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

[Pattern-chaser]

What scares me about this conversation - do we all have raging Dunning Kruger or is a situation that corrupt in science communication that we might actually be right that there's something wrong with the idea of strong emergence?

I believe I live in a messed up / Darwinian enough world where I could see both possibilities with almost equal weight - ie. that none of us know what we're talking about and even the LLM's don't know what they're talking about because any real proper explanations of what strong emergence is (in the real world) are not available online to the public (plebs don't need to know) or could there be a whole bunch of bunkum we're dealing with in popular science communication that's either twisting concepts for political purposes or even sometimes entirely making them up for politics?

Not a pleasant set of circumstances.

Are you describing some sort of science-based cover-up? Keeping the truth from the rest of us? What truth would that be, I wonder? Or have I just misunderstood?

[The Beast]

Last words of Socrates:
Crito, I owe the sacrifice of a rooster to Aesculapius, will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?
After all, Crito was an ignorant rich man and a mecenas (see Gaius Maecenas) so not uncommon for someone else to pay. … But, why a rooster? A temperature function together with the function of pressure (or atmospheric pressure) makes oxygen and hydrogen solids. For oxygen at -219 deg C and normal pressure, a transition into a blue solid with unique magnetic properties “emerge”. If the function of pressure is added, then it changes into a red solid… The case for hydrogen is more peculiar. Is it because of (functions) or some random event?... and intelligence is a property of functions.

[Papus79]

Also are you saying that room temperature liquids in general are a case of strong emergence or just water?

No, I'm only saying that liquid water, 'emerging' from hydrogen and oxygen — both gases — is a real-world example of emergence. Unpredictable and unexpected, too.

Right... so I'm getting at a subtler point beneath this, which is that it would seem to be - at least from what information is broadly available - that the idea of 'strong emergence' is a horrible gimmick and that it doesn't signify anything that's 'real'. Anything that has the seeds of an emergent property in its substrate would be weakly emerging. The claim that there's even such a thing as a 'strong' vs. 'weak' emergence is a public dialogue and it's hard to understand why 'weak emergence' isn't just 'emergence'.

I mean - I think I know some of the reasons (willing at modern industrialized global trade requires exploiting resources better than anyone else - any talk of reality being fundamentally 'conscious' would damage competitive prosperity, therefor panpsychism or similar ideas would be 'malinformation') and we could discuss that one more but - I'm trying to peel back some of the Lakoff-framing that seems to have wormed its way into science and the philosophy of science and then maybe see if I can also be respectful of the deeper concerns over why people are quite anti when it comes to frameworks that aren't strictly (strong) emergentist with respect to consciousness.

[Steve3007]

In my view, if someone were to deny the existence of emergent properties then they would be denying, among other things, the existence of thermodynamic properties such as the temperature, pressure and volume of a gas. Those are all collective/statistical properties of large quantities of gas molecules. It would seem odd to me to regard those as "something for free" and/or to deny their existence.

It seems self-evident to me that there are properties which, by definition, apply to collections without applying individually to the members of the collection.

I think that's weak emergence though - ie. shapes of snowflakes, wetness or fluid dynamics of water, I'd even add cymatic patterns with salt on plates. Those are situations where environmental feedback iterates over a group of some type of molecule and brings out possibilities already latent in the molecules involved but the behavior of which is 'sculpted' or contextualized in ways that the individual components wouldn't achieve on their own.

'Strong emergence' OTOH almost seems to be separated from weak emergence via the nested claim that it gets something for free - like weaving together the right kinds and qualities of carpet threads to get an authentic Persian flying carpet that lives up to the description and can air-taxi people around town.

I don't think there's a hard dividing line between strong and weak emergence. Just a continuum of complexity. As with any continuous spectrum we can label different parts of it, and draw our lines on it, but that doesn't stop it from being a continuum. Some physical systems are more complex than others. For example, the emergence of consciousness/intelligence/sentience etc from the collective interconnected behaviour of neurons is more complex than the emergence of temperature as the collective movement of gas molecules. It's all emergence though. It's all properties of collections that aren't present in the individual constituents of the collection.

[Sy Borg]

Maybe there is no such thing as strong emergence.

I was thinking similarly, that the distinction between weak and strong emergence might just be a matter of time.

The difference between LUCA and humanity could be thought of as a strong emergence in the biosphere. Then again, LUCA is our great (x 140 million) great grandparent, so there seems to have been many "weak" emergences that culminated in a "strong" emergence (or a number of "strong" emergences along the way).

[Lagayascienza]

That sounds right. Some things look like "strong" emergence when seen from above but when we look beneath the surface it is just the outcome of a buildup or many layers of "weak" emergence over time. Stuff happens where there is an energy gradient that allows matter to combine in certain ways . That's how we go from chemistry, to biochemistry, to life, to consciousness. Conscious actions look like top down causation but it's actually the outcome of billions of years and many layers of bottom up causation. At least, that's how it seems to me. I keep trying to think of an incontrovertible example of "strong" emergence but each time I think I've found one it turns out that it's just a build up of layers of weak emergence. I'm open to the idea of strong emergence if anyone can come up with an example.

[Sy Borg]

That sounds right. Some things look like "strong" emergence when seen from above but when we look beneath the surface it is just the outcome of a buildup or many layers of "weak" emergence over time. Stuff happens where there is an energy gradient that allows matter to combine in certain ways . That's how we go from chemistry, to biochemistry, to life, to consciousness. Conscious actions look like top down causation but it's actually the outcome of billions of years and many layers of bottom up causation. At least, that's how it seems to me. I keep trying to think of an incontrovertible example of "strong" emergence but each time I think I've found one it turns out that it's just a build up of layers of weak emergence. I'm open to the idea of strong emergence if anyone can come up with an example.

Yes, think about the strong (?) emergences of life and consciousness. LUCA would be vastly more similar to its nonliving organic replicators than to plants, fungi and animal. Yet, LUCA and multicellular eukaryotes are in the category "alive" while the replicators are considered to be "dead".

As for consciousness, how many brain cells does an organism need for their responses to count as primitively conscious as opposed to being sophisticated suites of reflexes?

[Pattern-chaser]

Also are you saying that room temperature liquids in general are a case of strong emergence or just water?

No, I'm only saying that liquid water, 'emerging' from hydrogen and oxygen — both gases — is a real-world example of emergence. Unpredictable and unexpected, too.

Right... so I'm getting at a subtler point beneath this, which is that it would seem to be - at least from what information is broadly available - that the idea of 'strong emergence' is a horrible gimmick and that it doesn't signify anything that's 'real'. Anything that has the seeds of an emergent property in its substrate would be weakly emerging. The claim that there's even such a thing as a 'strong' vs. 'weak' emergence is a public dialogue and it's hard to understand why 'weak emergence' isn't just 'emergence'.

Yes, it looks like we're all floating toward (approximately) the same position:

I don't think there's a hard dividing line between strong and weak emergence. Just a continuum of complexity. As with any continuous spectrum we can label different parts of it, and draw our lines on it, but that doesn't stop it from being a continuum. Some physical systems are more complex than others. For example, the emergence of consciousness/intelligence/sentience etc from the collective interconnected behaviour of neurons is more complex than the emergence of temperature as the collective movement of gas molecules. It's all emergence though. It's all properties of collections that aren't present in the individual constituents of the collection.

I would tend to agree that perhaps "strong" and "weak" emergence mislead us into thinking that there are exactly TWO types of emergence, and they bear those labels. We all seem to be moving away from this, to an understanding that emergence exists, and it's some sort of spectrum, not just strong or weak.

After all, what benefit do any of us gain by wondering whether strong and weak exist, in what proportion, and so on? I see little or no benefit. It's emergence that we're here to discuss, that we find interesting. For myself, at least, I don't give a flying f*ck whether a particular event displayed strong emergence or not.

I mean - I think I know some of the reasons (willing at modern industrialized global trade requires exploiting resources better than anyone else - any talk of reality being fundamentally 'conscious' would damage competitive prosperity, therefor panpsychism or similar ideas would be 'malinformation') and we could discuss that one more but - I'm trying to peel back some of the Lakoff-framing that seems to have wormed its way into science and the philosophy of science and then maybe see if I can also be respectful of the deeper concerns over why people are quite anti when it comes to frameworks that aren't strictly (strong) emergentist with respect to consciousness.

"Lakoff-framing"? I assume this refers to George Lakoff, philosopher, and lately political commentator too. I was hooked by "Metaphors we live by", and then "Philosophy in the flesh". Is this something we could discuss further?

[Papus79]

"Lakoff-framing"? I assume this refers to George Lakoff, philosopher, and lately political commentator too. I was hooked by "Metaphors we live by", and then "Philosophy in the flesh". Is this something we could discuss further?

I've mostly enjoyed interviews with George, haven't read his work but 'Lakoff framing' is something I've heard Daniel Schachtenberger bring up in terms of media but I've also heard Eric Weinstein bring it up.

Eric had a pretty concrete example, I think when he was talking to either Chris William or Steven Bartlett:

'You're steadfast, she's stubborn, and he's a pig-headed fool'.

All three of those descriptors effectively mean the same thing but have added valence as to whether you're supposed to approve or disapprove of their firm stance. Knowing what George Lakoff researches I'm assuming he himself doesn't call it 'Lakoff framing' but it might be one of the more novel and interesting parts of his media research on framing.

[Pattern-chaser]

"Lakoff-framing"? I assume this refers to George Lakoff, philosopher, and lately political commentator too. I was hooked by "Metaphors we live by", and then "Philosophy in the flesh". Is this something we could discuss further?

I've mostly enjoyed interviews with George, haven't read his work but 'Lakoff framing' is something I've heard Daniel Schachtenberger bring up in terms of media but I've also heard Eric Weinstein bring it up.

Eric had a pretty concrete example, I think when he was talking to either Chris William or Steven Bartlett:

'You're steadfast, she's stubborn, and he's a pig-headed fool'.

All three of those descriptors effectively mean the same thing but have added valence as to whether you're supposed to approve or disapprove of their firm stance. Knowing what George Lakoff researches I'm assuming he himself doesn't call it 'Lakoff framing' but it might be one of the more novel and interesting parts of his media research on framing.

Ah, yes, I'd forgotten he'd done so much recent work on 'framing'.

The power of framing: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it

This article is more than 7 years old

The 2016 election and a wealth of psychological data show how much our reasoning can be influenced by how information is framed

Steve Rathje
Thu 20 Jul 2017

In March 2016, before Trump was selected as the Republican nominee, cognitive scientist George Lakoff was already concerned about the emerging Trump phenomenon. So he wrote an article called “Understanding Trump” that details the ways in which Trump “uses your brain against you” – and sent it to every member of the Clinton campaign.

Lakoff researches how framing influences reasoning, or how the way we say something often matters much more than what we say. And he has used his research to inform how Democrats can better frame their party positions. He consolidated his advice for Democrats in his book, Don’t think of an elephant! The title conveys one of its main insights: if you negate a frame, you strengthen a frame. In other words, if you say “don’t think of an elephant,” you can’t help but think of one.

[Gertie]

Are these examples helpful?

With those examples and the ones Lagayascienza gives it sounds like there's a lot of debate still for what counts as a brand new property not latent in the substrate (water and snowflakes especially).

I think we'd have to clarify what emergence is in physical processes.

What I can see is that horizontal processes - both group processes and iterations of interaction over time - have a way of yielding results that we wouldn't foresee. That would include group dynamics creating behaviors and symmetries which aren't anything truly 'new' other than revealing group behaviors over time as well as evolutionary forces such as with the buildout of a snowflake where if you could jam all inputs into a Markov matrix you could probably get the right answer but nature almost never gives us such a clean example. Is that what emergence is? If not what additional characteristics does emergence have? Otherwise, if so, how does one argue that emergence doesn't rely entirely on the qualities of its substrate and environment and under that wouldn't the only kind of credible emergence be weak emergence in that case?

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.

Starting point: What do you think of Space as strong emergence or spacetime or gravity?

My understanding of the Physicalist position, framed by the Standard Model, is that

Space would emerge as a result of the interactions of fundamental particles according to the fundamental forces.

Time is a marker of those interactions.

And Gravity is one of the fundamental forces.

[Gertie]

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.

One of the most compelling cases for downward causation with consciousness is Michael Levin's biology experiments studying embryos and his 'bioelectric template'.

Now one suggestion above that's relatively profound if taken seriously - is consciousness the only thing we know of that brings about downward causation? If true that could be a silver bullet as far as being able to tell whether AI is conscious and all of the other ethical concerns people have related to that.

That's a really intriguing point about conscious AI being capable of downward causation! It seems like something potentially testable too.

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.

I still think the particular flavor of science right now is carrying a lot of religious trauma - maybe not as much as it did a century ago but it's still there to the degree that the scientific field is held in a position that it not only needs to explore and reckon reality by way of independently verifiable experiments but it also has the job of staving off the next Yellow Turban rebellion or some other similar case where a religious uprising has Communism-level deadly results. For a long time I think that political mission - of being a counterforce to organized religion - is a hurdle that current proponents of ideas like extended functionalism, analytic idealism, neutral monism, and constitutive panpsychism (all the well known IAI names) are trying to break down with the argument perhaps that the world is already secular enough that it might be safe to explore stranger ideas again - arguably over AI safety rather than religion - as a side door to explore other concepts further.

Maybe. My own feeling is science and Enlightenment thinking is in something of a crisis. I suppose a lot depends on how the rising techbro oligarchy decide to take things...

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.

This has been roughly my conclusion as well.

Right.

[Gertie]

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.

I was saying that currently at least, for consciousness to pass the two testa of weak emergence, it would have to be ontologically and causally reducible to its components, and not be capable of downward causation.

But it doesn't seem to fit those criteria for weak emergence. Or simply 'emergence' as it's understood under Physicalism.

Hence Physicalism had to come up with the term 'Strong Emergence', which doesn't actually fit its model, as a sort of place-holder for an actual explanation. In order to fit consciousness into Physicalist monism.

So either Physicalist monism is wrong, or there is some explanation, but Physicalism hasn't found it yet. The latter implies there's nothing especially difficult about finding the explanation, as science has done so many times before. On the other hand people point to the apparently uniquely difficult problems consciousness presents to a Physicalist analysis and explanation.