I guess nothing ever happens in the view from nowhere, then. — Olivier5

What would that imply for metaphysics?

Let's try a different route. Maybe the event is the focus. But what is an event?

I don't know what the metaphysical implication is. The physical one is that you need a frame of reference to describe any event. This is a logical, mathematical requirement to describe any event in any language, whether that language is made of words or x, y and z coordinates and vectors.

Since your rejection of subjective points of view now extends to a rejection of logical frames of reference, no event can be described to you in a logical language.

Nothing can happen in the view from nowhere.

I don't know what the metaphysical implication is. The physical one is that you need a frame of reference to describe any event. This is a logical, mathematical requirement to describe any event in any language, whether that language is made of words or x, y and z coordinates and vectors.

Since your rejection of subjective points of view now extends to a rejection of logical frames of reference, no event can be described to you in a logical language.

Nothing can happen in the view from nowhere. — Olivier5

But what stage is the event happening? Panpsychism and process philosophy gives a first person perspective to the object itself. There are "occasions of experience". That sounds weird, so what else is there? We can keep pretending that we are narrowing in on some specific "object in action" from the third person imaginative perspective, but that's not the case.

So yes, it does go back to "If a tree falls in the woods.." that makes the problem no less tricky.

So yes, it does go back to "If a tree falls in the woods.." that makes the problem no less tricky. — schopenhauer1

Why the anthropocentric perspective? When an actual tree does fall in the forest, humans may or may not notice it but the tree seems to notice, as well as many other critters.

But what stage is the event happening? Panpsychism and process philosophy gives a first person perspective to the object itself. There are "occasions of experience". That sounds weird, so what else is there? We can keep pretending that we are narrowing in on some specific "object in action" from the third person imaginative perspective, but that's not the case. — schopenhauer1

As some one who defends a pansemiotic ontology, I would point out how a brutely physical level of reality would be organised by the failure to care, or the indifference of the system.

So emergence, rather than being a way to insert some kind of mentalism into the fundamental picture, is highlighting the way that differences in physical scale lead to a generalised blindness to detail, a generalised stochastic blanding out of physical interactions.

Stan Salthe nailed this with his hierarchy theory work and his notion of "cogent moments".

For any observer - or scale of physical interaction - there is some spatiotemporal region in which a forceful or energetic exchange is taking place. Atoms react with other atoms in their vicinity. This action can be captured by general physical models of the usual type. And if you have some collection of atoms, they will fall into some collective state as their interactions go to equilibrium. A collective state - defined in the language of probabilty theory – will emerge to characterised the atoms as a system with generic properties like temperature and pressure. The system will be thermalised and predictable and so have what Salthe is terming cogency.

There is nothing "mental" happening. And from any internal view, it is just atoms mindlessly bashing about in accidental fashion. But from a larger scale of observation - as might be adopted by a scientist or even any larger physical system having an interaction with the thermalised atomic state - this little system of atoms is instability stabilised. From a distant in spatiotemporal scale, all the specific details of the interactions are information that has been discarded, to leave only the core statistical properties like pressure and temperature. Or rigidity, conductivity, etc.

So emergence is a product not of the mindfulness of some higher scale point of view. And especially not the product of small scale mindfulness expressing itself as some higher collective property.

Instead it is about a higher scale of interaction emerging via an ability to ignore the physics of the internals of a lower scale of organisation. The higher scale now only sees the stable, long-run, statistical view. And that stability of view is what in fact allows there to be a new higher hierarchical scale of material organisation. The ability to ignore the small scale physics - treat its "determinism" as "randomness" - is the foundation for constructing a next level of causal order.

Of course, the key to sealing off a lower level of materiality like this is all about being able to impose the constraints that allow the detail to be ignored. The larger scale is the entropy sink or heat bath environment which permits a closure via a generalised information forgetting.

So the atoms might be modelled as a bunch of deterministic interactions in which every informational detail is heeded. That seems very mindful. Yet emergence is predicated on being able to treat all this action as purely statistical - a pattern encoded in some stochastic attractor.

The whole of classical physics is then itself emergent from a blanding out of the quantum scale of material action. The difference for our modelling is that we now have to include the fact that it is the environment that constrains the material freedoms to some wavefunction state of possible outcomes. The quantum "internals" no longer have the taken for granted stability and deterministic predicability of the classical view.

From Satlhe's cogent moment point of view, nature is thus organised as a hierarchy of thermalising scales. From any (classical) point of view, we are going to look down in scale and see a lot of deterministic detail blur into a single flat statistics. All the atomistic interactions are going to have some stable average that thus supports are own more complex scale of observation. We can now have our own definite and particular physical interactions as we have no need to care at all about the micro-detail supposedly supporting our own.

Our ability to ignore such detail is what makes our level possible as its own thing. And also by definition, we have to be unwittingly imposing the right constraints on that lower level to be keeping it stable and untroublesome. Whatever we are doing, it must be bounding that lower level in a long-run fashion.

That is the view looking downwards from where we are - which is a place capable of a classical description, and thus a scale which can emergently take its scale of interactions for granted.

And likewise, there is the view we have looking upwards. We must be embedded in turn in the same arrangement where we become the indifferent elements of some much larger cogent moment. We become the statistical blur of some still larger spatioscale of statistical indifference.

So there is us here as entropic systems, complex life feeding off the solar flux. And we can do this because we live within a cosmos that is so large and slowly changing that it seems like an eternally fixed backdrop, with a constant temperature, pressure, energy density, chemical composition, etc.

We don't need to care the sun will rise tomorrow, or that protons won't decay. We can be blissfully indifferent to physics on the largest scale, just as we are to physics on the smallest.

The small scale is furiously changing, but that just blurs into a generic statistics from our point of view. Likewise the cosmic scale is making a wild change from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. But that is so large a change that is completely fills our entire possible point of view. We only sample a tiny fraction of that reality during our own cogent moment of emergent existence.

So the pansemiotic view of nature does build on "mentalistic" concepts like observation and information. But it is anti-mentalistic in that its stresses the fundamental importance of achieving stability by means of forgetting, ignoring, becoming indifferent.

And as I have pointed out before, even the biology of life and mind is dependent on being able to ignore and forget. The brain doesn't want to be exquisitely mindful of every possible detail. It wants to master the habits that allow it to deal with the challenges of reality as if they were meaningless trivialties.

Not every road bump can be flattened out by good suspension. But the basic principle of good suspension is to be able to notice as little as possible. And that mindlessness is what - by its contrast - produces the further potential to construct some new level of telos and material directedness.

And as I have also pointed out, we need to look closely at what humans use their undoubted mindfulness for. Entropy production. We can persist as a level of physical emergence as we are smart as serving the underlying thermodynamic flow the Cosmos has established.

And what is it that we are so good at ignoring? This very fact. We are indifferent to climate change and ecosystem wipeout as just something that goes along with the nature of being an emergent system. We construct a point of view on the back of being blissfully indifferent to the smaller and larger scales of physical being in which we are embedded.

That is why "cogent moment" is such an apt term. Cognition emerges as the ability to obsess about "internal" detail ... because the capacity to maintain a generalised indifference to actual worldly physics has become some sophisticated.

Why the anthropocentric perspective? When an actual tree does fall in the forest, humans may or may not notice it but the tree seems to notice, as well as many other critters. — Olivier5

Let's take the critters out of it then.

Okay so if a star explode into a supernova and no critter every notices, did the star explode?

I don't know but I tend to think yes.

Atoms react with other atoms in their vicinity. — apokrisis

But even this simple statement seems so simple in human understanding and so bizarre outside of it, as an event in itself without a perspective.

will emerge to characterised the atoms as a system with generic properties like temperature and pressure. The system will be thermalised and predictable and so have what Salthe is terming cogency. — apokrisis

Temperature and pressure are measured. They are properties of the observer. What would that be in itself?

Hold on.. I have to read the rest but that was my first read.

But even this simple statement seems so simple in human understanding and so bizarre outside of it, as an event in itself without a perspective. — schopenhauer1

It's just a model. That is stated up front. And models are about frames and their events - some set of laws and some collection of components.

So sure, atomism did make "action at a distance" interactions, like gravity, seem bizarre to Newton and Descartes. Descartes struggled to make things work with a corpuscular theory of the vacuum. Newton just got on with the maths and gave up trying to fill in the gap with his imagination.

Einstein fixed things with a new model of the spacetime frame in which energy density shaped its global dimensional metric. We then had a "still more bizarre" reality that really made explicit a cogent moment approach to modelling classical emergence. The whole shaped its parts as the parts shaped their whole.

So I don't get your complaint on this. Atomism might have seemed so simple and obvious to us humans. But as I say, that is because it was the way of thinking that allowed us to ignore the most about reality. It allowed us to picture a purely mechanical world of relations. A world ruled by immaterial laws and brutely existent matter. A world described without the point of view that scale brings, and thus the canonical view from nowhere.

Physics has even since been building hierarchical scale and cogent structure back into this way-too-simple atomism.

But my point is about how this is all to do with the emergence of generalised indifference - a stochastic picture of nature. We shouldn't zero in on atomistic interactions (like Whitehead) and expect to find anything mentalistic going on. The mentalistic thing that is going on is instead the "cognitive" process of developing a global capacity to ignore details, stabilise a "world", by establishing points of view that are safe from the thermal fray.

If we want to unify physics and mind science, pansemiosis is how we can do that. Both the cosmos and the brain run on the same principle of being able to impose habitual predictability on an essentially unstable world. Both become what they are by imposing statistical constraints that turn all action into some unchanging average.

Temperature and pressure are measured. They are properties of the observer. What would that be in itself? — schopenhauer1

They are what can be measured from a larger scale - if that larger scale is imposing the right constraints on the smaller scale.

With human observers, that imposition is pretty literal. We have to trap some quantity of gas in a flask and let it come to equilibrium in a heat bath. So as humans, we are inside the physical world. But we do experiments by flipping positions on nature.

Nature just is nature. Stars have a steady-ish temperature and pressure as they are the product of the forces of gravitation and fusion reaching some long-run equilibrium balance.

The small scale is furiously changing, but that just blurs into a generic statistics from our point of view. Likewise the cosmic scale is making a wild change from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. But that is so large a change that is completely fills our entire possible point of view. We only sample a tiny fraction of that reality during our own cogent moment of emergent existence. — apokrisis

I'm going to pick this quote because it might encapsulate a lot of the rest regarding scale. Let me put these words in succession to show where I'm coming from:

Scale: Can things have scale without a viewer? Where do objects and events obtain in space/time if there is no stage of scale?

Properties: Can things have properties without a viewer? Where do properties inhere if there is no stage of properties?

Events: Can there be events without a viewer? Without scale or properties, what kind of events can happen?

a higher scale of interaction emerging via an ability to ignore the physics of the internals of a lower scale of organisation. The higher scale now only sees the stable, long-run, statistical view. And that stability of view is what in fact allows there to be a new higher hierarchical scale of material organisation. — apokrisis

This was my first thought -- the difference between the mereological sum of whatever bits make up a boulder and a boulder. Do we call the boulder an "emergent" object? Certainly a boulder has properties of its own that the bits don't have on their own or as an abstract set of bits. The boulder can roll down a hill and smash through a tree. Is that an "emergent" property of something, like the bits arranged in ways that "produce" or "constitute" or "give rise to" a boulder?

I'm not sure what an observer has to do with any of this. Either that set of bits is heaped or scattered around or whatever, or it's arranged as a boulder. If we're only asking because of the metaphysics -- whether we countenance the existence of the boulder, and in what way -- that doesn't look all that interesting to me, unless it's to call attention to larger system within which boulders play a part.

I'm not sure what an observer has to do with any of this. Either that set of bits is heaped or scattered around or whatever, or it's arranged as a boulder. If we're only asking because of the metaphysics -- whether we countenance the existence of the boulder, and in what way -- that doesn't look all that interesting to me, unless it's to call attention to larger system within which boulders play a part. — Srap Tasmaner

Again, how events play out, how things scale, how properties inhere without an observer is the question. Objects on their own are different than objects as we perceive them. This seems simple yet bizarre because it is unusual to think of objects separated from our perception of them. An objects scale, property, and event on its own, is just an odd thing.

Scale: Can things have scale without a viewer? Where do objects and events obtain in space/time if there is no stage of scale? — schopenhauer1

The problem is that "viewer" already implies a passive notion of consciousness - the classic Cartesian mistake. So it builds in the conclusion that the mind could exist in some separated res cogitans.

My reply is built around an active, Peircean, understanding of consciousness. What you call a viewing, I would call an interaction. There is always the semiotic wholeness of things in a triadic sign relation.

So scale itself becomes defined by cogency, or the question of whether things can or can't be in an active, informative, relation.

To have a viewpoint in regards to some object or event means it can matter to you - physically - whether it is changing or not changing, pushing or pulling, hot or cold, etc. But if something is so small that it becomes part of a backdrop blur, or so large that it just is the backdrop, then you can't "view" it. You just interact with some statistical level effect.

So differences in scale are what create "viewers" in the first place. If all differences had the same scale, there would be no effective differences. Once difference breaks up across many scales, then you start to get the emergent effects where there are the interactions you have at your own level vs the interactions you have with the finest grain, and also the coarsest grain, of being.

The Cosmos started with no scale difference. Everything was Planck scale at the Big Bang. Spacetime extent was so small, and energy density was so large, that there was no effective separation of the two.

But then it expanded and cooled with exponential speed. And matter could clump out and even start to move at less than the speed of light. You started to get the possibility of a Universe of "medium sized dry goods" – our "everyday" world of people, tables, fridges, boulders, cows, puddles. All the similar scale objects and events that we see as being particular, concrete and deterministic in terms of our interactions with them.

And at the same time, you got a backdrop of a Cosmic backdrop void. You got your stage that is a combo of completely cold and completely expanded physics – a 2.75 degree K sizzle of cosmic radiation filling a 93 billion light year visible light cone.

So scale was born of a cosmic division – two kinds of exponentially receeding limits. The global light cone the local average energy density. And our "view" is now divided into the world of objects/events that have material meaning to us - like fridges and puddles – and the contrasting realms of a giant spacetime void, and near zero temperature sizzle, which we only relate to in the most averaged-out of view way.

Properties: Can things have properties without a viewer? Where do properties inhere if there is no stage of properties? — schopenhauer1

Again the reply that if you demand that there be "viewers", you are taking a Cartesian mind~world dualism for granted. And I agree that is a very "classical physics" way of looking at reality.

But my whole position - for both physics and mind science - is relational (indeed, semiotic). And so a "viewer" is simply another term for speaking of things in meaningful interaction.

Properties are thus contextual. Something has properties in contrast to other things. And both have properties in contrast to whatever constitutes the general averaged backdrop.

Does the Cosmos have a temperature? We can say it is 2.75 degree K in contrast to the heat it had earlier in its evolution and the near zero degrees it will have by its Heat Death. So that is a comparison we make by standing outside the current Universe itself.

Then the stove can be hotter than my hand as a more particular statement. It depends whether it has been turned on, etc.

So properties = meaningful distinctions. And meaningful distinctions can be both between individuals and even between the general states of the embedding context, if it was one thing before and another thing later.

But yes, that means there must always be a stage, the contrast that a generalised backdrop provides for the foreground of particularised events. And that is precisely what the Salthe/semiotic/hierarchical approach brings to the table. It shows how once scale is born by a symmetry breaking - such as cooling~expanding - then you must get the secondary distinction between those things that are within reach of your interaction, and those things that are so far out of scale as to turn into a generalised blur of smallness, or a generalised view-filling of largeness.

A semiosis of interaction just drops out of the whole shindig in a natural fashion. And life followed on from physics in being able to apply its constraints on the world - fix things so that it divided more sharply into what was general and what was particular.

Events: Can there be events without a viewer? Without scale or properties, what kind of events can happen? — schopenhauer1

What is stopping events from happening? They are going to happen pretty freely over all scales if that is possible.

The real question is how can I - as a pragmatic organism - minimise my need to care about events? How much can I push out of my zone of concerned interaction so as to maximise my "own" capacity to pick and choose the events that occur.

So I can't stop the weather. But I can build a roof. I can establish a generalised indifference to the rain.

You are arguing for an ontology where there are objects with properties in a spacetime context that is then characterised by interactions or events. And sure, that is what emerges as a good account of the Cosmos about halfway through its entropic journey in the sparsely located locales that are planetary lumps of matter.

But I'm talking about the developmental whole and how to characterise that. I'm talking about the emergence of an object oriented ontology itself, and how it arises due to the geometric logic of scale differences.

Do we call the boulder an "emergent" object? — Srap Tasmaner

I would see boulders as part of a fractal entropic flow. Every boulder is on its way - over eons - to being crumbled into fine sand. And every boulder was once part of a historically cooled lava flow.

So any emergence here - ie: some distinction in terms of a particular size or temperature - is not really of any physical consequence. A boulder behaves like a boulder. Drop in lava and it will melt. Roll it down the mountain and it will smash.

The boulder has an identity constrained by the generality of the laws of thermodynamics. But beyond that, its size or temperature - its relative scale - is a matter of uncontrolled chance so far as nature is concerned.

So emergence speaks to the emergence of a reason to constrain events in the world. A lava flow is an emergent self-organised thing. A scree slope or sandy beach is likewise a self-organising feature of the world.

But a boulder mixed in with general landscape debris - rock outcrops, rocks, pebbles, dust - is a statistical accident. It emerges out of the complementary fact that what isn't constrained can freely happen.

So there is a duality to emergence here - that which is being produced as a necessity and that which is being left to the vagaries of chance.

What actually emerges in natural physical processes is then some balance point. A certain balance of geological forces will tend to produce a bunch of boulders rather than a beach of sand or a rocky outcrop. Context and event tend towards some particular statistical attractor that we could call "boulder-prone".

I'm not sure what an observer has to do with any of this. Either that set of bits is heaped or scattered around or whatever, or it's arranged as a boulder. If we're only asking because of the metaphysics -- whether we countenance the existence of the boulder, and in what way -- that doesn't look all that interesting to me, unless it's to call attention to larger system within which boulders play a part. — Srap Tasmaner

The point I would make is that the anthropomorphic response would be to see the boulder as either something very definite and meaningful, or completely random and meaningless. Whereas my approach sees every object as a product of some balance of contextual constraints and local freedoms.

So who does it have an "interesting" size for? Or temperature for?

Humans might have one kind of answer - one that can range from the boulder being sacred to being the most random object imaginable.

Nature - as a thermodynamic process - can also have its more general physical answer. Is the boulder typical or atypical given the general environmental context in play? To the degree that it is not yet statistically typical, we might expect it to become more so as time passes. The appropriate thermal balance is what we should expect to emerge.

So there is a duality to emergence here - that which is being produced as a necessity and that which is being left to the vagaries of chance. — apokrisis

Yeah that's a really funny thing. People seem to reach for "emergence" when expecting a story about how such-and-such unlikely something-or-other (usually consciousness) -- "unlikely", of course, in the eye of the theorist -- came about, what caused it, what made it happen.

And you might very well answer, in some cases at least, "It happened because nothing was stopping it." That's quite a serious shift in worldview.

And you might very well answer, in some cases at least, "It happened because nothing was stopping it." That's quite a serious shift in worldview. — Srap Tasmaner

From my time in mind science, this is a reason I came to dislike the use of the term. Emergence is invoked in the sense that "something pops out" as the product of bottom-up reductionist causes simply as some kind of happy accident.

So liquidity is a bottom up emergent property - unmysterious because that is just the collective statistical behaviour of a bunch of dipole molecules interacting with weak bonds. And consciousness was suppose to be a similar kind of neural magic.

Put together enough quantitative interaction, and a new qualitative state would emerge in spontaneous and supervenient fashion.

But in theoretical biology, I found that emergence was modelling as a composite of the bottom-up and the top-down. The two levels of action have to be mutually reinforcing - each synergistically producing the other in emergent fashion - for the whole to have stably emergent existence.

So life as an emergent state is the product of informational constraints - the information provided by genes, membranes, molecular machinery of all kinds - acting top-down to stabilise the material processes that produce the chemical body. And then the organic chemistry also had to exhibit the right kind of self-organising properties to assemble into cellular structures on a statistical basis.

Every protein folds by chance. But it is also nudged in the proper direction by where the genes place the bonds that tug the strand into a compact shape.

So there are indeed two contrasting worldviews here - and one of them is still basically reductionist about its emergence. Properties pop out as some surprising collective accident instead of being a more complex negotiation between top-down contextual constraints and bottom-up degrees of freedom.

So there are indeed two contrasting worldviews here - and one of them is still basically reductionist about its emergence. Properties pop out as some surprising collective accident instead of being a more complex negotiation between top-down contextual constraints and bottom-up degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

My problem with top-down causation is that the consequence is already assumed at the top. For example, evolutionary adaptation at the microbiological level is explained by changes at the macro level of the environment. But the environment was already in the equation. Can top-down be a sort of shoehorning or bootstrapping that is illigitimate? It could be a subtle way of shifting the Cartesian Theater again, no? There it is as top-down causality. It used to be integration of neurons, or this or that, but it's the new place for the theater to play.

By the way, are you familiar with George Ellis?

I found that emergence was modelling as a composite of the bottom-up and the top-down. The two levels of action have to be mutually reinforcing - each synergistically producing the other in emergent fashion - for the whole to have stably emergent existence. — apokrisis

I think I agree with that. Emergence thinking is not a negation of bottom-up causality, it is a reminder that causality is a two way street: it can also work top-down.

My problem with top-down causation is that the consequence is already assumed at the top. — schopenhauer1

Not sure what you are arguing precisely but I would talk about top-down constraints more than top-down causation to emphasise that this is about a regulating or limiting context. So the larger environment does set the determining conditions for a physical system.

My post simply sought to show how scale itself creates a bounding effect. A qualitative difference must emerge due to a division in the nature of possible interactions.

Interactions between things of the same general spatiotemporal and energetic scale are going to have one quality. Then the lack of specific interactions - the turning of deterministic specificy into a statistical generality - as you approach the scale of both the very large and the very small, is going to have a different emergent character.

So you were asking about observers or points of view. You were talking about the need for a choice between a first and third person perspective. The first person is the completely local or subjective POV. The third person is the external God’s eye view - Cartesian coordinates - as imagined by classical physics.

I was describing yet another choice - the semiotic or internalist perspective. And this speaks directly to an emergentist metaphysics.

Having a position becomes a thing simply by the fundamental emergent feature I described - the three way separation into a hierarchy of being where there are all the second person interactions an object can have with other objects of the same scale. And then the two boundaries or horizons of the objects that become too small for particular interaction, so becomes a generalised material blur, and the objects that become so large that they totally fill the field of view, so cease to be objects and are now simply the embedding environment.

You get a world that has action in the middle ground and which becomes closed over by generality at the upper and lower boundaries of scale.

Again, this is a way to bypass the view from nowhere externalism of classical physics and also the mentalistic view from me pushed by some kind of Panpsychism. It is its own emergentist paradigm of pansemiosis where position in scale is what creates the contrasts between specific interactions and completely general ones.

As a metaphysical model, it applies directly to cosmology. It is obviously the case that we exist in a world where our kind of particularity and hence complexity of local interactions is possible as the quantum fine grain of differentiation is so small and cold, the cosmological light cone scale of integration so large and empty, that they have both become background statistical generalities.

We interact classically because quantum uncertainty is reduced towards its limit by distance. And also because the emergent “laws of nature” - the generalised balancing act - are now apparently frozen into an unchanging global scale of being.

It is because we can’t interact with the quantum scale, or the cosmological scale, in any meaningful way (until we invented the technology) that there only seems to be classical interactions playing out against a fixed universal backdrop that itself never changes.

But the internalist perspective of pansemiosis sees that the fixity of the upper and lower scales of being is itself an emergent effect of scale. It presents the second person POV alternative here.

I think I agree with that. Emergence thinking is not a negation of bottom-up causality, it is a reminder that causality is a two way street: it can also work top-down. — Olivier5

I was thinking of Wheeler’s aphorism on GR. “Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve”.

In a self organising system, there is no fixed foundation. Neither direction of action has reductionist priority. Instead it is all about the dynamical balancing act. A co-creation.

I love thinking about emergence.

It often seems that emergence is about things at different levels of description.

A flock of birds emerges from individual birds, or a chair emerges from a bunch of particles seemingly because they are the same things but being described at a different level.

I think that’s our clue. Emergence is about language, at least in part.

- A flock of birds is an emergent property of individual birds.

Here the words ‘a flock of birds’ is not sufficient to give information about (particular) birds seeing as it could be giving information about a different flock of birds. However ‘a collection of birds’ is sufficient to give information about a flock of birds, seeing as this phrase always gives information that is true of a flock of birds.

That combination of non-sufficiency and sufficiency - I think - is enough to tell us when something is a) one of Aristotle’s four causes, namely the final cause, and b) emergence.

Note that if we use this same permutation of non-sufficiency to talk about consciousness it also explains so called ‘strong emergence’.

- ‘Consciousness’ is not sufficient to give information about a (particular) thing seeing as consciousness might not always involve a particular thing, but ‘a thing’ is sufficient to give information about consciousness, (perhaps in a surprising way: the way that all language gives information about consciousness.)

However with both examples we still see that permutation of sufficiency we typically see with emergence, letting us know we’re dealing with emergence (and Aristotle’s final cause.)

As a result both examples are about emergent properties:

- A flock of birds is an emergent property of a collection of birds and
- Consciousness is an emergent property of a thing (in fact any thing you could name)

As a result it seems panpsychism is true in a non-mysterious way.