It was always possible to arrange bits of metal etc together into a steam engine, even if nobody did it until relatively recently. — Pfhorrest

Physically, maybe, assuming that the laws of thermodynamics haven't changed since the bronze age. But historically, no, because you need a certain grade or quality of steel to build a steam engine, which ancient Egyptians did not have the technology for.

Can you clarify? — Andrew M

The Schrödinger cat thought experiment was conceived in order to refute the Copenhagen interpretation, specifically the idea that the act of "observation" or "measurement" reduces or "collapses" the wavefunction. I am sympathetic to the attempt, I don't believe in the magic of observation either. But to me, it seems Schrödinger forgot a tiny little detail, which is that his cat was an observer too and therefore (according to said Copenhagen interpretation) could collapse the wavefunction inside his box, all by himself.

Edit: I've read your "Schrödinger bacterium" article. As often the case, the title widely overstates the finding that

"Our models show that this phenomenon being recorded is a signature of entanglement between light and certain degrees of freedom inside the bacteria,”.

Namely, the analysis points to a quantic interaction between photons and the bacterium's chlorophyll. What happens when a photon is "captured" by a chlorophyll molecule has been the subject of countless studies and many of them call upon QM to explain how photosynthesis works. For instance, chlorophyll is known to be fluorescent. It releases photons in a certain precise wave length (red). You can see it for yourself here, or you can just put a nice green solution of chlorophyll under the sun, and you will notice like a faint red light shimmering inside the green liquid.

Now, fluorescence is considered a quantic phenomenon, so this finding above that chlorophyll can "entangle" with photons doesn't seem so new to me.

Actually Schrödinger's cat was an attempt to prove that observers cannot be the cause of anything quantic happening.

I'm pretty sure Schrödinger and Wigner had carefully thought their ideas through. — Andrew M

How come Schrödinger did not see that his cat was just as good an observer as he was, pray tell?

I agree that the possibility was always "there" for everything, somehow, but possibilities do not actually exist ontologically. It's not like the ancient Egyptians had a thing in hand which they could call "the possibility of a steam engine". Instead, we present day folks, who know now what a steam engine is, can imagine that "it would have been possible to make one at the time of the pharaohs". But that is anachronistic. In reality, the steam engine was invented ("emerged") much later. And if the pharaohs had invented it, well, it would have emerged sooner, that's all.

What MWI says is that you, the observer, are a quantum system just like the quantum coin. From an isolated observer's viewpoint (see Wigner's Friend), you become entangled with the quantum coin when you measure it — Andrew M

Thought experiments mean very little, especially when poorly thought through.

E.g. what Schrödinger forgot in his famous mind experiment is that the cat is just as valid an observer as his master. And the Schrödinger equation of the Schrödinger cat (or of any other cat) remains unknown so even if we assume that the cat can be described with QM formalism, we have no idea how.

A cat, or a human being for that matter, is not just an observer. She is also a biological system. Nobody has ever solved the Schrödinger equation for biological systems, it's far too complicated. We can barely compute it for simple molecules, like water. If you want to apply QM to life, you got a lot of very very hard "shut up and calculate" to do.

So before you can speak of me getting "entangled" with my coin, you would have to show that QM applies to me, as a whole, and that my holistic Schrödinger equation accepts such a possibility.

We'd have to discover that the universe already had that strongly emergent feature to it, and then take advantage of that. — Pfhorrest

Okay so for you, all possibilities must have emerged at once, at time zero in the history of the universe, like in the mind of God. In my version, things and possibilities emerge more progressively. Emergence is spread over time and not finished or predetermined at time zero.

And the way that it works is something that we made up. — Pfhorrest

Correct, like all philosophy, like all art and all science... Like cars or computers, or zillions of other things.

because it's written in Italian.

On the same theme:


It rains, hear how it raining
Madonna! How it rains
Feel how it's coming down

Did you see that it's raining?
Hear how it comes down
You who said it wasn't raining anymore
That you would never fall in love again
And now look at you, you're all wet
And it rains
Madonna! how as it rains
On your head and the air gets cooler
And it will rain until the earth is full again
And then it will clear up

It rains, hear how it's raining etc.

Hear the drops hitting on the roof
Hear the noise, turning in your bed
It will start again, it's already reborn
You hear it rains, and the wheat ripens
And you will get big and you will get strong
And those leaves that seemed dead to you
They will repopulate your branches once more
It is spring that knocks on your door

And it rains. Madonna how as it rains
Before the sun comes back for the party
Hear, feel how it rains
Feel the drops beating on your head
And it rains, feel how it rains etc.

You who believed that now your plants
Had dried up and would not grow any more
You waited for a while, but feel how it rains now
On your head, feel how it's coming down
Wasn't it you who had resigned yourself by now
And said you would never fall in love again?
The earth sometimes needs to be watered with tears
But then you will see, the rain will return

Oh, it rains, feel how it rains
Madonna how it rains
Feel how it comes down etc.

Water falls from the sky
Powerful rain
Wash my mind with cold water
And take the pain out of my memory

Take me down to the river
Take away all the anxiety
Don't leave me alone I want more water
And take the pain out of my memory

Water falls from the sky
Powerfull rain

Stories are real, as in, people really to tell stories. Things happen in stories that can't happen in real life. If they can't happen in real life, how can they happen in stories? zomg big philosophical mystery? No. — Pfhorrest

But the argument is NOT about what language SAYS but about how it WORKS.

Human language uses elements such as phonemes or letters to forge words. The meaning of words is not contained in their elements (letters).

In turn, language uses these words as elements of structured sentences, and sentences are elements of paragraphs and book. A word can have many meanings, and the meaning of a word has to be interpreted within its context (sentence or group of), and thus the relationship between elemental word meaning and sentence meaning is a complex one, a two-way relationship. It is NOT additive:

Meaning of word <> meaning of letter 1 + meaning of letter 2 + meaning of letter 3 + ...

Meaning of sentence <> meaning of words 1 + meaning of word 2 + meaning of word 3 + ...

It is in this sense that one can say: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. There is something in the whole that is not present in the parts taken in isolation: the connexions, the interrelations, the synergies.

If language is not additive, if complex structures play a central role in it, why can't the same type of non-additive structures exist elsewhere?

If such non-additive, emergent structures exist in our mind, if they are fundamental to the way we think, doesn't it stand to reason that they can exist outside of our mind? Ontologically, that is.

Even if one contends that structures are views of the mind but do not exist in and by themselves in the outside world, we still think in terms of structures, so where does this seemingly new human ability come from? Did it emerge from nothing? That would contradict your stance that emergence does not emerge...

...The songs without an ending
Where do they go?
Silence
Who can know?

Del cielo cae agua
Lluvia poderosa
Lávame la mente con agua fria
Y saca la pena de mi memoria

Llévame hacia el rio
Sácame toda la ansiedad
No me dejes sola quiero más agua
Y saca la pena de mi memoria

Del cielo cae agua
Lluvia poderosa

Personally, I don't buy the distinction between weak and strong emergence. I see the latter as a sum of many small (weak) emergence events. It's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. I use the term "strong emergence" to be better understood by @Pfhorrest only.

That's like saying "but if magic can happen in stories, it can happen outside of them too". — Pfhorrest

No. It's like saying: if consciousness happens in humans, it must have a precursor in the animal kingdom. It cannot stem from nothing.

People can choose to assign meaning to a word that is not a composite of the meanings of the letters, as we obviously do, but that doesn't mean that there's any actual strong emergence in the real world, — Pfhorrest

But language is real. If strong emergence is a fundamental characteristic of all human language, where does it come from? How did strong emergence emerge?

Thanks :-)

I remember we had plans for the Earth
For people as well as nature
Break down the barriers, the walls
Old parapets from the time of Arthur

Behold
Imagine our hope
We surendered our hearts
To the power of flowers
Jasmine, lilac...
Those were our divisions, our soldiers
To change all that
To change the world
To change things
With bouquets of roses
To change women
To change men
With geraniums

I remember we had songs, lyrics
Like petals and corollas
That the dreamy little girl would listen to
Like crazy on the record player

O the frangance...
Imagine the scent
Eden, the garden
Was for tomorrow
But tomorrow is just the same
The same desire watching
There deep in our hearts
To change everything in a sweet way
To change souls
To change hearts
With bouquets of flowers
War to the wind
And love ahead
Thanks to wildflowers

Ah, on earth there is so much to do
For children, people, elephants
Ah, so much to do
So to strengthen you heart
I send you flowers
You will see
We shall again wear scarves, shirts
And bright colors
And even though love is gone
It is only a postponement

By way of colors
Chords, scents
To change the old world
To make a garden
You will see
The power of flowers
There's this pop idea in my song:
To change souls
To change hearts
With bouquets of flowers
War to the wind
And love ahead
Thanks to wildflowers !


Changer les âmes
Changer les cœurs
Avec des bouquets de fleurs
La guerre au vent
L'amour devant
Grâce à des fleurs des champs

But if strong emergence happens in language, it can happen outside of it too. Otherwise, when did strong emergence emerge? :-)

Hard to come after Patti.

Where's the love song
To set us free?
Too many people down
Everything turning
The wrong way around

And I don't know
What love will be
But if we start dreaming now
Lord knows we'll never
Leave the clouds

And you've been so busy lately
That you haven't found the time
To open up your mind
And watch the world spinning
Gently out of time

Feel the sunshine
On your face
It's in a computer now
Gone to the future
Way out in space

And you've been so busy lately, etc...

Tell me I'm not dreaming but are we out of time?
(We're) out of time

when they are put together like that the properties of the house show up automatically. — Pfhorrest

Show up = emerge.

Note that one can make several different houses with the same material, so the structure of the house is additional to the material. It is not 'contained' in the material.

Your language examples are a bit beside the point, because we make up the rules of language and so can make up strong emergence in them if we want. — Pfhorrest

Okay, so strong emergence happens, I suppose...

It's interesting to compare our colour categories with those of other cultures. You might like this but I read recently:

It may help us to realize the arbitrary character of
our own classifications if we study the very different
classifications of the same material which other
peoples have practised in the past or indeed still
practise in the present; for example, the way in
which the ancient Greeks and Romans classified
colours not as we classify them, by the qualitative
differences they show according to the places they
occupy in the spectrum, but by reference to some-
thing quite different from this, something connected
with dazzlingness or glintingness or gleamingness or
their opposites, so that a Greek will find it as natural
to call the sea ‘wine-looking’ as we to call it blue, and
a Roman will find it as natural to call a swan ‘scarlet’ —or the word we conventionally translate scarlet
— as we to call it white. It has been suggested that this
is because the Greeks and Romans were colour-blind.
But no sort of colour-blindness known to physiology
would account for the facts. In both languages there
are the rudiments of what we should call a true colour-
nomenclature ; and in both languages it happens
that there are words for red and green, the colours
that colour-blind persons cannot distinguish. — Colingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics

Thought you'd like it. :smile:

Khaki is another example of a composite color that does not feature in the light spectrum, something the OP seems to call an imaginary colour if I understand well.

It's a colour name that English borrowed from Persian, in which it means: the colour of dirt (khak where kh is pronounced like the Spanish jota), of top soil. The original colour is any shade of light brown rather than dark green-brown, which is the tint for which we use the word khaki.

In Iran and Afghanistan, where Persian is spoken, there aren't many trees and greenery, often, so khaki is the dominant colour in the environment, the colour of the earth around you, and it deserves a name.

Blue in Persian is "abi", the colour of water (ab or aw).

It's a question of whether the new behavior is an aggregate of the behavior of the constituents (weak emergence) or not (strong emergence). — Pfhorrest

It all boils down to what kind of aggregation one is talking about then.

Aggregation: the formation of a number of things into a cluster.
"a single dose of aspirin irreversibly inhibits the normal aggregation of platelets"

This word therefore calls to mind a naturally collected, loosely structured mass of elements.

Would one call a house "an aggregate of bricks"? The bricks do not merely aggregate into a house like platelets aggregate into a clot. A house has a very definitive structure, which may be made of certain types of bricks or other material but the material does not naturally aggregate into a house.

Likewise, a word is composed of certain sound types (phonemes). When written, the word is composed of certain letters, arranged in a specific way, otherwise it's another word. It is a structure, not a mere clot of letters.

Likewise, a sentence is composed of words, but it is not a passive aggregate of words. A sentence binds its elements into a precise structure to mean something specific.

The structure is not comprised in the elements, and it brings something new. This structure is what you hide to yourself when you use the word "aggregate". It's what you cannot account for in your system. You have no sense of structure.

That distinction between strong and weak emergence is unclear to me and I suspect it is spurious. Either some new property or behavior emerges when elements are arranged a certain way, which would not happen to the elements taken in isolation or arranged another way, or it does not emerge.

That is how a nazi would read it, no doubt.

the temperature of the ensemble just is an aggregate of the kinetic energies of the individual particles. — Pfhorrest

Un fact it is more complicated than that, but I see what you mean.

The concept of emergence does not imply that magic things happen between elements when they arranged a certain way. This is a strawman. These concepts simply mean that certain things happen when elements are arranged a certain way, which would not happen to the elements taken in isolation. So for instance a sentence has meaning, in a way that the letters composing it lack. The meaning of the phrase Cogito ergo sum is not the meaning of C + the meaning of O + the meaning of G, etc. It is not even the meaning of "cogito" + the meaning of "ergo" + the meaning of "sum", although that'd be a bit closer to it.

Total energy=1/2E+1/2E=E — Andrew M

So at every branching, the total energy of the universe is divided by 2? And likewise with its mass, I suppose. Since there is a gigamongous number of branching per nanosecond, it follows that if the MWI was true, our universe would become empty of all matter and energy quite rapidly, like in a few seconds.

such as beam splitters, mirrors and sample liquid on the paths). — Andrew M

Ok, so a photon still behaves as a wave when it is reflected by a mirror. Fair enough. That doesn't make for an infinite number of universes, though.

That is not saying they should leave Germany.

I suggest you go back to hate sites and leave philosophy alone.

It has no meaning at their level.

The "Address to the German Nation" by Fitche was more self-consistent and although he too called for Jews to leave Germany, — Gregory

Where did Fitche call for Jews to leave Germany?

those atoms could already do — Pfhorrest

I repeat: atoms cannot reproduce.

1. A philosophical book is just an arrangement of words. If there is nothing new in philosophical books, why write them? Why read them?
— Olivier5

For the same reason that we collect a variety of goods and organize them on shelves in the same building called a "store": — Pfhorrest

You are talking of dictionaries. I am talking of philosophy books.

The possibility [of a steam engine] was always there, — Pfhorrest

The possibility of a steam engine is something very different from a real steam engine, though.

human being is an absolutely insanely complicated thing, but when you analyze one sufficiently it turns out to be an aggregate of a (whole frickin') bunch of simple molecular reactions. — Pfhorrest

The point is that this thing can reproduce, while an atom cannot. It can decide to fight or flee. It can sleep. It can eat and drink. It can observe, and it can think.

These behaviors emerged through life. They have no meaning outside if it.

nothing wholly new emerges out of nothing like magic when things are just arranged in the right way. — Pfhorrest

I would dispute that with three counter examples.

1. A philosophical book is just an arrangement of words. If there is nothing new in philosophical books, why write them? Why read them?

2. A steam engine is just an arrangement of steel, water and fire. And yet when it was invented, it was pretty revolutionary. And if there's nothing new in a steam engine, how come the pharaohs of antiquity didn't think of building a Memphis-Thebes railroad?

3. A living organism is just (supposedly) an arrangement of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen etc. And yet a living organism can reproduce, which an atom cannot do. To be precise, to reproduce an atom would mean very little, because what is reproduced in life is the (complex, biological) structure of the organism, the shapes the molecules make with atoms, not the atoms themselves. So the concept of reproduction has a clear meaning in biology but not in physics.

the photon still interacts with the apparatus at the slits — Andrew M

Not the photons passing the slits.

That is childish. An interaction always exists: The Van der Waals forces from the laboratory, the natural radioactivity and the gravity of the earth. — SolarWind

Van der Waals forces are inter molecular. Gravity does not affect light.

I am referring to this brilliant book by Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. The idea is that one can interpret dreams through a specific procedure based on word association. I have tried the method many times, on myself and others, generally with success.

In this view of dreams, they are messages or concerns from our subconscious self. But for some reason, these messages are represented, acted out in scenes with characters.

I believe this comes close to a private language. But it's not one that uses standard words and grammar, it's more like some constantly invented, improvised theatrical art.

Oooops.