Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[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.

[Pattern-chaser]

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?

I mean entanglement, and much more.

Everything is connected to everything else.

That could be hippy religion, and it might be metaphysics, but it's physics too. Take gravity and matter. Every localised concentration of matter attracts every other such concentration, regardless of location (i.e. physical separation) or size. And that's before we look at electromagnetic forces, and so on. Then, if we need to, we could look aoutside physics, and maybe outside science, for less tangible connections.

In practice, everything really is connected to everything else. Multiply-connected. There are so very many connections it would be difficult even to assign a number-value to their total. The Universe (i.e. everything that exists) is like a network. If we look at it as being composed of matter — which is a true but incomplete statement — then the nodes are lumps of matter, and the connections are ... manyfold.

And so, when we start from the Universe, and drill down (mentally and philosophically/scientifically) to a wheat seed, we need to divide and sub-divide the Universe, again and again, in our reductionist fashion, until we reach our chosen object of interest (the wheat seed). And in doing so, we cut and discard all connections, and all the network nodes they, in turn, connect to.

By the time we reach our seed, we have cut very many connections, and discarded nearly all of the whole Universe, to leave only the Universal element (the seed) we are interested in. It is no wonder that, from time to time, we note unexpected and unpredictable properties we call 'emergent'. Many, if not all, of them are caused by the connections we discarded, and the things they connected to, too.

[The Beast]

I made the inference from the grain of wheat that Universal properties are fundamental and from there that emergent properties are some fundamental properties in the background returning as emergent. I might add: The seed could stretch out in the spacetime continuum (big bang) and that the seed had a constant temperature but in the spacetime continuum is a function. Is the function emergent? Perhaps consciousness can only operate (human data) in a narrow part of the temperature function… moreover, if our consciousness is envisioned/evaluated in the spacetime continuum within the temperature property, it would be a very narrow (non-feverish) horizontal line in the spacetime continuum. From the property of a constant temperature a variable temperature emerged. The variable temperature in the spacetime continuum emerged from the variable temperature and fundamental Universal properties flourished as emergent properties in the requirement of temperatures… functions make spectrums and in the emergent spectrum of consciousness the function of temperature is one of many. In this context: Emergent is the instance of a spectrum given by the points (neuron connections?) of the corresponding (known and unknown) functions in the spacetime continuum… a line of reason and thought… or not.