Rocks should be however minimizes the suffering of things capable of suffering. Rocks can't suffer, so the rocks themselves aren't subjects of concern in ethical considerations.

And yes, the capacity to suffer is a (weakly) emergent phenomenon, like life, consciousness, and back to the subject we're wildly diverging from now, will. It's a kind of functionality, which like all functionality shapes both behavior and experience.

And that's not strongly emergent, because it's not that new "ethical properties" arise when amoral matter is arranged the right way — Pfhorrest

And yes, the capacity to suffer is a (weakly) emergent — Pfhorrest

The capacity to suffer arises when matter without capacity to suffer is arranged the right way. Therefore, suffering is strongly emergent as per your definition.

The capacity to suffer arises when matter without capacity to suffer is arranged the right way. Therefore, suffering is strongly emergent as per your definition. — Olivier5

No, because the capacity to suffer is, on my account, a product of the way that the brain functions (though like all mental phenomena it's multiply-realizable: it doesn't have to be exactly a human brain to be capable of suffering, just execute the same general kind of function), which is an ordinary physical process built up out of simpler ordinary physical processes in a way that is only weakly emergent.

I.e. there's not some extra fundamental law of nature about suffering, on top of the ordinary physical laws, that only applies to matter arranged the right way into something like a human brain. But when you arrange matter the right way, a possible product of the complex interactions of the ordinary laws already governing that matter is a state of suffering.

You keep changing your definition of strongly emergent. Make up your mind.

I have not changed it at all. You just don't understand it. Willfully, I think, since you said you want not to distinguish between the two.

If you put a bunch of simple things together and some higher-level structure or behavior appears out of the complex of them, that's emergence, simpliciter, of some sort or another.

If you could (in principle) model just the simple things, put together like that, and your model would automatically show the higher-level structure or behavior in the complex of them, that's weak emergence.

If, instead, even a perfect model of just the simple things, even put together like that, could not (even in principle) automatically show the higher-level structure or behavior in the complex of them, unless you added a special rule to the model to make complexes like that do things like that, that's strong emergence.

On my account, if you were to perfectly model just the low-level behavior of a bunch of matter arranged exactly like it is in a human being, you would automatically model a being capable of suffering, and all other mental phenomena, without having to add any special rules to the model specifically to handle modeling mental phenomena. So that is weakly emergent, not strongly emergent.

Okay, fair enough. At least we agree that emergence does happen, that entirely new structures can emerge haphazardly, and that entirely new properties that did not exist at elemental level can emerge at structural level with them. And therefore that something wholly new and unpredictable can emerge out of a new and unpredictable arrangement of elements. Such as, you know, life, reproduction, suffering, language and philosophy.

That such emergence needs to be physically possible (without magic) in order to happen is a point that you have made at some length, and I agreed that impossible or magical things do not usually happen, so if emergence happens it must be within the boundaries of what is physically possible, but the point seems rather trite to me.

We also agreed that strong emergence is fundamental to how language works, and therefore that it happens, if only in the mechanisms of symbolic language. I guess such strong emergence weakly emerged at some point... :-)