Terrance Deacon says that when we pile stuff together it usually just makes a mess and then disintegrates toward the heat death of the universe. He says it's when we see arrangements, especially ones we love, that's when we attribute the cause to something absent.

Like with natural selection, every critter is reaching for something, food or sex or security. The engine of life is this ever present absence.

Like with natural selection, every critter is reaching for something, food or sex or security. The engine of life is this ever present absence. — frank

But natural selection is based on natural profligacy of species, environmental chaos, and shear dumb luck of being in the right place just at the right time. Natural selection is not directional nor emergent.

There are plenty of counter-examples though which remain baffling mysteries, like the early development/emergence of feathers and light air-filled bone structure for dinosaurian birds which are necessary for a much later emergence of flight.

He says it's when we see arrangements, especially ones we love, that's when we attribute the cause to something absent. — frank

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there. — Lao Tzu

That's quoted in the book. Ha!

But natural selection is based on natural profligacy of species, environmental chaos, and shear dumb luck of being in the right place just at the right time. Natural selection is not directional nor emergent. — magritte

True. He's saying that science and philosophy focus on what's present, but would benefit from noticing the potency of lack, especially regarding life and consciousness. I'm just at the beginning, though.

↪Olivier5 ↪ChatteringMonkey ↪schopenhauer1 ↪magritte
What if we worked toward a basic definition and then conquered Chalmers strong and weak emergence? — frank

I suspect there is no qualitative difference here, that "strong emergence" is just what a billion years of "weak emergence" looks like.

The IEP puts it this way:
"If we were pressed to give a definition of emergence, we could say that a property is emergent if it is a novel property of a system or an entity that arises when that system or entity has reached a certain level of complexity and that, even though it exists only insofar as the system or entity exists, it is distinct from the properties of the parts of the system from which it emerges. However, as will become apparent, things are not so simple because “emergence” is a term used in different ways both in science and in philosophy, and how it is to be defined is a substantive question in itself."

I would add a few criteria, as follows:

Structural strength: for an emerging form to perdure at all, the form must be structurally cohesive and/or self-sustaining. Otherwise the slightest perturbation in the environment would erase the form. A structure that emerges and then vanishes (like the waves in the OP) is not building up any emerging property over the long term. It emerges and then goes back to zero, and so does the next wave.

Cumulative: for emergence to go anywhere over the long run, it needs to build upon past emergence. So to qualify as real emergence, a structure or form has to maintain some of its structural gains over time (criteria of structural strength), long enough for another emerging form to happen, AND this new emerging form has to build upon the previous one (i.e. be cumulative).

Self-maintainance: because of entropy, an emerging form is generally subject to degenerescence and destruction. In order to satisfay criteria of structural strength and cumulativeness, an emerging form must therefore be able to repair itself, otherwise it is not going to last long enough for cumulative emergence to happen.

@Olivier5@ChatteringMonkey@frank@magritte
Okay looks like you have the book already! What page are you all on? I would like to discuss his cogent understanding of Cartesian Theater. Does anyone want to reference that and provide some of his examples?

Structural strength: for an emerging form to perdure at all, the form must be structurally cohesive and/or self-sustaining. Otherwise the slightest perturbation in the environment would erase the form. A structure that emerges and then vanishes (like the waves in the OP) is not building up any emerging property over the long term. It emerges and then goes back to zero, and so does the next wave.

Cumulative: for emergence to go anywhere over the long run, it needs to build upon past emergence. So to qualify as real emergence, a structure or form has to maintain some of its structural gains over time (criteria of structural strength), long enough for another emerging form to happen, AND this new emerging form has to build upon the previous one (i.e. be cumulative).

Self-maintainance: because of entropy, an emerging form is generally subject to degenerescence and destruction. In order to satisfay criteria of structural strength and cumulativeness, an emerging form must therefore be able to repair itself, otherwise it is not going to last long enough for cumulative emergence to happen. — Olivier5

What is the nature of a new property to inhere in something? Solidity of an object let's say. At what level is solidification happening? To what? Where?

At what level is solidification happening? — schopenhauer1

Good question. I suppose that various chemical bonds and forces would need to exist between components, bindings them in certain ways, for an emerging object or form to have any solidity. So one level of solidity is chemical.

So one level of solidity is chemical. — Olivier5

When is this binding solidification though and not just arrangements of matter?

It is just arrangement of matter. Solid, liquid and gaseous phases are well known physical concepts about how atoms "connect" or not with one another.

It is just arrangement of matter. Solid, liquid and gaseous phases are well known physical concepts about how atoms "connect" or not with one another. — Olivier5

I guess I should say, at what perspective is this happening? I presume, you the human has a set of images of this playing out.. some sort of latice forming from free flowing links, or chemical looking diagram or 3D graphic in your head.

Worth pondering but likely to solved only when hell freezes over. The problem is the idea or theory, if you will, is untestable or unverifiable, I can't tell which. The only way to know that a thing exits is to observe it; if so, how can I ever know it exists when I'm not? It's like asking someone to tell us how a particular food item tastes like but without tasting it? Impossible!

Nevertheless, the famous but quite old double-slit experiment suggests a Cartesian divine observer. Electrons, it's safe to say aren't capable of observing either the experimenters, themselves or anything at all for they matter. Yet, their behavior (interference pattern or a single point of light) seems to evince, among other possibilities, a conscious decision to act in one way and not the other. God? Your guess is as good as mine.

I guess I should say, at what perspective is this happening? — schopenhauer1

The scientific perspective, as far as I am concerned.

I think I'll make another thread to discuss the book in, this one can remain for more general discussion of emergence.

Let's explore a few examples. I primarily have life in mind, but it may be useful to look at a few non-biological emerging structures to test the criteria of self- maintenance.

1. A stalactite: it "emerges" from a cave ceiling by the slow accretion of limestone and other minerals brought by percolating water. The emergence of a stalactite takes thousands if not millions of years to happen. The cave environment shields the phenomenon from wind erosion and other entropic forces. So it doesn't need to be self-maintaning, but it is self-sustaining because flowing water will tend to follow an already formed bulge in the ceiling, precipitating its minerals at the tip of the bulge.

2. A river: it's an earth topographic structure "emerging" from water erosion over a raised area of land. Here too the phenomenon is self sustaining: water flowing digs down the river bed (typically) so the structure remains more or less there, stable in spite if the fluctuation in water flow. An ecosystems develops around it. Sometimes the river dries up for a period in summer; and sometimes it floods the plains around it. The banks can get eroded or built up by silt, so the bed of the river evolves over time.

So self-sustainance is a better criteria than self-maintainance because it doesn't exclude purely physical emerging phenomena.

When we talk about emergence, aren't we talking about something more general than only emergent forms?

From the earlier posted Chalmers definition :

"If we were pressed to give a definition of emergence, we could say that a property is emergent if it is a novel property of a system or an entity that arises when that system or entity has reached a certain level of complexity and that, even though it exists only insofar as the system or entity exists, it is distinct from the properties of the parts of the system from which it emerges."

From wiki :

"In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole."

I feel like something need not necessarily be self-sustaining to be called emergent. Or put another way self-sustaining emergent forms seem only a subset of emergence in general, an important subset no doubt, as life would fall under that, but not all emergence.

Yeah, probably better to start a new thread. I've only skimmed to first few pages to see if I would commit to reading it.

I think I'll make another thread to discuss the book in, this one can remain for more general discussion of emergence. — frank

:ok: Too tired to make sense of anything. Rambling...rambling...but, thankfully, not gambling.

I agree with the criteria that an emerging "thing" or phenomenon must be more than the sum of its parts, must exhibit novel properties that its parts did not exhibit. But I am trying to see what that implies in practice. It implies - me think - a capacity for small emerging events to build up to something bigger, hence emergence needs to be somewhat cumulative and self-sustaining over long periods of time.

Emergence is a small step, and then another small step, and another one, cumulatively adding up to a journey.

It implies - me think - a capacity for small emerging events to build up to something bigger, hence emergence needs to be somewhat cumulative and self-sustaining over long periods of time. — Olivier5

Ok, I wouldn't limit emergence to that just yet... but fair enough.

Ok, I wouldn't limit emergence to that just yet... but fair enough. — ChatteringMonkey

And you'd be right. I'm talking of what it takes for emergence to build up over time. Ocean waves are emergent but they don't last, and they don't grow upon one another.

Here's a graphic example of weak emergence from a BASIC program I wrote that involved an infinite composition of complex functions. Unpredictable imagery. Magnified 2000X.

Quantum Bug (don't let this into your quantum computer!)

Could you explain it a little more? Please?

At each pixel a (complex number) value is computed, then the pixel is colored based on the modulus of that number. E.g., dark green=small, bright red=large. The actual functional computation is complicated. It's virtually impossible to ascertain beforehand what sort of image will emerge as the program runs. Hence, weak emergence.

Sometimes philosophical discussions can be dry and it helps to look at graphic examples in reality. :cool:

Here's another one: Infinite Brooch

So at what epistemic level is a non-viewer based emergent event happening. You keep giving me the human picture of how emergence looks. The viewer is baked in. Next it's going to be shoehorned in by some generic level of "forces" but what does that even mean without the epistemic viewer? Then people will make the odd epistemic imaginative leap to pretend they are the first person view of a localized physical event that combines forces and matter. Nope.

So at what epistemic level is a non-viewer based emergent event happening. — schopenhauer1

This is a contradiction in terms, because "epistemic" implies a viewer. More generally, there is no such thing as a view from nowhere.

I agreed with you. It also think some kind of perspective-taking is baked into the concept of emergence. That's not to say there not something there regardless of our perception of it which we capture with the concept. Just that it doesn't make sense to try to look at it completely divorced from any perspective... because the concept is invented so that we - who necessarily view things from a certain perspective - could make sense of the world.

This is a contradiction in terms, because "epistemic" implies a viewer. More generally, there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. — Olivier5

If there is no view from nowhere, then "what" is happening? Can one speak of this?

I agreed with you. It also think some kind of perspective-taking is baked into the concept of emergence. That's not to say there not something there regardless of our perception of it which we capture with the concept. Just that it doesn't make sense to try to look at it completely divorced from any perspective... because the concept is invented so that we - who necessarily view things from a certain perspective - could make sense of the world. — ChatteringMonkey

Correct, so can you see where this fits in with things like mental phenomena "emerging"?

"epistemic" implies a viewer. More generally, there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. — Olivier5

There are two choices here 1) I know that x, 2) We know that x. Belief and justification are quite different for the two, so they're not the same. In the first person, belief is subjective and private, justification can be deduction or personal experiential or a reference to a public or conventional fact. We know that or it is known that is a publicly conventional belief justified by expert evidence.

The number of dots on the face of a die has two answers, It's either the side facing me or what is publicly known of all six sides. Neither of these is from nowhere.