But are you asking me to change your username here, on the old site? — Jamal

Yes. That way it will be easier to find my posts on the archive. Won't it?

As I noted, I was successful in registering on the computer.

Note--I am T_Clark from now on. @Jamal--Can you please change me to that on this web page.

There was no registration button.

To Whom It May Concern - I found I couldn't register on my cell phone. I had to register on my computer first. Then I could get access on my cell. After that no problem.

I just don't see a property that we would call life. — Patterner

Does that mean you don’t see the distinction between things that are living and things that are not as an important one?

life may be just an illusion or epiphenomenon,

This is one way of looking at things, but if we do see it that way, then all of reality is just illusions and epiphenomena.

Damasio just lists ones physical thing or event after another, and eventually says now there is consciousness. — Patterner

I’ll say it again, even though you tricked me into getting back into the discussion before. I have nothing more to offer here.

But, it’s exactly that, the interpretation of text will always skew an authentic image others have of you, regardless of honesty put into words. It becomes the same as two people reading the same book having wildly different views on how to interpret it. — Christoffer

I don’t experience it that way.

We cannot look at any aspect of consciousness and see how it emerges from any lower level process or properties. — Patterner

I know enough to say this isn’t true, but not enough to get a better explanation. You wrote that you’ve read “Feeling and Knowing” by Antonio Damasio. He also wrote “ The Feeling of What Happens.” Those tell the story better than I could. If you read those and aren’t convinced, there’s not much more I could say.

I'm a fan. Didn't find it a slog at all. — AmadeusD

I’ll take your words as encouragement. The good thing about reading it in a book club is that we all encourage each other to keep going. There’s no way I can quit reading it without disappointing my family.

Consciousness can't be. Those who say it emerges from sufficient complexity of whatever types of physical processes cannot explain it in the ways we can explain biological processes, and don't have a guess as to how it might work. — Patterner

Sure we can explain it. We call it biology, neurology, and psychology.

I thought weak was something that could be explained by the properties of lower levels, and strong was something that could not. — Patterner

This is correct. I thought that’s what I said. I guess I’ve just confused things more.

@javi2541997 forgot to mention he is currently reading “The Conservation of Snails, Slugs, and Freshwater Mussels.” He has promised us a report when he’s finished.

The canyon between your true identity and the perceived identity of your internet persona is very large, even for those who are honest and true to their real self when writing. — Christoffer

The T Clark you see here on the forum is exactly the T Clark you would see if you were sitting here in my living room with me right now. No canyon.

Intelligences vastly greater than ours might be able to predict various emergent things, like liquidity. — Patterner

There are different kinds of emergence—weak and strong. We’ve mostly been talking about strong emergence like when biology emerges from chemistry. As we’ve said, in those situations, knowing the principles of the lower level of organization will not allow you to construct, predict, the principles of the higher level.

Weak emergence is a bit more straightforward. There are times when you can predict more complex macroscopic behavior from its simpler microscopic roots. A well-known example—the behavior of an ideal gas can be predicted based on the behavior of the individual atoms in the gas. In that example, properties like temperature, pressure, and volume are derivable based on knowledge of the average velocity, quantity, and mass of the atoms and molecules in the gas. I think the behavior of liquids you mentioned is probably an example of weak emergence.

So if your point all along has been the precise path, I definitely agree. If your point is that it's impossible for me to take the same path twice, I disagree, even though it is astronomically unlikely to happen. — Patterner

The question is, could I have predicted it in advance? Can I predict what comes next? To be fair, emergence doesn’t generally apply to individual phenomena or events. It applies to systems—levels of organization, e.g. chemistry as compared to biology.

there is no reason that a universe with initial conditions and properties that could be described exactly the same ways could borrow produce another universe much like this one. — Patterner

That’s an entirely different question than the one on the table here.

Since the universe was constructed from those laws, there is no reason that those laws couldn't do it again — Patterner

The universe was not constructed from or by the laws of science. Those laws describe how that universe works and its history.

But no human, if given the power to create a Big Bang, and the power to manipulate anything using any of those laws any time and anywhere, could reconstruct this universe. Is that what you mean? — Patterner

No, not really. Let’s try this…

Let’s say you decide to go for a ramble someplace with no pathways, no roads, no towns, no landmarks. You don’t make any plans. You don’t have a map or compass. You don’t have any goals. You just go out for a walk. You wander around deciding which way to go—each moment depending only on your desire at that particular moment. Or maybe you could make your decisions by rolling a die.

When you’re all done, if I’ve been watching, I can look back and see the path you we’re on, and where you went—to oversimplify, that’s reduction. But I couldn’t have predicted that path before you started.

I don’t anticipate that thought experiment will be any more convincing than my previous arguments.

The T Clark family book group is currently reading “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Quite a slog. Somebody please tell me it gets easier.

This is why I was surprised that you confidently asserted that biology is strongly emergent and then cited Anderson, since I don't think Anderson makes such a distinction. — SophistiCat

Anderson does not use the term “emergence” in his 1972 article. As I quoted above he states “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe...”

I just think I'm not understanding you. It seems like you're saying we have tables made out of wood and nails, but we can't make tables out of wood and nails. — Patterner

I’ll start off with my clever response before I come back with my more straightforward one

Clever response—It’s not making the table out of wood and nails, it’s making the wood out of atoms and molecules.

Straightforward response—As I said, I can’t think of anything else to say that might convince you or at least help you understand what I’m trying to say. I don’t think my own understanding is good enough to come up with something better.

Sorry, I'm not trying to be difficult. There has to be a misunderstanding. Anything that exists and is the product of the laws of physics was constructed on the laws of physics. But you're saying they cannot be constructed on the laws of physics. — Patterner

I think most physicists probably agree with you. I've given convincing you my best shot, so we should probably leave it at that. It's been a good conversation for me.

Are you saying that thermodynamics is not reductionist — SolarWind

I left my response to this out of my previous post. Yes, you can construct the principles of thermodynamics from the laws of physics, but you can't for the other elements listed.

No one needs to explain all this in detail. Are you saying that thermodynamics is not reductionist because you can't predict the weather exactly one year in advance?

Reductionism is actually correct in principle. Suppose a pile of 271,828 atoms reacts differently than expected. Then you simply define a new rule for 271,828 atoms, and everything is reductionist again. — SolarWind

The essence of emergence is that, while you can reduce all phenomena into pieces explainable by lower level laws, e.g. physics, in many cases you can not construct higher level phenomena based on those same laws even in theory. Tell me how you would determine the principles of biology I described in my previous post from the principles of physics?

Chemical interactions are physical events. A biological entity is made up of a huge number of interacting physical events. It's all explainable by the lower-level principles of physics and chemistry. — Patterner

Do you think, or do you think it’s possible, to explain and predict the principles of biology from the principles of physics. Here’s a list of some of those principles— evolutionary theory, physiology, genetics, thermodynamics, and ecology. Once you’ve done that, you need to explain and predict how those principles will interact and integrate to produce biological organisms and how they historically evolve and develop as energy-processing, self-regulating systems.

The ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe is a given, because it's what actually happened. — Patterner

Everything that happens, happens consistent with the laws of lower levels of organization, i.e. physics. That doesn’t necessarily mean you can predict in advance how a complex system will evolve based on those laws, even in theory.

Keeping in mind this is a controversial idea.

what you were saying seems impossible. I can understand that it's possible that, if there were non-biological beings who had intelligence equal to or greater than human intelligence, they may well never postulate the principles of biology. I would imagine there are so many ways the principles of chemistry and physics can combine and interact that it's possible no one would ever stumble upon the ideas that we know as the principles of biology. But that's not the same as it being impossible in theory to come up with those principles. — Patterner

Here's what Anderson says:

...the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a “constructionist” one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe...

...The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other... — P.W. Anderson - More is Different

I already quoted from and linked Philip Anderson. — Srap Tasmaner

I didn't see your earlier reference.

Andersen does not talk about strong emergence, or indeed any emergence - these terms gained traction later. — SophistiCat

It's true he does not use the terms "emerge," "emergent," or "emergence," but that's what he was writing about. As for the provenance of the terms in this context, this is from E.A. Burtt's "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science," written in 1924.

These developments strongly suggest that reality can only be consistently regarded as a more complex affair, that the primary qualities simply characterize nature so far as she is subject to mathematical handling, while she just as really harbors the secondary and tertiary ones so far as she is a medley of orderly but irreducible qualities. How to construe a rational structure out of these various aspects of nature is the great difficulty of contemporary cosmology; that we have not yet satisfactorily solved it is evident if one considers the logical inadequacies in the theory of emergent evolution, which appears at present the most popular scheme for dealing with this problem. In this theory we either have to suppose fundamental discontinuities in nature such as permit no inference from qualities earlier existing to those later appearing, or else we have to regard the more complex qualities as somehow existing even before they would have been empirically observable, and co-operating in bringing about their material embodiment. — E.A. Burtt - The Metaphysics of Modern Science

As I understand it, Burtt uses the term "evolution" here to mean developmental change in general, not Darwinian evolution. I don't know if he was the first to use the "emergent" in this context or whether it was used by others. As far as I know, Burtt did not have any influence on Anderson.

I doubt that. I can roughly imagine how chemical interactions give rise to life, and much of this (DNA, RNA, neurotransmitters) has already been researched. — SolarWind

Whether or not you can “roughly imagine” how something works is not the standard by which strong emergence is determined. When we say a level of organization is strongly emergent, that means it’s rules and principles cannot be determined, constructed, in advance from the rules and principles of a lower level, even in theory. You cannot determine the principles of biology in advance from the principles of chemistry and physics.

If you’re interested, here’s a link to one of the founding documents of the study of emergence.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4047.393

Oh, and I won't be responding to you again btw. You are on the 'not worth it' list. — Clarendon

Alas. And since you’re making up definitions for words that already have well established meanings, I assume you’re using “not worth it,” to mean “points out when I am wrong.”

This just ignores what I explicitly said I mean by weak emergence. — Clarendon

@Patterner is right about what weak emergence means. A good example is the emergence of macroscopic ideal gas behavior out of the microscopic behavior of molecules. An example of strong emergence is the development of biological life out of chemical interactions.

I don't know how you define life. It seems to me it's a bunch of physical processes. Metabolism. Respiration. Circulation. Immune systems. Reproduction. Growth. What aspect of life is not physical? What aspect can't be observed, measured, followed step-by-step? — Patterner

My analogy between life and consciousness mostly has to do with the inability of people on one side of the argument to conceive that a particular phenomenon might be a manifestation of a physical process. There must be something else. For life it was "elan vital," a spark of life coming from outside. The need for that explanatory factor no longer seems to be an issue for most people. What is the spark for consciousness?

And what aspect of consciousness is physical, and can be observed, measured, followed step-by-step? How can we know that everything needed for the existence of consciousness is purely physical if no aspect of consciousness is? — Patterner

How do we know that someone or something other than ourselves is conscious? By observing their behavior. The most obvious way is by listening to what another person says--how they describe their own first-person experience. Obviously that's not enough. Not all conscious entities have language to self-report. What I need to do to make this a better argument is to identify non-verbal patterns of behavior that demonstrate consciousness. I'm not prepared to have that discussion right now.

And when I do that, will that be enough? Is consciousness more than just patterns of behavior? I know you'll say yes. What do I say? I'm not sure. This is why I was trying to avoid a discussion of the "hard problem” until I have a better answer.

Wait – I think it might be a good idea to pick up a book about fishing or the behaviour of mussels next time. — javi2541997

Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías and The Tamarit Divan by Federico García Lorca. — javi2541997

I've told you before, Javi. You need to stop reading so much. You should take up knitting.

Do you think you can make something non-physical with only physical building materials? — Patterner

To be clear, arguments about your question were not what I was calling "pseudo-science."

Now to answer. Let me think...well...I guess the answer is "yes." The example I always come back to is biological life. Is life physical? I'd say no in the same sense we'd say consciousness isn't. Chemicals behave in certain ways. Life is just one of the ways chemicals behave. Historically, people have asked the same kinds of questions about life you're asking about consciousness. To them, there must be something else, something added beyond the chemistry.

I think consciousness is more difficult to get a grasp on because it's so personal. It feels different from the other things we interact with. And, of course, that's the problem. Subjective experience is, in our subjective experience, different from those things we call "physical."

Hey!!! You tricked me into talking about the hard problem of consciousness.

I don't quite think this is going to go anywhere. Take care. — AmadeusD

This is all pitiful pseudoscience—“you can't get out what you don't put in”— baloney.

You and I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. As I noted previously, I think it’s a good time to end the conversation.

There is no problem in revisiting already discussed topic in the past, — Corvus

In general, that’s true, but I’m not interested in taking it up right now.