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I've had an interesting back and forth with the most unfiltered AI I could find and I tried to drill down into emergence.

One of the things that's always bothered me about the concept isn't that you can get unitary behavior at a higher level that even has it's own downward causation, it's the idea that you 'get something for free' that wasn't there in the component parts that just doesn't work.

I went back and forth with the AI to make sure I was actually understanding the proper usage of the term 'emergence' and a fit analogy would be this:

A national or international music band plays in a small club filled with devoted fans. Many if not most of the fans have a lighter in their pocket. When a very sentimental song comes on the fans pull their lighter out and wave it in the air to the song. Light and heat emerged from that group as a consequence of their recognition of the song and how it impacted them.

If you're thinking a bit you can probably already see the issue with the example - fire and heat didn't come from them standing around, they had lighters in their pockets which already had light and heat as potential.

From what when people talk about consciousness arising from emergence - I kind of have to take this conclusion - unless they really believe in Harry Potter magic they're talking about weak emergence, like with the lighters. To say anything about consciousness emerging in any credible way means that you're acknowledging at least micropsychism, even if some people would detest that idea because hippies are lazy idiots who don't shower or work - I get it, not everyone's social club. Even so - emergence can't do that! This isn't guild crafting!

So it seems you are advocating weak panpsychism, where consciousness stemmed from proto-consciousness, which some posit is ubiquitous. Personally, I think of the precursor to consciousness as reflexes and the precursor to reflexes as reactivity.

Papus79 wrote: ↑January 4th, 2025, 5:55 pm I've had an interesting back and forth with the most unfiltered AI I could find and I tried to drill down into emergence.

One of the things that's always bothered me about the concept isn't that you can get unitary behavior at a higher level that even has it's own downward causation, it's the idea that you 'get something for free' that wasn't there in the component parts that just doesn't work.

I went back and forth with the AI to make sure I was actually understanding the proper usage of the term 'emergence' and a fit analogy would be this:

A national or international music band plays in a small club filled with devoted fans. Many if not most of the fans have a lighter in their pocket. When a very sentimental song comes on the fans pull their lighter out and wave it in the air to the song. Light and heat emerged from that group as a consequence of their recognition of the song and how it impacted them.

If you're thinking a bit you can probably already see the issue with the example - fire and heat didn't come from them standing around, they had lighters in their pockets which already had light and heat as potential.

From what when people talk about consciousness arising from emergence - I kind of have to take this conclusion - unless they really believe in Harry Potter magic they're talking about weak emergence, like with the lighters. To say anything about consciousness emerging in any credible way means that you're acknowledging at least micropsychism, even if some people would detest that idea because hippies are lazy idiots who don't shower or work - I get it, not everyone's social club. Even so - emergence can't do that! This isn't guild crafting!

I'm not 100% sure of any exact definition for emergence, but I do have a view on this.

Consider, briefly, the software aphorism that everything is a network, which is true enough, in itself. More or less anything/everything can be seen as a network, if we find it useful to do so. Anyway, our usual (reductionist) approach to the universe is to grab a node, tear it free of all those pesky connections, and then repeat, over and over, at gradually smaller scales. The consequence is unavoidable. Many or most of the connections are lost.

The Universe stays just as it is, of course, the connections are only lost in our understanding of it. And so I suggest that, sometimes, emergence is just the discarded connections making their presence known — emerging, we might say — and we just wonder where they can possibly have come from. "Ridicularmus!"


In other words, we don't "'get something for free' that wasn't there in the component parts", we merely rediscover something(s) we discarded earlier, perhaps unwisely.

A case for a decision of human intelligence.
It is known. An ovarian egg has a diameter of 0.12 mm (smaller than a microprocessor). A comfortable place for the lucky one. 50% of chores and fifty percent of the 20000 genes for “the one”. Until recently it was thought that the ovarian egg was a chemical vault but now it is a living organism just as the spermatozoid is and so 2 become 1 or 1 is all. IMO, the hitchhiker thumb has a problem with DNA expressions; It is now understood as the light of intelligence correlating with an ADS. The question is: genetic or epigenetic? Obviously, we are dealing with neural substrates and unknown mechanisms made visible by compiling data and associations arriving at (high probability) “hitchhiker thumb correlates with ADS” Bursch B et al ‘Chronic pain in individuals with… ADS’ J. Pain (2004) 5:290-5. Maybe a two prone approach to the transcriptomic analysis of deep intronic mechanisms, specifically the one dealing with the working memory (hereditary) might make us better understand the workings of the introns. The second prone is for the time being a very secret hypothesis… or not since I probably did mention it but, there is some simplicity (not wrong) in considering hypermobility as reflexes and the works of the introns (via calcium signaling) as reactivity going by a set of traits named Mendelian traits (to include gastrointestinal traits) … Can chemistry make reactivity better at the intron level? Well yes.
Some new businesses make use of human ashes and hair. With some supercollider technology, it is now possible to make a diamond. So, you send hair and wait ten months to get a diamond. Abstract and real meaning. Obviously, a diamond is only carbon. Maybe subjective carbon.

Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 4th, 2025, 11:00 pm So it seems you are advocating weak panpsychism, where consciousness stemmed from proto-consciousness, which some posit is ubiquitous. Personally, I think of the precursor to consciousness as reflexes and the precursor to reflexes as reactivity.

I don't have a strong opinion one way or another what the reduction or build path looks like but at a minimum we're not born with metacognition built so that seems like a special use case of consciousness rather than a thing in and of itself. For what happens all the way down - complex organic molecules already seem eerily life-like and even somewhat agentic in some cases. By the time you get to single-celled organisms you have something which can behave quite a bit like an animal.

Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑January 5th, 2025, 4:55 am I'm not 100% sure of any exact definition for emergence, but I do have a view on this.

Consider, briefly, the software aphorism that everything is a network, which is true enough, in itself. More or less anything/everything can be seen as a network, if we find it useful to do so. Anyway, our usual (reductionist) approach to the universe is to grab a node, tear it free of all those pesky connections, and then repeat, over and over, at gradually smaller scales. The consequence is unavoidable. Many or most of the connections are lost.

The Universe stays just as it is, of course, the connections are only lost in our understanding of it. And so I suggest that, sometimes, emergence is just the discarded connections making their presence known — emerging, we might say — and we just wonder where they can possibly have come from. "Ridicularmus!"


In other words, we don't "'get something for free' that wasn't there in the component parts", we merely rediscover something(s) we discarded earlier, perhaps unwisely.

TY, that's great added nuance and yes - with the crowd and the lighters there's mirror neurons involved that spin up a flywheel of encouragement for other people who might not have otherwise done so to do so when half the people around them are waiving their lighters in the air.

The Beast wrote: ↑January 5th, 2025, 1:07 pm A case for a decision of human intelligence.
It is known. An ovarian egg has a diameter of 0.12 mm (smaller than a microprocessor). A comfortable place for the lucky one. 50% of chores and fifty percent of the 20000 genes for “the one”. Until recently it was thought that the ovarian egg was a chemical vault but now it is a living organism just as the spermatozoid is and so 2 become 1 or 1 is all. IMO, the hitchhiker thumb has a problem with DNA expressions; It is now understood as the light of intelligence correlating with an ADS. The question is: genetic or epigenetic? Obviously, we are dealing with neural substrates and unknown mechanisms made visible by compiling data and associations arriving at (high probability) “hitchhiker thumb correlates with ADS” Bursch B et al ‘Chronic pain in individuals with… ADS’ J. Pain (2004) 5:290-5. Maybe a two prone approach to the transcriptomic analysis of deep intronic mechanisms, specifically the one dealing with the working memory (hereditary) might make us better understand the workings of the introns. The second prone is for the time being a very secret hypothesis… or not since I probably did mention it but, there is some simplicity (not wrong) in considering hypermobility as reflexes and the works of the introns (via calcium signaling) as reactivity going by a set of traits named Mendelian traits (to include gastrointestinal traits) … Can chemistry make reactivity better at the intron level? Well yes.
Some new businesses make use of human ashes and hair. With some supercollider technology, it is now possible to make a diamond. So, you send hair and wait ten months to get a diamond. Abstract and real meaning. Obviously, a diamond is only carbon. Maybe subjective carbon.

A fertilized egg already has everything it needs seemingly to start running with the things Michael Levin talks about which includes spinning up the 'bioelectric template' or the living software that runs over the hardware and exerts downward causation such as cell and tissue differentiation and telling the developing embryo where the boundaries are for skin cells, muscle tissue, bone / cartilage, etc.. There's a heck of a lot we don't know still and to even see something like a bioelectric template with knowledge of what to do almost suggests that there are something akin to templates in a Platonic realm that are being matched, maybe something like Sheldrake's morphic fields although we're still light on details and don't know where the template comes from exactly (maybe we'll find some hints of it in the amplituhedron or some other higher-dimensional mathematical object).

Papus79 wrote: ↑January 4th, 2025, 5:55 pm I've had an interesting back and forth with the most unfiltered AI I could find and I tried to drill down into emergence.

One of the things that's always bothered me about the concept isn't that you can get unitary behavior at a higher level that even has it's own downward causation, it's the idea that you 'get something for free' that wasn't there in the component parts that just doesn't work.

I went back and forth with the AI to make sure I was actually understanding the proper usage of the term 'emergence' and a fit analogy would be this:

A national or international music band plays in a small club filled with devoted fans. Many if not most of the fans have a lighter in their pocket. When a very sentimental song comes on the fans pull their lighter out and wave it in the air to the song. Light and heat emerged from that group as a consequence of their recognition of the song and how it impacted them.

If you're thinking a bit you can probably already see the issue with the example - fire and heat didn't come from them standing around, they had lighters in their pockets which already had light and heat as potential.

From what when people talk about consciousness arising from emergence - I kind of have to take this conclusion - unless they really believe in Harry Potter magic they're talking about weak emergence, like with the lighters. To say anything about consciousness emerging in any credible way means that you're acknowledging at least micropsychism, even if some people would detest that idea because hippies are lazy idiots who don't shower or work - I get it, not everyone's social club. Even so - emergence can't do that! This isn't guild crafting!

It seems to me that if you buy into Physicalist Emergence, then you have to buy into Physicalist Reductionism, which science tells us ends in the Standard Model.  A model which doesn't place conscious experience as fundamental.   Actually it doesn't place conscious experience anywhere, but if it's not fundamental, it must somehow emerge from physical stuff interacting in ways described as  physical 'laws'.   

I agree that the Strong Emergence of conscious experience would be akin to magic per our current Physicalist understanding. It doesn't happen in nature, except when minds are already a component (like your example which requires minds playing the part of the bridging/causal mechanism).  

And I agree that Weak Emergence can't account for consciousness on its own Physicalist reductionist terms. In fact I'd say the term 'emergence' here is used as a Physicalist place-holder for 'no idea' when confronted with Levine's Explanatory Gap. 

What inference we should take is an open question which no-one knows how to answer, though there are plenty of ideas.  Maybe there's a missing/bridging ingredient in brains we've not yet found/recognised,  some form of panpsychism,  some quantum mallarky, something else entirely we might not have the toolkit to grasp,   Physicalism itself is an illusion, etc.

Gertie, I'd like to understand what you mean here. You say that emergence "doesn't happen in nature, except when minds are already a component (like your example which requires minds playing the part of the bridging/causal mechanism)." Should I take it from this that you subscribe to an Idealistic metaphysical position rather than a materialist one? If so, I'm wondering what evidence there is that leads you to idealism. Why do you think that the universe is all mind-stuff rather than material stuff. If there were no minds do you think the universe would cease to exist?

Lagayascienza wrote: ↑January 5th, 2025, 10:43 pm Gertie, I'd like to understand what you mean here. You say that emergence "doesn't happen in nature, except when minds are already a component (like your example which requires minds playing the part of the bridging/causal mechanism)." Should I take it from this that you subscribe to an Idealistic metaphysical position rather than a materialist one? If so, I'm wondering what evidence there is that leads you to idealism. Why do you think that the universe is all mind-stuff rather than material stuff. If there were no minds do you think the universe would cease to exist?

The sentence before the one you quoted should've made it clear I was referring to Strong Emergence there.  I'm saying there are no cases of Strong Emergence in nature, unless minds are part of the components.  Which suggests there's something special going on.

There are definitional probs around the term 'emergence' which makes it confusing.  But I take the key element of emergence as regards Philosophy of Mind as being the other side of the coin to reducibility.  In that monist Physicalists  say that the universe in all its complexity and innumerable properties emerged from the fundamental particles (ontological stuff)  interacting in ways which 'follow the laws of nature' (causality).  Just these two things - Fundamental Physical Stuff interacting Causally according to Fundamental Forces can account for everything which exists and everything which happens. And likewise the entire universe can similarly be reduced ontologically and causally to the Standard Model of fundamental stuff/particles and fundamental causes/forces. 

Physicalism says that's how nature works, as I understand it, and I call that Weak Emergence.    Meaning  the emergent property is ontologically and causally reducible to its parts and their interactions.  (Particles and Forces).   

As opposed to Strong Emergence where if you reduce something to its parts and interactions, there is still something left over which is unaccounted for. That's the magic aspect of Strong Emergence.


So if we fully understood how brains physically work, we could reduce them in such a way that all the physical components and causal interactions can be accounted for. And that would explain how brains physically work.  But when we do that, we still have this left over unaccounted for novel property which is phenomenal experience.  And reversing that, Physicalism wouldn't be able to deduce or predict that the novel property of conscious experience would emerge from that arrangement of those components.  There's an 'explanatory gap' there. 

If we take the lighters at a concert example, it's not like the Weak Emergence of the novel properties of say oceans emerging from the interactions of  H2O molecules.  Because  the causal bridge between the lighters staying in pockets and then lighting up is people deciding to light them. Without that minded causal intervention, the lighters would remain in the pockets. 

Does that help, or is it just more confusing? 

As to whether this 'explanatory gap' can ever be explained by Physicalism, or it turns out that's the wrong track, as I said I don't believe we are in a position to know that. Physicalism at least gives us a framework, and something (brains) to observe and poke.

Papus79 wrote: ↑January 5th, 2025, 4:08 pm

Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 4th, 2025, 11:00 pm So it seems you are advocating weak panpsychism, where consciousness stemmed from proto-consciousness, which some posit is ubiquitous. Personally, I think of the precursor to consciousness as reflexes and the precursor to reflexes as reactivity.

I don't have a strong opinion one way or another what the reduction or build path looks like but at a minimum we're not born with metacognition built so that seems like a special use case of consciousness rather than a thing in and of itself. For what happens all the way down - complex organic molecules already seem eerily life-like and even somewhat agentic in some cases. By the time you get to single-celled organisms you have something which can behave quite a bit like an animal.

There's a lot of variety in microbes. Some behave more like little bundles of chemicals blowin' in the wind (or Brownian Motion) while others are active and responsive.

Fair point about us lacking awareness at first ... and then at some stage, we start comprehending our situations.

Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑January 5th, 2025, 4:55 am I'm not 100% sure of any exact definition for emergence, but I do have a view on this.

Consider, briefly, the software aphorism that everything is a network, which is true enough, in itself. More or less anything/everything can be seen as a network, if we find it useful to do so. Anyway, our usual (reductionist) approach to the universe is to grab a node, tear it free of all those pesky connections, and then repeat, over and over, at gradually smaller scales. The consequence is unavoidable. Many or most of the connections are lost.

The Universe stays just as it is, of course, the connections are only lost in our understanding of it. And so I suggest that, sometimes, emergence is just the discarded connections making their presence known — emerging, we might say — and we just wonder where they can possibly have come from. "Ridicularmus!"


In other words, we don't "'get something for free' that wasn't there in the component parts", we merely rediscover something(s) we discarded earlier, perhaps unwisely.

Papus79 wrote: ↑January 5th, 2025, 4:11 pm TY, that's great added nuance and yes - with the crowd and the lighters there's mirror neurons involved that spin up a flywheel of encouragement for other people who might not have otherwise done so to do so when half the people around them are waiving their lighters in the air.

I was thinking of connections that are rather more intimate and intrinsic/internal than the connection that gives rise to communal waving of lighters, but I suppose it counts too. I was also thinking of how very many of those connections there are. Perhaps near-infinite?

Gertie wrote: ↑January 6th, 2025, 5:31 am

Lagayascienza wrote: ↑January 5th, 2025, 10:43 pm Gertie, I'd like to understand what you mean here. You say that emergence "doesn't happen in nature, except when minds are already a component (like your example which requires minds playing the part of the bridging/causal mechanism)." Should I take it from this that you subscribe to an Idealistic metaphysical position rather than a materialist one? If so, I'm wondering what evidence there is that leads you to idealism. Why do you think that the universe is all mind-stuff rather than material stuff. If there were no minds do you think the universe would cease to exist?

The sentence before the one you quoted should've made it clear I was referring to Strong Emergence there.  I'm saying there are no cases of Strong Emergence in nature, unless minds are part of the components.  Which suggests there's something special going on.

There are definitional probs around the term 'emergence' which makes it confusing.  But I take the key element of emergence as regards Philosophy of Mind as being the other side of the coin to reducibility.  In that monist Physicalists  say that the universe in all its complexity and innumerable properties emerged from the fundamental particles (ontological stuff)  interacting in ways which 'follow the laws of nature' (causality).  Just these two things - Fundamental Physical Stuff interacting Causally according to Fundamental Forces can account for everything which exists and everything which happens. And likewise the entire universe can similarly be reduced ontologically and causally to the Standard Model of fundamental stuff/particles and fundamental causes/forces. 

Physicalism says that's how nature works, as I understand it, and I call that Weak Emergence.    Meaning  the emergent property is ontologically and causally reducible to its parts and their interactions.  (Particles and Forces).   

As opposed to Strong Emergence where if you reduce something to its parts and interactions, there is still something left over which is unaccounted for. That's the magic aspect of Strong Emergence.


So if we fully understood how brains physically work, we could reduce them in such a way that all the physical components and causal interactions can be accounted for. And that would explain how brains physically work.  But when we do that, we still have this left over unaccounted for novel property which is phenomenal experience.  And reversing that, Physicalism wouldn't be able to deduce or predict that the novel property of conscious experience would emerge from that arrangement of those components.  There's an 'explanatory gap' there. 

If we take the lighters at a concert example, it's not like the Weak Emergence of the novel properties of say oceans emerging from the interactions of  H2O molecules.  Because  the causal bridge between the lighters staying in pockets and then lighting up is people deciding to light them. Without that minded causal intervention, the lighters would remain in the pockets. 

Does that help, or is it just more confusing? 

As to whether this 'explanatory gap' can ever be explained by Physicalism, or it turns out that's the wrong track, as I said I don't believe we are in a position to know that. Physicalism at least gives us a framework, and something (brains) to observe and poke.

Yes, I see now, Gertie. We seem to be in the same place. You put it well: "Physicalism at least gives us a framework, and something (brains) to observe and poke."

Lagayascienza wrote: ↑January 6th, 2025, 11:34 pm

Gertie wrote: ↑January 6th, 2025, 5:31 am

Lagayascienza wrote: ↑January 5th, 2025, 10:43 pm Gertie, I'd like to understand what you mean here. You say that emergence "doesn't happen in nature, except when minds are already a component (like your example which requires minds playing the part of the bridging/causal mechanism)." Should I take it from this that you subscribe to an Idealistic metaphysical position rather than a materialist one? If so, I'm wondering what evidence there is that leads you to idealism. Why do you think that the universe is all mind-stuff rather than material stuff. If there were no minds do you think the universe would cease to exist?

The sentence before the one you quoted should've made it clear I was referring to Strong Emergence there.  I'm saying there are no cases of Strong Emergence in nature, unless minds are part of the components.  Which suggests there's something special going on.

There are definitional probs around the term 'emergence' which makes it confusing.  But I take the key element of emergence as regards Philosophy of Mind as being the other side of the coin to reducibility.  In that monist Physicalists  say that the universe in all its complexity and innumerable properties emerged from the fundamental particles (ontological stuff)  interacting in ways which 'follow the laws of nature' (causality).  Just these two things - Fundamental Physical Stuff interacting Causally according to Fundamental Forces can account for everything which exists and everything which happens. And likewise the entire universe can similarly be reduced ontologically and causally to the Standard Model of fundamental stuff/particles and fundamental causes/forces. 

Physicalism says that's how nature works, as I understand it, and I call that Weak Emergence.    Meaning  the emergent property is ontologically and causally reducible to its parts and their interactions.  (Particles and Forces).   

As opposed to Strong Emergence where if you reduce something to its parts and interactions, there is still something left over which is unaccounted for. That's the magic aspect of Strong Emergence.


So if we fully understood how brains physically work, we could reduce them in such a way that all the physical components and causal interactions can be accounted for. And that would explain how brains physically work.  But when we do that, we still have this left over unaccounted for novel property which is phenomenal experience.  And reversing that, Physicalism wouldn't be able to deduce or predict that the novel property of conscious experience would emerge from that arrangement of those components.  There's an 'explanatory gap' there. 

If we take the lighters at a concert example, it's not like the Weak Emergence of the novel properties of say oceans emerging from the interactions of  H2O molecules.  Because  the causal bridge between the lighters staying in pockets and then lighting up is people deciding to light them. Without that minded causal intervention, the lighters would remain in the pockets. 

Does that help, or is it just more confusing? 

As to whether this 'explanatory gap' can ever be explained by Physicalism, or it turns out that's the wrong track, as I said I don't believe we are in a position to know that. Physicalism at least gives us a framework, and something (brains) to observe and poke.

Yes, I see now, Gertie. We seem to be in the same place. You put it well: "Physicalism at least gives us a framework, and something (brains) to observe and poke."

Searle's Biological Naturalism posits an alternative which avoids  the  'irreducible  extra something'  problem and the  'downward causation' problem (eg mind causing the lighter to light) of Emergence.   Snipped from wiki  -

''Searle believes that consciousness "is a real part of the real world and it cannot be eliminated in favor of, or reduced to, something else"[1] whether that something else is a neurological state of the brain or a computer program. He also believes that consciousness is both a cause of events in the body and a response to events in the body. 

On the other hand, Searle doesn't treat consciousness as a ghost in the machine. He treats it, rather, as a state of the brain. The causal interaction of mind and brain can be described thus in naturalistic terms: Events at the micro-level (perhaps at that of individual neurons) cause consciousness. Changes at the macro-level (the whole brain) constitute consciousness. Micro-changes cause and then are impacted by holistic changes, in much the same way that individual football players cause a team (as a whole) to win games, causing the individuals to gain confidence from the knowledge that they are part of a winning team.

He articulates this distinction by pointing out that the common philosophical term 'reducible' is ambiguous. Searle contends that consciousness is "causally reducible" to brain processes without being "ontologically reducible". He hopes that making this distinction will allow him to escape the traditional dilemma between reductive materialism and substance dualism; he affirms the essentially physical nature of the universe by asserting that consciousness is completely caused by and realized in the brain, but also doesn't deny what he takes to be the obvious facts that humans really are conscious, and that conscious states have an essentially first-person nature.

It can be tempting to see the theory as a kind of property dualism, since, in Searle's view, a person's mental properties are categorically different from his or her micro-physical properties. The latter have "third-person ontology" whereas the former have "first-person ontology."

However, Searle holds mental properties to be a species of physical property—ones with first-person ontology. So this sets his view apart from a dualism of physical and non-physical properties. His mental properties are putatively physical.''

It strikes me as another 'What if...' hypothesis   designed to solve a problem for Physicalism in order to defend it, rather than something Physicalism itself would arrive at following its own methods.  But you never know.

You may be right, Gertie. I'm not familiar enough with the philosophy of consciousness to able to argue for or against Searle's position but it does not seem to offend what I take to be common sense the way dualism, IMO, does.