Wharf some kind of new age guru wanting to mix science with metaphysics. The cause and effect is in MACROSCOPIC scale and STABLE state of a system whereas EMERGENCE phenomenon concerns MICROSCOPIC scale and TRANSITIONAL state of a system. If you compare apple with banana sure you can say it is different thing haha ! And how it relates to market's model is really another stuff. People like analogy because it is shortcut thinking. Sure there is analogy of FORM between fluid flowing and stock market but the CAUSAL effect has nothing to do with flowing itself but with MICROECONOMIC INTEREST I can say it because I have worked on it. This fashion is like the IA fashion every 20 years it fades then it comes back like in stock market there's a need of a generation to forget.
As long as they are discussing in fuzzy terms they can give the impression of being discussing something valuable but it's like discussing on ether at the beginning of the century : something that was an illusion at least until Einstein's theory blows off. This can always happen in science a theory is always partial for one cannot pretend to have discovered the ultimate since he would be God then.
>Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2003
Consider the Particles
see Mathematics and Causation
I don't agree with the Newton formulation of cause and effect. Differential equations are pretty descriptive, and the mindset difference you attribute to Newton versus Euler seems forced.
But here is my take on the problem.
The traditional mathematical approach to physical systems to to take an outsider's view and describe the system, then to solve the general equations. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't mesh with our understanding of how the individual particles are reacting (where "particles" can be atoms, gas molecules, people, stock prices, or whatever the system is modeling). In most of the real world, particles are pretty dumb: they simply react to the forces impinging upon them. So a better modeling technique is to model what it looks like from the perspective of the individual particle: take an insider's point of view.
This is what modern swarm theory, automata theory, chaos, complexity, and related approaches are all about. You model the individual, and the rest follows. Our mathematical tools are usually inadequate for this task, which is why most of the really interesting work is being done through simulations. See Wolfram's book. See Johnson's trade book for a popular account of some of this work: Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. New York: Scribner.