论文标题
闪烁的出现：信息理论方法中的局部问题
Flickering emergences: The question of locality in information-theoretic approaches to emergence
论文作者
论文摘要
“出现”是复杂系统显示属性，行为或动力学的现象，而不是其组成元素的微不足道，它是复杂系统的定义属性之一。最近，已经进行了一致的努力，以使用信息理论的数学框架正式定义出现，这表明可以从批发状态和部分如何共同披露有关系统集体未来的信息的方式来理解出现。在本文中，我们展示了信息理论方法的共同基础成分如何意味着对出现特性的固有不稳定，我们称之为闪烁的出现。系统平均可能显示出有意义的新兴属性（无论是提供丰富的粗粒还是高阶协同作用），但是对于特定的配置，即将出现的属性会崩溃并变得错误。我们展示了存在证明，表明闪烁的出现发生在两个不同的框架（一个基于粗粒的框架，另一个基于多元信息分解），并认为任何基于时间互信息的方法都会显示出来。最后，我们认为，闪烁的出现不应是任何出现模型的剥夺资格的财产，而是在试图从理论化出现与自然世界的实用模型之间的关系时应考虑它。
"Emergence", the phenomenon where a complex system displays properties, behaviours, or dynamics not trivially reducible to its constituent elements, is one of the defining properties of complex systems. Recently, there has been a concerted effort to formally define emergence using the mathematical framework of information theory, which proposes that emergence can be understood in terms of how the states of wholes and parts collectively disclose information about the system's collective future. In this paper, we show how a common, foundational component of information-theoretic approaches to emergence implies an inherent instability to emergent properties, which we call flickering emergence. A system may on average display a meaningful emergent property (be it an informative coarse-graining, or higher-order synergy), but for particular configurations, that emergent property falls apart and becomes misinformative. We show existence proofs that flickering emergence occurs in two different frameworks (one based on coarse-graining and another based on multivariate information decomposition) and argue that any approach based on temporal mutual information will display it. Finally, we argue that flickering emergence should not be a disqualifying property of any model of emergence, but that it should be accounted for when attempting to theorize about how emergence relates to practical models of the natural world.
