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[Papus79]

Are we now describing our map, not the territory? Emergent behaviours are unexpected and unpredictable, but isn't that because we humans just don't *understand*? Our reductionist approach to understanding pretty much everything, detaches and discards so very many connections*, it isn't really surprising to discover that they (the connections) had a role to play, is it? Emergence really could be that simple.

Curious what you mean by the connections. Are you speaking of entanglement or something else?

[Lagayascienza]

I'm woefully ignorant about the scientific technicalities, but the way I basically  see it, Physicalism has two fundamental/irreducible parts,  Physical Stuff and Physical Forces (which describe how stuff interacts in a causal framing).  Basically two things exist/happen in the universe - Fundamental Forces causally act on Fundamental Stuff. Everything can be explained by this. Weak Emergence under Physicalism = irreducible forces causally acting on irreducible stuff resulting in the complex universe we observe, without exception.


So if we take h2o molecules and apply physical forces, we can in principle account for the different properties of eg snowflakes emerging.  We just have to know all the details in a specific scenario.  This applies to the entire universe, which if we knew all the details, is reducible to the fundamental forces causally acting on the fundamental particles.

Note in this model, 'top downward causation' by novel properties would be a misnomer, because it's the most fundamental forces still doing all the causal work. 

That's how I get my head around it anyway, re Philosophy of Mind. 

The Causal problem for Physicalist Emergence, is that it appears conscious experience can causally intervene in that model.  The mind can instigate causal change. Chat GPT's example of the lighters doesn't make that really clear.   We can take a simple example like I experience feeling hungry, which causes my arm to reach for an apple and my teeth to bite it. 

That looks like an example of  Top Down Causation arising in the novel emergent property of mind. Mental causation, mind over matter. Which  wouldn't be fully accounted for by fundamental forces acting on fundamental particles.  It requires the novel property of my conscious experience of feeling hungry, seeing the apple, deciding to eat it, willing my arm to move, etc to cause that  event to happen.  And thus unlike snow flakes being predictable or deducible in terms of forces acting on h2o molecules, the event isn't predictable under Physicalist Emergence even if we knew all the details of the event.

It looks like an anomaly to 'normal' physicalist emergence.  Magic.  As does the apparently unpredictable/irreducible emergence of conscious experience itself. So Physicalism invents a new type of emergence called' Strong Emergence', to account for it.

But just naming it doesn't account for it in an explanatory way of how emergence can work in a way which contradicts its explanatory model for Everything That Can Happen Or Exist - ie apparently both ontologically irreducible stuff with causally irreducible power.

But now 'Strong Emergence' apparently exists under Physicalism. In reality the term 'Strong Emergence' is simply a place-holder for a physicalistl explanation. Which of course could exist. Or you can take the Epiphenomalist position that mind has no causal power, and physical bodies do all the causal work with the brain at the nexus.

Yes, that's how it seems to me. It seems that the physical body, and especially the brain, cause consciousness. If this is so, then consciousness is just another example of regular emergence and not of so called "strong emergence". Does anyone have an incontrovertible example of strong emergence to share? I'm open to it but cannot think of one myself.