Emergence, if it is to help us here, has to be akin to "seeing as", as Wittgenstein set out. So once again I find myself thinking of the duck-rabbit. Here it is enjoying the sun.

The duck emerges from the rabbit? — Banno

At any give time, either the duck emerges as a perception, or the rabbit emerges as a perception.

It is a function of how your brain is processing the data from your eyes from moment to moment.

Wouldn't that be a big step forward? — Ludwig V

I'm not clear on what you are asking.

I see weak emergentism as most reasonable, and in the context of weak emergence the emergence is only epistemic. So on this way of looking at things there is nothing for emergence to do, except provide cognitively limited being like ourselves with conceptual frameworks that are manageable.

Perhaps this should have been spelled out more clearly earlier in the thread. In any case, I don't know if Christoffer shares this view.

I think so too. I think the plausibility of my house's plumbing being conscious is about the same as the possibility that I'm a zombie: nonexistent. Yet, when you make Kastrup's point to materialists, they shrug and say, "Well, the brain is conscious, so I guess a bunch of pipes, valves and pumps could be conscious too". They don't want to entertain the possibility that there is no physical brain, that idealism might be the case. They're so opposed to idealism, they will seriously consider they might be zombies or "there is something it's like to be a sewer system". — RogueAI

This is just an argument from incredulity and a wheat field's worth of straw manning.

It's unfortunate that so many who consider themselves to be critics of physicalism have nothing much more than cheerleading for their tribe.

He hopes you will do that to further fuck with you. He has accepted that it is just a game for him: — Paine

:up:

Depending on how essential emergence is in nature, if it is an integral part of everything, then finding a holistically governing equation would be like finding the equation to end all equations. — Christoffer

It's not the holisitically governing equation some may dream of, but we can certainly make a psychologically called shot based on scientific understanding, on occasion.

↪wonderer1 Thinking about what? You haven’t said anything. — Banno

No, not if you can look at things from a more holistic perspective, and recognize the interactions that occur within the world. I could provide a link if you can't think of recent examples you have seen on TPF or in real life. — wonderer1

I said I could provide a link if you can't think of recent examples. Do you need me to point out an example of the sort of interaction I was referring to?

Doesn't sound like you are interested in thinking about it.

Never really been that into math.

Do you have an understanding of the sort of interactions I was referring to?

Isn't emergence no more than Emperor Reduction in his new clothes? — Banno

No, not if you can look at things from a more holistic perspective, and recognize the interactions that occur within the world. I could provide a link if you can't think of recent examples you have seen on TPF or in real life.

You see, everything a computer does can, in principle, be done with pipes, pressure valves and water. The pipes play the role of electrical conduits, or traces; the pressure valves play the role of switches, or transistors; and the water plays the role of electricity. Ohm’s Law—the fundamental rule for determining the behavior of electric circuits—maps one-on-one to water pressure and flow relations. — RogueAI

He demonstrates scientific ignorance with the last sentence there, showing his scientific understanding to be highly questionable. At least that is what he shows me.

I'm a ways back on your dominoes video and am wondering if it could be misleading on how computation is done — Mark Nyquist

Well, if I posted the right video, it discusses how logic gates are implemented in domino structures. So the domino structure is crudely isomorphic to a subsection of a small part of a microprocessor. But what do you expect from dominos? :smile:

No, it is not much like what goes on in the neural nets in our brains, other than that the domino system and neural networks both exhibit the three key elements I mentioned earlier. (nodes, channels, amplification)

The computational capability of our brains is qualitatively different, in that it is massively parallel distributed processing with dazzlingly complex processes going on.

The problem is not in finding examples of phenomena that might exhibit emergence. There are plenty of those. It's in framing what emergence is in a way that meshes with the overall ontology (which would generally be physicalism since the overwhelming amount of work on emergence is in that context).

The blocks example is about our intuition — a metaphor. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seemed to me to be reinforcing a simplistic intuitive view, since blocks aren't something we typically think of as interacting with each other in any very interesting way.

However, substitute dominos for blocks, and see the video I posted earlier, and you can observe the property emerging from the dominos being structurally arranged in a certain way.

Yes, I understand that, but what is is about brains that makes them conscious? There must be something about brains that makes them necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. What makes brains so special? — RogueAI

Three things I think necessary for any information processing:

1 Nodes that perform some mathematical/logical function on inputs and produce an output.
2 Channelled transmission of outputs to the inputs of other nodes.
3 Amplification of signals.

Here is an example, see if you can recognize those three elements:



Then consider the neural networks in brains and the relative lack of neural networks in hearts.

Night all. It's been fun. :grin:

Here's the problem, because that looks like simple causation to me. — Banno

If it wasn't cases of complex causation that we are discussing, we wouldn't bother discussing supervenience and emergence. So I don't see the relevance of the word "simple" in your statement.

So if we drop the "simple", you are saying the problem is that it looks like causation?

I'm not seeing how the way it looks to you is supposed to be a problem for physicalism.

It's in framing what emergence is in a way that meshes with the overall ontology (which would generally be physicalism since the overwhelming amount of work on emergence is in that context). — Count Timothy von Icarus

How many words do you think it should take, to explain "what emergence is" for all cases of emergent properties? Are you sure this should be considered a serious question?

I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree with it. The point is, however, that we speak the same language and can convey ideas through text. That is what I say is not meaningfully reducible to the physical. — Wayfarer

Bringing in reducibility is shifting the goal posts, and I understand that you don't agree with it, but can you give me a reason to think that your disagreement is not simply a matter of biased intuitions on your part?

"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" Intuitive answer is you simply don't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Combine enough blocks and you get a black hole, which wasn't in the blocks to start with.

Note this thread Is 'Information' Physical where this idea was dragged over the coals discussed at length some time ago. — Wayfarer

Argument from authority. So what?

Of course. IN each transition, the physical constituents of the information change and also the underlying media. It's translated between electrical pulses, pixels on the screen, then you might even write it down. But the substance of the information stays the same. So how could that be physical? — Wayfarer

You are assuming the mental content in my mind as I read your post is identical to what? Do you think it was identical to the way you were mentally modelling me interpreting it when you wrote it?

I think what happened is you wrote based on your intuiton as to how I would interpret it. I read the pixel based form of the data and my intuitions generated the interpreted content that occurred for me. It is clearly naive however to assume identical content for both of us associated with the digital data. If such verbatim content transfer occurred, I wouldn't be so frustrated about people here not understanding emergence and supervenience. :rage: :razz:

I don’t believe the substance of this exchange can be explained in physical terms. — Wayfarer

Even if you really really really believe it, it doesn't falsify physicalism.

If I say something that affects you it might increase your blood pressure. Yet nothing physical would have passed between us, unlike if I had administered a medicine. That’s an example. — Wayfarer

I'm awfully confident that you physically used a computer input device to compose your post so that it was physically sent over the intenet to the TPF server. Then when I reopened the thread my Kindle was able to receive the data representing your post, as a result of that data having been physically transmitted from the TPF server to my Kindle.

You being unaware of the sequence of physical events in the causal chain, does not constitute evidence that nothing physical passed between us.

Then there's also the discovery of neuroplasticity. as highlighted in Norman Doidge's book "The Brain That Changes Itself," demonstrates the remarkable ability of the brain to change in response to various kinds of training and stimuli. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's capacity to reorganize its structure, functions, and connections in response to experiences, learning, and environmental factors. — Wayfarer

Neuroplasticity is not problematic for physicalism.

However,there is also such a thing as top-down causation which mitigates against purely physicalist explanations of consciousness. This concept becomes evident in phenomena like the placebo effect and other instances of psychosomatic medicine. — Wayfarer

There certainly is the term "top-down causation". However simply assuming top-down causation occurs is begging the question against physicalism. Now if you can provide some empirical evidence demonstrating that top down causation occurs then you could falsify physicalism. However simply asserting that top-down causation occurs isn't good enough.

Do you have incontrovertible empirical evidence of top-down causation?

3.5

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what is the best way to explain emergence and supervenience to philosopher

ChatGPT
To explain emergence and supervenience to a philosopher, you can describe emergence as the phenomenon where complex systems exhibit properties or behaviors that cannot be straightforwardly deduced from the properties of their individual components. Supervenience, on the other hand, is the idea that higher-level properties are dependent on, or supervene upon, lower-level properties.

For example, consider the mind-brain relationship. Emergence suggests that mental phenomena, like consciousness, arise from the complexity of neural networks in the brain, but you can't predict consciousness just by examining individual neurons. Supervenience, in this context, emphasizes that mental states depend on the underlying neural states.

In essence, emergence highlights the unpredictability of higher-level phenomena, while supervenience emphasizes the dependency of these phenomena on their underlying components.

But can anyone set out clearly what emergence is? — Banno

Maybe Christoffer can articulate it in a way that I can't see how to at the moment, but I can point to examples. For instance, suppose I have designed a voltmeter. When an instance of such a voltmeter is powered, it has the emergent property of displaying a number corresponding to the voltage applied to the input terminals. That emergent property supervenes on the particular properties of components within that specific instance of the voltmeter design.

Another instance of the same voltmeter design might have a different emergent property due to having different specific components. For example, voltmeter A may be more accurate than voltmeter B. Because the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B supervenes on B's components, changing the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B would require a change in one or more of the specific components of B that the emergent property supervenes on.

It seems to me that the changing of paradigms could, at least in practice, if not sociological theory, be mapped onto falsification. — Janus

:up:

That's not good enough. Do you really think you can convince a bunch of authoritarians with this kind of liberal relativism?? — baker

Not in the short term. But with a longer term perspective, and via ongoing discussion I have had success pointing others to what a better informed perspective looks like.

Are you saying that you lack such experiences yourself?

The US populace badly needs education on the nature of narcissism.
— wonderer1
No, they "need" education on the authority and validity of psychology. — baker

Sure, better education in psychology in general would be good. But the authority? No.

Psychology should be seen as a bunch of what people at times found to be the inferences to the best explanation. However given the broader scientific perspective, it needs to be understood that psychology needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It's just the best we have for now.

Some things that give me, as a physicalist, a spiritual experience:



For me, best when listened to with closed eyes:

I'm familiar with that 'koan'. In reality Zen/Ch'an is highly regimented and disciplined and is generally conducted in an atmosphere of strict routine and observance of rules and hierarchy. Have a read of Harold Stewart's take on Westerner's interactions with Japanese Zen. (Stewart was an Australian poet and orientalist who lived the last half of his life in Kyoto.)

Acolytes are expected to develop indifference to the discomforts of heat and cold on a most frugal vegetarian diet and to abstain from self-indulgence in sleep and sex, intoxicating drinks and addictive drugs. Altogether Zen demands an ability to participate in a communal life as regimented and lacking in privacy as the army. — Wayfarer

This doesn't give me the impression that you really thought about that quote I posted. What does what you posted have to do, with Zen having rudimentary technology for dealing with human intuitions?

Have any thoughts on what that quote itself said?

"Consciousness" is as undefined as a physical object as an "ecosystem". And in similar fashion both systems produce problems for us to define their behavior by just studying its parts. Just like consciousness we have problems explaining the behavior of the whole of an ecosystem by trying to draw lines from its parts. It's like something "clicks into place", a cutoff point in which new behaviors emerge. It's this abstraction that produce a problem for scientists to just explain consciousness by the neurological parts alone. The interactions between all systems and individual neurons increase so quickly in mathematical complexity that we lose our computational capability to verify any meaningful causal links other than trivial ones that formed our knowledge of how different parts in the brain are linked to basic and trivial functions of our consciousness. But the holistic entity that is our consciousness shows functions that we don't understand by these trivial links we experiment with. And they disappear as through a cutoff point when we remove more and more interactions and interplays between functions in the brain, as I defined when writing about the near-death waking up-experiences. — Christoffer

:100: :up: to your whole post...

...and this paragraph especially is brilliantly said.

:100:

The US populace badly needs education on the nature of narcissism. What amazes me is how anyone who had worked in the White House for more than a month, didn't recognize Trump as a dangerous narcissist.

Yet, in favor of the point I intended to initially make regarding some form of idealism, we nevertheless require that physicality in total be intelligible via laws of thought in order to infer that laws of thought in any way develop from physicality. — javra

What sort of thing is this requirement, that physicality in total be intelligible via laws of thought?

An understanding of biological evolution gives reason to recognize that we wouldn't be here without some regularities to events in the universe. So from such a perspective it is fairly unsurprising that a combination of biological and cultural evolution resulted in truth conveying human language use having regularities which have a correspondence with regularities to events in the universe.

However what mandates a "total" intelligibility?

Furthermore, why think laws of thought are even sufficient to reach a total intelligibility? Suppose instead of laws of thought we consider digital computation? Digital computation is only up to the task, of simulating things to some level of complexity. Is there reason to think application of the laws of thought can do, what digital computation cannot?

Question: In what way can the basic laws of thought either rationally or empirically be evidenced to not in and of themselves be basic laws of nature writ large—such that that which is logically impossible is then deemed to be part and parcel of physical reality? — javra

Suppose we question taking as axiomatic that there are laws of thought?

Might there be no such things as laws of thought, and what we conceptualize as laws of thought are actually incorrigible intuitions about how language tends to relate to reality? Intuitions arising from pattern recognition applied to observation of the way language is used and relates to regularities in reality. Intutions that began developing in our minds at an age too young for us to even remember.

Is there a way we could distinguish between laws of thought being laws of nature, and 'laws of thought' being incorrigible intuitions related to language and regularities in nature, that have developed in us from a young age?

But I don't understand when an atheist say I don't believe in "God". Because it already presupposes there is only one singular definition to which they refer. Their own one. — Benj96

Do you see that you are presupposing that the atheist in this scenario is bringing his own concept of God to the discussion?

Conversations can be ongoing and allow for the concept of God under discussion to be fleshed out. At the same time in an ongoing conversation, I as someone who calls himself an atheist, can clarify nuances of my perspective. If I am in a discussion with a theist, the concept of God that makes sense to talk about is the concept of that particular theist. I'm well aware that the concepts of God that theists hold are all over the place.

I posted a reply in your thread, but I didn't think to tag anyone, so...

A thought problem along similar lines (or curves):