Whole is greater than the sum of its parts
The origin of concept that the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is attributed to Aristotle (Metaphysics , Book 8), however the closest I found there is "...the whole is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the totality is something besides the parts, there is a cause of unity ..."
Did I miss something?
Thank you
Did I miss something?
Thank you
Comments (109)
Personally I believed that it is OK to use "the whole ... its parts" as a figurative speech, but philosophically and especially scientifically it is FUNDOMENTELY wrong.
Which is greater: the live plant parts forming a whole bouquet, or the disassembled bouquet laid out in rows as parts? The parts are the same, the mass is the same, but one is a bouquet, the other one isn't.
Theoretically, we could take your brain apart and lay out the neurons, vessels, white matter, etc. side by side on a very large table. Which would be greater? Your disassembled brain (parts) or your whole brain?
Clearly, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because as part of the whole, nerve cells, flower petals, and so on can do things that they can't do alone. Actually, as parts, nerve cells can't do much of anything.
That is so cool.
So it seems the particular term "greater" is a misquote.
The problem with that is that I disagree that relations and processes aren't parts. Also, no one saying that a whole is the sum of its parts is saying that relations and processes are not included.
At any rate, @ , I would say that that Aristotle quote is effectively saying "the whole is other than the sum of its parts."
Bitter Crank
The "sum" is mathematical notation, sort of tool, that could be useful or deceptive, depending how we use it. For example what is the "sum" of one "dog" and one "steak"? If you could ask this question Aristotle, he may respond with long incomprehensive metaphysical talk, say ... if dog will eat the steak the result is "1", otherwise it is "2" etc. However If you ask this question a middle school child he/she may respond that the question is mathematically wrong.
Regarding example of bouquet and its part, the notion of "sum" or "greater" are mathematically or logically inappropriate.
In the example with bouquet the SOMEONE assembles the individual pieces into bouquet. So if you still want to use the mathematical notation as a figurative speech, you should ask the following question:
Is "various parts of bucket" + "someone who put them together" = "bouquet" ?
What is your answear to this question?
I know that Koffka did not like the translation and firmly corrected students who replaced "other" with "greater". Does it mean that the wisdom of "Whole is greater than the sum of its parts" is (at least partially) originated of incorrect translation?
Clearly, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because as part of the whole, nerve cells, flower petals, and so on can do things that they can't do alone. Actually, as parts, nerve cells can't do much of anything"[/i]
I own you the response for these examples as well.
Regarding the brain and its neurons and other components conceder the following analogy:
Lets have a manufacture and take apart all its building and equipment. Then let force all its employers to lay down on the ground face down.
We understand that under these condition employer cannot do much. Do we need to ask why? Do we need to ask what is "more" or "less", the striving manufacture or its ruins and horrified employers.
The "whole is more than sum of its part" means nothing. It is a just a bumper sticker, a symbol of our ignorance to understand complex phenomena like brain.
This, I would say, is contentious. We could be mereological nihilists and think that the parts of the flower are arranged "flower-wise", but not believe that there is such a thing as a "flower".
So are the arrangements of parts themselves something? Is an arrangement a thing? I would argue that perhaps we ought to see arrangements, or structures, as something parts do. Thus complex static objects don't exist, but what we commonly see as complex static objects are really processes of parts all working together. The act of working together is "something".
As such, there are no strict boundaries between systems. The world is messy.
No, no, no. The phrase "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" is not a bumpersticker slogan. Its an accurate assessment of a world in which many phenomena (including us) are emergent, always exceeding the sum of our parts.
Another example. A rich delicious soup has a fixed list of ingredients. Eat the raw ingredients ground up together and it won't taste very good. Simmered in a pot for several hours, and it's heavenly. Flavors emerge in the soup that weren't there in the "un-stewed" parts.
I don't know... If you don't get it, you don't get it. No soup for you.
Maybe we could be mereological nihilists, but we are not -- I'm not anyway. Speak for yourself.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Right, because the soup of many parts boiled over, covering everything up with hot, emergent, whole, complexity.
Way to ignore that relations and processes are parts and that no one saying "the whole is the sum of its parts" is saying that relations and processes aren't included.
So when we consider the existence of an object, and specifically the coming into being of the object, it is necessary to conclude that the whole is prior in time to the parts. When the parts come into existence, they are necessarily parts of a whole, so the whole is necessarily prior in time to the parts. This is why the whole is something other than (greater than) the sum of the parts, because the whole may exist even without any parts.
Anything which is simple, not compound.
What is an example of an existing object which is anything and simple, not compound?
But there is something wrong even with this account. A bare neutron has a half-life of about eleven and a half minutes; it decays into a proton, an electron and a neutrino. However, once inside the nucleus of an atom, its integration into the higher order intelligibility of the atomic nucleus changes its properties and it remains stable for billions of years. The higher order reality has modified the lower order constituent. Indeed if this did not happen there would be no stable atomic nuclei and no stable chemical substances.
It's an interesting illustration of 'top-down causation'.
Actually in that section of the Metaphysics Aristotle argues that the abstract has an essential unity: 'all things which have no matter are without qualification essentially unities.' Things with matter are however inescapably matter/form.
The other ontological issue can come up even in 'realism'. (To generalise a point Wayfarer is making) Are for instance abstractions in biology 'reducible' to chemistry or physics? Is 'the economy' reducible to some set of naturalistic terms? Or are there - as I would see it - different levels of abstraction appropriate to different forms of analysis, without the supposed component parts being in some way 'superior' or 'more fundamental'?
It seems to me that an elementary particle is also a compound of the particle plus some property that it has. Or is that just a property of language imposed on the thing described?
Quoting mcdoodle
Are there unities without parts? Quoting Wayfarer
Interesting. So, could an elementary particle exist without having any real properties by itself but getting properties from other things?
Actually, this OP has been very useful, because the meaning of the phrase 'the totality is something besides the parts, there is a cause of unity' seems to me a better way of putting it than the usual translation.
In Mongrel's thread on Leibniz I put the analogy of the 'holographic image'. There is a property of holograms, which is that if hologram is broken up, each of the fragments contains the whole image, albeit at a lower resolution than the original. This is one of the paradigmatic examples of the principle of holism. It seems basic in biology also - stem cells, for example, can take on the form of any of the specialised cells in the various organs, depending on the context in which they're put. 'Gene expression' is also regulated by the environment, which is arguably another form of 'top-down' causality. Again, individual cells seem to function according to their context; that seems near to the meaning of Aristotle's phrase also.
Agree
I think that to understand the elementary particle we have to relate it to the field. But now the particle appears to be a property of the field. So it may not be truly elementary, as it is the property of something else. But fields are completely conceptual, and no one knows what "field" refers to in reality, it just mathematics which describes the conditions under which elementary particles appear. The elementary particle now appears to be just a part of a larger whole. I think this is what Wayfarer is referring to. But this raises the possibility that "whole" could be something completely different from what we think.
Yep. And a telltale fact from hierarchy theory is how wholes act to simplify their parts. Wholes refine their components so as to make themselves ... even more easy to construct.
Take a human level example of an army. For an army to make itself constructible, it must take large numbers of young men and simplify their natures accordingly. It must turn people with many degrees of freedom (any variety of personal social histories) into simpler and more uniform components.
So wholes are more than just the sum of their parts ... in that wholes shape those parts to serve their higher order purposes. Wholes aren't accidental in nature. They produce their own raw materials by simplifying the messy world to a collection of parts with no choice but to construct the whole in question.
Quoting Wayfarer
Even the Cosmos had to impose simplification on its parts so as to exist. To expand and cool, it needed particles to radiate and absorb. It need a pattern of events that would let a thermal unwinding happen.
That is why you get order out of chaos. Reality needs to form dissipative structure that has the organisation to turn a sloppy directionless mess into an efficient entropic gradient.
Turn a full soda bottle of water upside down and it glugs inefficiently until a vortex forms and the bottle can suddenly drain fast and efficient.
Wholes make their parts by reducing degrees of freedom and creating components with little choice but to eternally re-construct that which is their causal master.
The claim for ontological emergence is my prime target. As you pointed correctly the phrase "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" is an essence and roots of the theory of emergence. It is why to defeat this theory I need to start with its roots.
Quoting Bitter Crank
You are right that taste of delicious soup is better (more) than taste of its ingredients. However you are right for the wrong reason, because you just forgot to include in your "equation" SOMEONE who tastes the soup. By adding this SOMEONE to your "equation" you may find the whole is now could be "more", "equal", or "less" that the "sum" of its parts, depending on the subjective taste of this SOMEONE. For example, I personally don't like Cesar salad (whole), but prefer its components (fresh vegetable) instead.
Your example with taste is a typical rhetorical example of emergence and is usually goes like that:
"Taste of sugar, a system phenomenon, could not be found in the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms that constitute components of sugar molecules". This example, limits the whole to sugar only while the another crucial element of the system is missing; SOMEONE who tastes the sugar and declares its taste vs. the taste of its component. Indeed for this SOMEONE taste of sugar and its purified components causes a very different taste (sensation perceived in the mouth and throat on contact with a substance). However to answer why it is different we don't need to invoke emergence; biochemistry and biology should be enough.
In the majority of examples, upon which the system approach is based, there is an exclusion of the invisible SOMEONE who designs, put together, tastes, or observes. Without this SOMEONE, the system property, like the taste, would not exist at all.
Omitting the creator or user of the system is the far most common mistake in emergentism. For example, a complex computer is built from the simple semiconductor components and it seems that the ‘computational intelligence’ of the computer is a new emerging phenomenon, because it cannot be found in its parts. However, the complexity of the computer is also due to the property (complexity) of human intelligence, which is not seen while we are observing the computer. Therefore, human intelligence is also one of the system’s causal powers and his or her properties determine the complexity of the semiconductor components, the complex wiring of the logic diagram, and sophisticated algorithms. In other words, there are no emerging properties in this example and
the properties of a computer could be reduced to the properties of its elements, including the creators of this computer.
I suppose some emergence may be a result of the difference.
Indeed, the whole, say a car, is an assembly of interacting parts. These parts weren't assembled by themselves, but were put together by human, who also conceive the the property, interactions, forms, and the structure of the car.
However the same parts that wasn't put together by human remains a pile.
Do we need to invoke emergence to understand this?
Indeed if some want to express the relationship between parts and whole in mathematical terms the processes need to be included in the "equation".
At the same time it is important to remember that such "mathematical" description is symbolic Therefore arguing about its meaning is the same as arguing about "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."
To have a meaningful discussion about whole and parts it need to be in terms of properties. The real question is: "Can the properties of whole be explained in terms of parts' properties (that includes interactions enable by these properties)"?
I have no problem with using "the whole is other than the sum of the parts" in your example, because it belong to a figurative speech and subjective experience.
My problem only if the same "formula" and the same mistakes are applied to a scientific understanding of relationship between whole and parts.
Quoting mcdoodle
The reducibility of biology to chemistry and chemistry to physic is exactly what I going to discuss next. This discussion would also affect the reduction of social and economic phenomena.
Let me reflect on this example for a moment. The army's capacity to "turn people" into "uniform components" is dependent on the willingness of the individual to be turned this way. So it is highly debatable as to whether this "turning" is a function of the army as the whole, or a function of the individual, as a part. In other words, I would argue that this whole in your example, is really a product of the willingness of the individuals to turn toward a common goal.
Quoting apokrisis
Following your example then, if it is true that wholes actually "shape those parts to serve higher order purposes" they must do this through the intention of the part. The part must willingly serve the higher order purpose. So if it is actually the whole which shapes the parts to serve the purpose of the whole, as per your example, then the whole must be shaping the intention of the part.
It may help if the individuals don't actively resist. But the army is what has the idea of what it needs the individuals to be. Point one. And the reduction in behavioural scope shows how components are created by a selective force subtracting degrees of freedom. Point two.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But the intention comes from the whole and it's common goal, as you just agreed. So the most you can argue for is a lack of effective resistance - some other goal in play. Materials only need to be pliable.
I don't buy that. Individual human beings have ideas. I don't see the basis for your assumption that the army has an idea. There may be seasoned veterans, commanders, who hold the idea of subordination, and impress these ideas upon the rank and file, but I think it is a mistake to say that "the army" has the idea.
Quoting apokrisis
The point though, is that intention is the property of the individuals, it does not come "from the whole", it comes from the individual parts. And in your example of the army, the entire existence of the whole, the army, is dependent on the intentions of the individuals. The army only exists through the intentions of the individuals. The whole only exists because the parts will it into existence. So if you want to argue that this act of the parts willing into existence the whole, is really an act of the whole exercising constraint over the individuals, you need to describe how the whole may influence the will of the individual. And, since the individuals must act willingly to bring the army into existence, the whole (being the army) must act on the wills of the individuals before that whole even comes into existence. At this time, the whole (the army) exists only as an idea within the minds of the individuals, and yet it still must have the capacity to act on the wills of the individuals in order that the individuals move to bring the actual army into existence.
You are confusing what was a simple point.
Under hierarchy theory, the whole is more than the sum of its parts because it has the power to make the parts less than what they were. The whole constrains the parts with a common purpose and this limits the freedoms they may have "enjoyed".
If you believe this is not how armies are, then you must have no clue about military life. Why do you think boot camps were invented? To aid recruits in discovering their truest selves? ;)
You have not demonstrated how the whole has the power to do anything. As I pointed out, it is the parts which are active, and being active they are the ones with the power. You have not demonstrated how "the army" has the power to do anything, other than by the power of the individuals. Do you think it is "the army", rather than the individual commanders who have the power over the recruits?
You're the one with a problem of infinite regress. You want to start with the assumption of a whole which imposes restrictions on the parts, but your whole is not a valid whole, as I've demonstrated. So now you face infinite regress. The army is just a part of a particular society, which is a part of humanity in general, which is a part of life on earth, which is a part of the universe, which is a part of a multiverse. Any whole you assume is actually just a part of something larger, until you lose yourself into the vagueness of infinity. And infinity cannot be a whole.
I start with the part, the individual human being, and see that there is a desire within that human being, intent, to be a part of a whole. The physical whole only comes into existence upon fulfilment of the intent of the part. But the non-physical whole, in the form of the design, necessarily pre-exists any physical whole. And, it must pre-exist all the parts as well, in order that when the parts come into existence, that non-physical whole has imparted to them, the intent, which is the necessary condition for producing the physical whole.
Something similar shows up in all kinds of places.
Say, hydrogen and oxygen atoms (the parts) can combine to water molecules (the whole).
In turn, atomic hydrogen and oxygen has protons and electrons and neutrons, ...
Quoting miosim
Depends on what counts as emergence I guess.
The car (the whole) can be used for transportation, but the pile (the parts) can't.
Are the water phases/states emergent? The nifty-looking, symmetrical, hexagonal ice-crystals?
The parts on their own can't be water steam/gas, liquid or ice/solid (which also depending on pressure and temperature).
Quoting Terrapin Station
Interesting.
Do you think the structure that make a car out of the parts, is also itself an independent part thereof (approaching Platonism it seems)?
Surely structure is contingent on parts to exist, whereas parts are not particularly dependent on other aspects of the car?
I suppose not just any structure will make a car out of the parts, but parts may be interchangeable.
The example of water is often used to justify the emergence phenomenon. The mistake in this example is that the water (the way we experience it) is not a single molecule, but gazillions of them interacting among themselves, and with the wall of vessel containing it, and with other external factors. Therefore comparing the water with an abstract physical model of atoms in terms what is "more" or "less" is a nonsense self-deceiving exercise. Instead we need to grow up and start talking about reducibility of the properties of water to the properties of its atoms that in most cases is fully reducible and therefore no need to talk about emergence.
At the same time there the complex phenomena like bifurcations etc., which have not satisfactory reduction explanation, but they deserves a separate consideration. For now I will state only that the gap in our understanding of these complex phenomena is not a proof for the ontological emergence.
Quoting jorndoe
The car used for transportation is a concept conceived by human who design and put it together. The pile of car's parts, say in the junk yard, cannot be used for transportation, because they are discarded by human for a different reason/purpose. Therefore talking about car as a whole without including human in this "figurative equitation" is "mathematically" illiterate.
Quoting jorndoe
Each part on their own can't, but the parts interacting among themselves and with other surrounded parts (environment conditions that are non-disclosed parts in your examples of whole) - can.
There some aspects of the complex system phenomena (like bifurcation, etc.) that are not fully understood. I prefer don't discuss them now because they deserve a separate consideration. However the fact that they are not understood, is not a proof or even a good evidence of ontological emergence; at best they are symptoms only
So say we have you, and then standing next to you, a small vat of chemicals - a vat of carbon, water, nitrogen, phosphorous, etc - that is absolutely identical in atomic composition.
What is missing that is present In one but not the other?
'I' is the result of very specific complex interactions between self-organized chemical components forming the living system, while the same chemical components without interaction among each other are just a quantity of things.
This is the same as a car and its parts. The only difference is that the car is put together by human, while 'I' am the self organized system.
So what is "self-organisation"?
In systems theory, it is the limitations that wholes can impose to turn chaos into order, noise into signal. And that is why there is a metaphysical-strength contrast with the parts.
The parts can only construct a state of organisation. The whole has the opposite kind of causality in that it can constrain the state of organisation.
And that is why the whole is greater that the sum of its parts. It represents the other kind of causality involved in creating the kind of organisation we call systematic or purposeful.
Per wiki, self-organization is a process where order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system.
Quoting apokrisis
As I understand, the definition you used is based on the notion of ontological emergence. I am strongly oppose the ontological emergence and believe that any theory based on emergence is wrong. Therefore I don't see much sense to accept or even discuss the definitions provided by such theory.
Yep. You gotta stick to what you believe and avoid all evidence to the contrary in this life.
Indeed my last post sounds like my conviction is based on my believe regardless of evidence. My fault.
Instead I am open to discus any evidences that support ontological emergence.
In the past I was very enthusiastic about, new at the time, system sciences (especially complexity science) that had promised the new paradigm - the shift from the narrow-minded mechanistic way of thinking to the holistic views on reality. First, it felt like a fresh air leading to the new horizons for explanation of life phenomenon.
However the more I learned the more my hopes have been replacing with growing suspicion that the horizons open by complexity science led to desert filled with mirages.
So what are you evidences in favor of emergence?
But what is this kind of causality dependent on? Presumably the arrangements of parts. All the parts working together create the illusion of emergence, the illusion that there is "something more" to the whole other than the sum of its parts.
Ascribing causal power to a whole seems to me to simply be a heuristic, and also oddly similar to the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation. According to the doctrine, the bread and wine is literally transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ, yet none of the features actually change (something I believe Peirce called "bullshit" essentially). Similarly, would the addition of "wholes" really change anything about how things work? What difference does it make if there actually is a whole that is greater than its parts?
If you want to call a set of parts working together a "system", I'm fine with that. But to add on to this and say that this "system" is something greater than its parts, I have issues with, because it's not clear to me how this "system" could possibly be "more" than its parts in any meaningful sense. All a system is, is a network of causal powers supplementing and contradicting each other to lead to an eventual outcome. Change the parts and the system changes. Indeed it would seem to be the case that the only way a system can change to begin with is if some of its parts change.
I see that you've learned to see through those mirages, as the hollowness of structures without a cause.
I was talking about self-organisation and not merely emergence. And I gave evidence. I said parts "emerge" via holistic constraint in hierarchically organised systems.
So it is not just emergence in the usual sense of new global properties popping out of collective behaviour. Instead it is the argument that global forms and purposes act downwards to limit material possibility in fruitful fashion. The whole simplifies messy reality to shape the very parts that compose it.
Yep. So that is why a functioning whole needs the power of constraint over its parts. It must limit the freedom or indeterminism of its components to ensure they remain "the right kind of stuff".
We are familiar with this principle in biology and sociology.
Societies fall apart if they don't produce the right kind of people. Bodies fall apart if they don't regulate their cells.
You've got a problem if your skin cells decide to start expressing their genetic potential to be bone, or liver, or heart tissue.
But, again, how does it do this? Is this "power" somehow something "else" other than simply interactions between the parts of the whole? A network of causal powers can function together but I hesitate to actually call this limitation function a thing itself.
Wholes carry the memory or information. Life and mind have coding machinery - words, neurons and genes, principally - that are "physical stuff", and yet not physical in the ordinary way. Information - states of constraint - can be represented symbolically. That is, in a way that is not subject to the usual dictates of entropification but instead which can swim in the opposite direction, upstream or negentropically.
So it is simple to see "the how" of biological, neurological and cultural complexity. There is more going on than just material dynamics. There is also the very different thing of symbolic regulation.
The tricky new thing is pan-semiosis - extending this metaphysics to existence in general. But it is hardly a secret that physics is undergoing its information theoretic revolution.
I mean what do you think an event horizon actually is? Is it matter? Is it information? Or is it really about a habitual relation between these two disjunct aspects of reality?
Apparently it's not as simple as you think, as there are still people who don't quite understand what you're talking about. Can you give an example as to why semiosis is necessary, and why material composition is not adequate? The only way information can be represented are by parts, no?
Quoting apokrisis
Can you give a specific example(s) of where this is happening instead of just asserting that it's public knowledge?
Quoting apokrisis
I have no idea, but "information" is meaningless without any form of predication.
http://www.academia.edu/863859/How_does_a_molecule_become_a_message
So what shapes a switch? Is binary logic "real" in your book? (I say yes - as real as any physical circuitry it engenders.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, not God. That would be stupid.
And here I thought you were sympathetic to teleology ... ;)
But the question is where does the binary logic derive from. In the article the author is look for origins of life. He implies that it is somewhat mistaken to look simply at the emergence of switching systems, because switches are useless unless they come to exist in an environment of a language. So he proposes what he calls a primeval ecosystem. The issue is, where does this primeval ecosystem come from, within which the switching systems can emerge,
Individually they can't do much.
However...with good co-ordination the 5 together can play basket ball i.e. the whole IS [I]greater[/I] than its parts.
without co-ordination the 5 would make a poorly performing team i.e. the whole is [I]less[/I] than its parts
First, I just want to remind that co-ordination is not an external factor, but the property of each individual player, so the quality of the team, as a whole, is fully reducible to the properties of individual players.
Second, by continue using the 'whole is more/less/equal to sum of its parts' as characterization of whole/parts relationship we are substituting the analysis of this relationship with misconstrued 'pop-cultural formula' that is using mathematical like notations 'sum/more/less/equal', etc. This gives an impression that this 'formula' is based on the solid ground of the most trusted science - mathematics .
In mathematics, the sum - is about the total amount of things, and not about their relationship. Therefore comparing the total amount of things with the whole , which is about relationships, is a nonsense.
Therefore we should better stop using this 'formula' as a scientific argument if we want ever understand the part/whole relationship, including complex system.
This iconic 'formula' is often used to justify Emergence. There is an understandable temptation to invoke emergence for the phenomena that seem impossible to explain in terms of their underlying mechanisms. However, after almost a century of development, emergentism has not demonstrated that it is a viable alternative to reductionism either. It is actually made things even worse by contaminating a scientific discussion with incomprehensive scientifically sound jargon.
You are explaining one puzzle (emergence) using another puzzle (self-organization)
The spontaneous self organization, including hierarchically organized systems, is a puzzle that is waiting for an explanation. We often think about self-organization in terms of 'spontaneous', free-energy reduction driven processes. It is important to keep in mind that the term ‘spontaneous’ doesn’t explain the complex molecular behavior and instead just conceals a gap between our understanding of physical forces acting in a linear manner, and the complex mechanism of molecular self-assembly. It is why a 'spontaneous' self-assembly is often described in the metaphysical terms of a so called goal directed processes.
Quoting apokrisis
I know what you mean. However, I think that this downward causation is still reducible to the properties of parts. I may try to demonstrate this on any example you will choose.
So maybe we should say, "I believe that this arrangement of parts conveys more information than some other arrangement."
Or perhaps, "The meaning assigned by an observer to this particular arrangement of parts may be greater than the meaning assigned to the parts themselves."
Or even, "This particular arrangement of parts has different properties (which I value more) than some other arrangement of the parts."
The value assigned to a particular arrangement (i.e., what the term greater seems to imply) depends on the interpretation of the observer. To one who speaks only English, a particular arrangement of brush strokes may appear random. But to a speaker of Chinese, those brush strokes may signify a word. Thus to the Chinese speaker, the whole (the arrangement of the brush strokes) may be greater (carry more information) than the parts (the brush strokes themselves). But to the English speaker ...?
Saying "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts" has poetic value, but is not technically correct.
Great. Start with consciousness.
But your own argument just showed that the whole has meaning, the parts are meaningless. So the whole has something more (unless you can show how meaning arises purely by the summation of brushstrokes such that an English speaker can understand Chinese by that method).
Hate to say it, but Pattee is just talking about the necessity of vague beginnings. Where you have the "mystery" of a dichotomy - in this case, the abiogenetic chicken and egg question of which came first, genetic codes or metabolic processes - then the riddle has to be solved using a logic of vagueness.
So the argument is that the primeval "ecosystem language" (and note Pattee is talking specifically about the code half of the dichotomy here) would have condensed out of vaguer, analog, conditions in the same way that the formal grammar that (used to be) taught every kid in school is a "written down" distillation or idealisation of the more informal habits to be found in spoken language.
So Pattee is simply making the usual argument. Where we find a sharply dichotomised reality, we can then know that it could only have developed out of a vaguer version of itself. And if we reverse a history of symmetry breaking, logic says we arrive back at a state of perfect symmetry - a vagueness, a firstness, an apeiron.
Let me try again : A listing of the parts (the sum of the parts) is a whole no less so than any other arrangement of the parts. And no arrangement carries any more value than any other, accept that the observer chooses to make it so. In other words, we decide to rank the arrangements - to give them value. But such a ranking is not to be found in the arrangements themselves, or we would all share the same rankings.
In reading through the comments, I see that I am repeating a point already made. So I won't belabor the point, but I will leave you with one question. In the aphorism as it is normally given, what exactly is meant by the phrase "the sum of the parts"? Is it a listing of the parts as I've suggested, or something else? I think that the way one interprets that phrase goes a long way toward determining how they view the truth of the aphorism.
Now the aphorism is not entirely without meaning - when properly understood. It actually means, "One arrangement is valued above other arrangements."
It's just not the same thing to list a set of components in a way that leaves out the further fact that is their organisation. Especially when my claim is that the parts rely on such active constraints to even be what they are.
Another familiar illustration of the holistic point is try scooping a swirling eddy out of the river in a bucket. Look in the bucket, and the vortex has gone. Proof it only existed as a local feature in a living context.
So you are arguing from a point of view that the whole of nature is composed of substantial entities. And modern physics shows how every such thing is simply the local feature of a dissipative process - an excititation in a field, as they say.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
No, its not a listing of entities in fact. It is the claim that causality can be reduced to bottom-up construction - a tale of efficient/material causes. So the summing is about the way simple things can construct complex things in purely additive fashion. And then - so this reductionist view goes - you get secondary emergent states with their own properties when there is so much of some stuff that it undergoes a further phase transition. So get enough water molecules at the right temperature and pressure and - voila - liquidity pops out.
But true holism is arguing something much stronger than mere emergentism.
Emergence is already saying the organisation that emerges is more than what can be found in the parts themselves. But my kind of systems holism says wholes - representing mathematical forms and entropic purposes - actually reach down to shape the materiality by which their existence can gain crisp expression.
So even reductionists have their (semi-mystical) notions about emergence (which they try to sooth away by switching to talk about supervenience).
I'm happy to argue the way more radical holism of a systems thinker where there just couldn't even be a cosmos without the limitations that formal and final cause are able to impose on vague material potential.
Aristotle's hylomorphism is essentially correct when understood through the lens of modern symmetry breaking maths. (Ie: the premise behind the latest metaphysical bandwagon of ontic structural realism.)
Quoting Real Gone Cat
So you are basically trying to apply a set theoretic point of view - and set theory is famously deficient in being able to account for the rules by which collections could be considered meaningful.
To value some arrangement over other arrangements is to add some rule that gives the collection meaning. So again the whole is more than the sum of its parts. You have your chosen collection in a bag tied up with a bow - and then the further thing of "its value".
Again essence has escaped your attempts at reduction. Again you have ended up with value (or final cause) made a property of the human observer and not a fact accounted for as part of the observable.
Magicians call this misdirection. The hand is quicker than the eye. Reductionists employ the same trick all the time ... on themselves, without realising it. One minute they are talking about explaining the meaning of a collection, the next, they are just pointing to a collection.
Actually I think he is saying the exact opposite. The idea of vague beginnings is what he is dismissing as the wrong approach. He proposes that we reject the idea of meaningless messages slowly becoming meaningful, in favour of the idea of messages which come into existence within the context of a pre-existing environment of a background language. This is what he calls the "primeval ecosystem". The pre-existing language must consist of specific constraints in order that any messages which come into existence can make sense. "A molecule becomes a message only in the context of a larger system of physical constraints which I have called a "language" in analogy to our normal usage of the concept of message." (p.8) As the "language" provides specific rules or constraints, this cannot be construed as "vague beginnings".
He then proceeds to discuss how "reliability, stability, or persistence" of a function is obtained. This occurs when the conditions required by the context, "the language" are fulfilled. The point he seems to be making is that while the meaning of any particular messages, which manifest as the different switches, appears to us as vague, because there are so many complex systems of switches, the primeval language itself, the basic rules or constraints, must be very simple and concise, and therefore not vague at all. This is exemplified by the speed at which the fundamental messaging occurs. Vagueness is in the messages, not in the language itself, which pre-exists the messages.
Quoting apokrisis
In making this type of analogy you must be sure to maintain a proper temporal order so as not to confuse cause with effect. The child is taught formal rules of grammar, but these come about following the use of messages, these are derived from the messaging systems which have vagueness inherent within, due to the nature of the messaging system. What Pattee is referring to is the rules or constraints of language which exist prior to any messaging coming into existence. So the messaging system comes into existence, and is formed in such a way as to fulfill the requirements of the pre-existing language, but what the child learns is rules which are derived from messaging system. The former is truly prescriptive, while the latter is descriptive.
Not exactly. The physical constraints that might in retrospect be recognised as the "primeval ecosystem" can be "crisply informational" for purely accidental reasons. So in the beginning there is spontaneity and contingency. Later develops the regularity of a habit whereby a system of symbols takes on some necessary interpretation.
So - remembering that we are talking about the development of the coding side of the biosemiotic relation - the syntax might seem physically definite in the primeval condition, but the semantics is still maximally contingent. And being uncertain or indeterminate, that makes it spontaneous or vague.
Although vagueness proper speaks to the primeval conditions of the whole semiotic relation of course - both code and dynamics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Exactly. Hence my point that it is only in retrospective fashion that we see "accidents" in terms of "necessities".
As we have discussed before, finality acts retrocausally from the future. It is the principle that determines in the long run exactly what are the necessary formal regularities of nature - its structural attractors - and what remains, even at the end of time, just "accidents. Contingencies which continue to be ignorable as they are differences that never make a difference.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. You are missing the point again.
What comes first is a vague state of semiotic relations. So chimps grunting in contextually meaningful, yet ungrammatical fashion, is at least some kind of messaging system.
And then the relation develops dichotomistically - each side of the equation strengthening in mutually co-arising fashion.
In human language evolution, we have the development by separation into words and rules. The more that speech becomes syntactically divisible, the more speech also becomes syntactically composable. Developing the syntactic habit of adding suffixes allows the development of a wide variety of semantic categories - like a variety of tenses.
So sure, you do have a division into syntax and semantics - or prescription and description, in your jargon. But the two are still aspects of the one developing dichotomy. And this co-evolutionary logic is why an organic systems perspective (such as Pattee's) never fits your own mechanistic understanding of time and causality.
So the "sum of the parts" consists of the material parts and their organization (arrangement). How then is the whole different from the sum of the parts? It seems that the parts and their organization must exhaust what constitutes the whole, and therefore are equivalent to the whole. Whatever properties the whole exhibits will also be exhibited by the parts and their organization - which is how you have defined the "sum of the parts" - and the aphorism is shown to be false.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree that a particular arrangement (organization) may exhibit different properties from the parts when those parts are not placed into that arrangement. But that has been my point all along. Any collection of the parts that is not organized in the given arrangement as needed to form the whole must have a different arrangement, or not exist at all. And different arrangements can have different properties.
Then we supply the value assessment (i.e., rank the arrangements).
Yeah, I like that perspective. Each part is also a whole, and then it's just a matter of how they interact. Combinations of wholes/parts aren't somehow more than the sum of those combinations of wholes/parts.
I'd just clarify that it's a matter of dynamic organization.
The aphorism arises out of the fact that people overlook relations and processes (or dynamic organization) when they talk about "parts."
Yep. Even a trivial version of the argument says you have to add the further thing of "the organisation". Summing the parts ain't enough.
And I note you just avoid my point that proper holism stresses the way wholes shape their parts to make them the right stuff.
Wholes have the causal power of constraint or limitation. It is what the organisation can subtract by way of local degrees of freedom that needs to be part of your Metaphysical maths.
I think you miss the holist point that emergence proper is about the emergence of new global boundary conditions that don't interact dynamically but act hierarchically.
So the reductionist just imagines a blur of parts in interaction and - somehow - an organisation emerges.
But holism says emergence is about dynamism becoming isolated by becoming stretched across different spatiotemporal scales. So the higher level order effectively "freezes out" from the point of view of the lower level dynamics. It becomes the stability creating ambience or backdrop - the boundary conditions, as I say.
"new global boundary conditions"
"don't interact dynamically but act hierarchically"
"dynamism becoming isolated"
"becoming stretched across different spatiotemporal scales"
"higher level order"
"lower level dynamics"
"the stability creating ambience or backdrop"
-----If only I had the faintest idea what any of that is supposed to be referring to.
Well, assuming it's not just a bunch of bullshit. Which I'm not at all ready to assume.
I'm surprised by your humilty.
I don't see how information can be accidental. The word implies a necessity, the necessity which is required for knowledge. Without some form of necessity there can be no knowledge and no information.
Quoting apokrisis
You continue to represent this in you inverted, mixed up fashion. What you call "the syntax" is the pre-existing "language", and this is the context in which the messages come into existence. It is not the syntax, it is the context and therefore semantic. As the context, this pre-existing 'language" provides the semantics, the meaning, and as the necessary condition for the existence of the messages, it is not contingent. Syntax is produced posteriorly, as what you call "the regularity of a habit". When the messaging proves to be sufficient for fulfilling the needs of the "language" there is reliability, stability, and this produces syntax. Simply stated, the rule follows after we notice what works, while the first messages might come off in a trial and error way.
Quoting apokrisis
Did you read the article by Pattee? He argues that it is necessary to assume that prior to any semiotic relations there exists a "language" itself. The semiotic relations are a function of the parts, the switching, the messaging, but prior to this is the "language" itself, the whole, and this "language" provides the context within which the semiotic relations will emerge. He argues that the language is prior to the symbols. So even if chimps grunting is considered to be a meaningful messaging system, he claims that these meaningful messages can only come into existence within the pre-existing "language". The "language" provides context, which is necessary in order that the grunts may have meaning. What Pattee does, is take this right back to the most primitive form of messaging, molecular switching, and claims that this switching must have come into existence within the context of a pre-existing "language".
You have it back to front. The primitive condition would have to be some kind of self activating network of connections - like an autocatalytic network.
So the point is that it would start with an accidental physical situation - like an ocean floor geothermal vent reducing sulphur in a biochemical series of steps. And then the physics would happen also to represent a simplest form of computational network - one that naturally generates cycling patterns that connect end states back to inputs.
In this pansemiotic fashion, the separate realms of Platonic form and material dynamics would be accidentally connected, the blue touch paper on biological development would be lit, and the rest becomes history.
So a language - in the sense Pattee employs - is about this happy conjunction of symbol and matter. The precondition is that computation is a form always in waiting. And that likewise, materiality could be patterned enough to accept yet further restrictions on its degrees of freedom.
So material dynamics is already organised by nature to run down biochemical gradients. But it then takes the addition of negentropic information - computational mechanism - to keep returning a cycle to its initial conditions, ready to repeat.
And I said the same thing about you. We might have to agree to disagree.
I thought you were trying to say that the organization-of-the-parts was itself a part. So to help me better understand, I must ask : What do you think is meant by the "sum of the parts"? Is it the collection of parts without any organization - perhaps in separate containers? But such a collection is in fact an organization of the parts! (Such a collection is what I termed a listing.) And it will have properties just like any other organization. Thus a particular whole will have different properties from the sum of its parts, but a particular whole is not greater than the sum of its parts - unless we decide to rank the organizations by their properties.
Please let me know what you think constitutes the parts and their sum - it will help me to argue my position clearer.
So your claim is that the existence of the parts precedes the whole, in a manner of vague existence? And from those vague parts comes a whole which constrains the parts?
If the parts are pre-existing the whole, in this unconstrained, vague fashion, where does the whole derive the power to constrain the parts, when the whole doesn't even exist yet? Do you not think that it's logically impossible for something which does not yet exist, to act as a constraint on existing parts, in order to bring itself into existence? The point to understand is the verb "to act". It is contradictory to say that something non-existent may "act" as a constraint, to bring itself into existence. And if the claim is that something can constrain without acting, or having any actual existence, this needs to be justified.
Quoting apokrisis
I expected you will offer an example where emergence shows advantage compare to reductionism. I don't think this is a case. The holistic approach, as I understand, contributed nothing in understanding consciousness, but just flooded discussion with new fancy terminology.
However the reduction approach to conscience also have a problem. The problem is not in the reductionism original formulation as 'The complex things are always reducible to the nature of the sum of underlying constituents and their causes, where the sum is any mathematical or logical procedure that evaluates a resultant of multiple causes', but in its stripped-down interpretation that 'the system behavior could be described in terms of parts' properties studying in isolation'.
This striped down interpretation is profoundly wrong, because it fails to recognize that isolated parts, in absent of interaction, will not exhibit any properties at all. For example, an electron possesses an electrical charge, but we cannot observe this property unless electron interacts with another charged particle. We do not declare that the charge of an electron emerges during interaction. Instead we agree that the electron always posses the charge (whether we observe it or not) and reveals this property only during interactions. While electron interacts with external magnetic field it reveals its spin properties, while accelerating an electron in the force field it reveals its mass, while interacting with atomic nuclear an electron reveals so many other of its properties not observable and not expected while we just stare at electron in isolation. These 'hidden' properties that are revealed only during interactions in the system causes the perception of emergence that is 'a holy grail' and fertile ground of emergentism.
When parts in the system are subjected to the new interactions that may reveal their 'hidden' properties. A system acts as a ‘magnifying glass’ and a ‘litmus test’ that reveal properties of the parts not observable otherwise.
To investigate life and mind phenomena I used this approach in the paper published more than a year ago. This is the badly written paper published in the online journal that you probably would avoid. However this paper has my answer to question about conscience. The paper is accessible using link below
http://www.hrpub.org/download/20151231/UJP3-19405044.pdf
Cool. You have conceded my point in regards to taking a set theoretic approach.
So the guts of my objection would be that nothing can be solved by positing a dualism of substance. In metaphysics, progress is always achieved by discovering the formal complementarity at the heart of every phenomenon. And arguing for two kinds of substance is making a brute claim about there being two types of the same general thing (a substance) that have no particular reason to be locked into a mutually formative interaction.
So positing a microphysics of matter plus mind cannot work. It has no internal logic. There is nothing to show how the existence of one requires the existence of the other. There is no holism or unity that binds these two ontic catergories. This is Panpsychism's essential problem. Matter and mind can't be shown to be the two halves of one whole, the two aspects of the one symmetry breaking.
With pansemiosis on the other hand, we are talking about the symmetry breaking that is matter and sign (or matter and symbol). And now the two categories are related as a symmetry breaking dichotomy. The two-ness is a fact of logical necessity rather than merely a brute and arbitrary claim.
Materiality is all about material degrees of freedom - the entropy to be dissipated. It is physical dimensionality.
But then the very fact of materiality makes room for its complementary opposite - information or the immateriality of symbolised meaning and sign relations. As I have argued in another thread, the universal expressiveness of a language is due to an extreme constraint on dimensionality. When materiality is reduced towards the ideal of a zero-D point - as it is with any serial code - then this active lack of materiality becomes the birth of the something different, the something opposite, that is the "immaterial" realm of symbols. Or negentropy.
Of course the play of signs, the play of symbols, still has to obey the second law. It takes work to run a computer or brain. Both must produce a lot of waste heat. But from the point of view of the play of symbols, the entropic cost of every bit, every operation (like executing a program or uttering a thought) is effectively the same. There is always a cost, but it is immaterial in not making a difference to the computation or the brain activity.
So the pansemiotic view can argue it's merit on first principles. Matter and symbol are formally complementary in that the existence of one makes the existence of the other a necessity. You couldn't have a material world and not then have "immaterial" sign relations with that world as a logical possibility.
So in general you start by arguing that reductionism is a failure - its reliance on a rather mystical notion of emergence being a symptom of that. I of course agree. Emergence is always itching to be reduced back to supervenience in the mouths of reductionists. A reductionist only wants to believe in an emergence that is sanitised by quote marks.
And then you argue that if monistic reductionism fails, then maybe mind - that horribly ill defined notion - is the second substantial ingredient that must be discovered in the microphysics. And yes, if all else fails, perhaps we have to accept such a brute fact posit.
But all else hasn't failed. Science already has a science of sign. It is perfectly normal in neuroscience or biology to treat the phenomena of life and mind as sign relations with the material world.
And the matter~symbol dichotomy has the required Metaphysical validity. Sign - living in its zero dimensional realm of digital bits - can be shown to be the outcome of material constraint taken to its physical limits. Negentropy is defined as the inverse of entropy.
The rapid emergence of an information theoretic approach to "everything" - microphysics and cosmology too - shows that this is the universal Metaphysical duality that is working. Information encodes the Janus face relation between sign and matter. Information theory describes entropy as both epistemic uncertainty and as ontic degrees of freedom. The two sides of the deal are now mathematically joined at the hip. Their essential complementarity has been recognised as a quantifiable quality - the holy bit. ;)
But Panpsychism has not fared so well. There is still no metaphysics, let alone physics, connecting the brute and disparate categories of matter and mind. As a possibility, it was raised a century ago and has proved a complete dud.
Pansemiosis, on the other hand, has become science's new dominant paradigm - even if cashing out all that which is implied is still a work in progress across the span of the sciences.
I've said it hundreds of times now. When things begin, both parts and wholes would be maximally vague. It is in their co-dependent arising that they together dispel the mists of unformed possibility to revealed their mutually supported actuality.
But it is also true that part and whole have their most definite state of existence on quite different spatiotemporal scales. So what you are seeing is what you would expect to see as an observer existing inside what is happening.
To you - looking at the story from the middle ground scale - the parts coalesce first. The whole is present largely as a desire to be achieved in the long run future. So the parts shed any vagueness fast and the whole remains vague for the longest possible time.
But as I say, this is an optical effect. It is what you see when you regard creation from some scale intermediate between its local and global limits. Of course the parts look small and definite "by now", while the whole looks large and mysterious, still to make itself absolutely clear to us.
I would like to make clear that the panpsychism I advocated is not about 'mater' and 'mind'. It is about 'some entities' which behavior could be described in terms of physical matter or mind. The difference is that description in terms of physical matter is simplified and incomplete (because it can't describe mind related phenomena) and only the description in terms of mind could describe all phenomena, including what we call physical.
Quoting apokrisis
According to some source, when von Neumann asked Shannon how he was getting on with his information theory, Shannon replied: "The theory was in excellent shape, except that he needed a good name for "missing information". "Why don’t you call it entropy", von Neumann suggested. "In the first place, a mathematical development very much like yours already exists in Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, and in the second place, no one understands entropy very well, so in any discussion you will be in a position of advantage.
I wonder if Shannon theory of information has a wrong name. It is not about information, but about data (storage, transmission, etc.). Shannon freely admitted that his definition of information was limited in scope and was never envisioned as being universal. Shannon deliberately avoided the "murkier" aspects of human communication in framing his definitions; problematic themes such as knowledge, semantics, motivations and intentions of the sender and/or receiver, etc., were avoided altogether.
Quoting apokrisis
On entropy I agree with von Neumann that no one understands it.
Quoting apokrisis
I am not up to speed with this new dominant paradigm, but Wiki also not aware about it. However I found a short clip about Pansemiosis on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5tLBa-Q-SY
I like it too. ;)
Perhaps this makes sense to you, but it is unintelligible, and therefore nonsense to me. All you are saying here is that when you look toward the beginnings of things, you cannot determine which comes first, the part or the whole, because the beginning is lost in vagueness. But as I've explained to you many times now, by logic, the whole is necessarily prior to the parts. You recognize this fundamental principle when you say that the whole constrains the parts. Co-dependence is unacceptable because it produces an infinite regress with no beginning. Therefore the assumption of co-dependence is a negating of the beginning rather than a looking at the beginning.
Since your perspective, for looking at beginnings, renders the relationship between parts and wholes "maximally vague", when logic tells us that wholes are necessarily prior to the parts, then we may conclude that your perspective is inadequate for understanding beginnings, and therefore unacceptable.
Nonsense. Instead of having to start with either a whole, or the parts, things start with the more foundational step of the beginning of their actual separation.
So the triadic part~whole relation goes from being something dormant as a pure possibility to something which actually starts to happen - a division that becomes crisply developed as it is self-sustaining due to feedback.
So yes, this still leaves metaphysical questions. But it kills the kind of mechanistic regress you are talking about because the first step is already irreducibly complex in being a symmetry-breaking relation. There is a concrete limit on any "beginning" which the "perfect symmetry" of vagueness marks.
As soon as you have the slightest bit of the one (wholes, constraints, global "formal" organisation), you also must have already the same degree of its other (parts, degrees of freedom, local "material" action).
Dialectical logic gives you no choice about this. Every action has its reciprocal reaction. Every thesis is intelligible only in the light of there being its antithesis.
Such a separation is only a beginning in the sense that it is the end of the old and the beginning of the new. So we must account for the old then. There must be something which is separated. If it's the whole, then the whole is prior to the parts. If it's a whole consisting of parts, which is what you seem to be saying, then prior to that whole, is another, and prior to that another, ad infinitum. Infinite regress is unavoidable when you describe a beginning as the end of something else.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see how the separation you speak of could kill the regress, unless the thing which separates, the symmetry itself, is something completely different from a whole and parts. In this case, the whole and parts would come into existence simultaneously at the symmetry-breaking. But if that is the case, how is it that the thing which is prior to the co-dependent whole and parts, the symmetry itself, not actually a whole, a whole with no parts, which later becomes a whole with parts? Then the whole is prior to the parts. The way I see it, either the whole is prior to the parts, or there is an infinite regress of co-dependence.
Being the beginning of (space)time, it is also the beginning of the dichotomy that we call old vs new, past vs future, change vs stasis.
To talk about things as they were "before" the time there was a "before" is nonsensical. Or at least, only a logic of vagueness - which talks about things "before" the principle of non-contradiction applies - can make sense of such a statement. :)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What's the problem if the whole with no parts is formally equivalent to the parts with no whole? That's what vagueness - as standing prior to the PNC - says.
1. less than
2. more than
3. equal to
We can discount the 3rd for obvious reasons. The 2nd is easily seen around us, which might account for the common 'reduction ' of Aristotle's and Koffka's statement(s). How about number 1?
Can we identify a case where the " The whole is LESS than the sum of the parts?" and it is yet relevant to the concepts where this axiom is used, specifically Holism, Gestaltism, Systems Theory... useful in understanding the universe around us?
What about chaos? All those parts flying about in determinate and lawful fashion, yet amounting to nothing strongly orderly on the whole.
If "the sum is greater" is about the power of global coherence, then chaos is about the other thing of increasing the global incoherence.
This is good! And true to its meaning. Another philosopher had posed the question, at which point do we see the heap instead of the millet.
The United States Congress.
Edit: possibly also the Los Angeles Dodgers.