Emergence
.@schopenhauer1
What do you mean by epistemic levels?
schopenhauer1:My point was sort of the epistemological paradox of emergence. We know of all other emergence through the process of cognizing it. At what epistemic level do tornados exist? Everything we know about emergence happens within the epistemic framework of a "viewer". Without the viewer, what is it from something to move from one level to another? What does that even look like? There is always a sort of hidden viewer in the equation. I guess I hear key words from types trying to answer this like "top-down causation" but it seems like a modern way of positing Descartes' God that is a necessity for everything else to exist.
What do you mean by epistemic levels?
Comments (110)
Sorry to interject but I think this is a concept that may require some attention, as well as the reverse concept of "bottom-up causation".
When I hit on a nail with a hammer, and the nail is driven down a plank of wood, can I say that the hammer head is accumulating kinetic energy, and that it transmits this energy to the nail? Or should I rather think that the atoms of the hammer head are accumulating kinetic energy and transmitting this energy to the nail atoms? Or should I instead say that the wave function of the hammer head elementary particles is interacting with that of the nail elementary particles? And at a smaller level, what about the quarks of my hammer? Are they the ones doing all the work or what?
I think that scale is in the eye of the beholder. We should avoid the assumption that there is a privileged scale at which causation happens. Causation happens at all levels at once because all levels coexist in one reality. Up and down in this context are best understood as metaphors for scale of observation, not for causation channels.
... and why would levels necessitate a viewer?
There's a difference in reports or accounts of what's happening at different levels. If there were no accounting happening, would the difference still be there?
Are numbers there if nobody's thinking about them? :grin:
Only Pi remains in the sky... :grin:
We just had a full moon, so yes. :razz:
I'm not sure what is meant by something moving from one level to another. but I think I agree that emergence implies a viewer, because it seems like it's a consequence of limits of our cognition.
If we were omniscient, with unlimited cognitive powers, there doesn't seem to be a reason why we would use higher level emergent descriptions. Everything in a fluid could in theory be described in terms of particles moving (and probably more complete), we just prefer using fluid dynamics because it is to complex 'for us' to describe it in terms of moving particles.
People may not like where this is going, but I think words like "real", "reality", "to exist" all necessarily have some link to what kind of beings we are, to how we view the world and try to understand it. You get into trouble quickly if you think we are capturing something like a thing-in-itself with our descriptions.
So, let's just say tornados exist [period].... because they are relevant to us.
No. Our limits of cognition are irrelevant to the world of emergence.
Levels are there whether we exist or not. There were no atoms before we discovered them? Before Kant there was no universe outside the Milky Way?
Alright, what is a level disconnected from our cognition and use? What do you exactly mean with the word 'to exist' entirely separated from any kind of viewer?
I'm also not saying nothing exists before we discovered it, i'm saying our descriptions and the languages we use (which includes words like exist) are (partly) influenced by us and our needs.
This was in the context of the debate on experiential states vs. physical states. When new phenomenon come about, it is usually already cognized from an experiencer. When you see the results of physical forces arising, you are already viewing it. However, mental states are the very thing viewing the emergence, and is itself supposed to be emergent. What exactly is "emerging" if we are talking about mental states? And from "what" is it emerging? What perspective is going on here? Is everything from a localized perspective? Water has properties of fluidity. What is fluidity at a level of atomic structure? You need the top-down perspective for fluidity to even make sense. Otherwise it is turtles all the way down. There is no separation of this or that phenomena. It just is in itself. It's actually really hard for me to explain. Some days I can explain these thoughts better than others. Struggling right now.
Yes, but all of this (and I am going to include your folding and feedback loops from other thread here, are things observed at some level (our conscious one). What atoms and elementary particles are the most basic "simples" (as the term is used in philosophy circles).. and how they bootstraps themselves to other epistemic levels is at question. You can say feedback loops, but that seems like a shoehorn phrase, similar to the Cartesian Theater, as we are observing the feedback loops at this level already. What are feedback loops without this already-observed top-down level?
Because what is a property without something that knows the property? How do properties arise from simpler properties without just assuming that property already there?
Right.
Yes good example.
I believe in some circles, the term "view from nowhere" and "view from everywhere" is discussed. Now discuss haha.
It's turtles all the way down, there's no elementary level of matter and energy that I can see. "Simpler" and "smaller" do not mean "more causal".
Haha, I scrambled my brain trying to think about this.
What if we worked toward a basic definition and then conquered Chalmers strong and weak emergence?
The IEP puts it this way:
"If we were pressed to give a definition of emergence, we could say that a property is emergent if it is a novel property of a system or an entity that arises when that system or entity has reached a certain level of complexity and that, even though it exists only insofar as the system or entity exists, it is distinct from the properties of the parts of the system from which it emerges. However, as will become apparent, things are not so simple because “emergence” is a term used in different ways both in science and in philosophy, and how it is to be defined is a substantive question in itself."
Problem is i'm not so sure there is something like strong emergence. From what i've gathered, part of the problem here is i'm no scientist, at least a good part of them doesn't believe in strong emergence. It's seems part of the controversy, so I don't know if we should just assume it.
So I'd even go further as to break down what the term "arises" means here. What does that entail. Our brains probably process this term similarly, but the term on its own might have issues. It is a fiat epistemic change. Arises, like many terms creates a new epistemic leap but without explanation other than, this happens.
Yes, I didn't mean take Chalmers as gospel, but rather look at the pros and cons of it.
I don't think it is. Not sure how to set these up though. People would have to let me know when they get the book I guess.
I'd be willing to join. And I can get an e-version of book too.
"So, at the risk of initiating this discussion with a clumsy neologism, I will refer to this as an absential2 feature, to denote phenomena whose existence is determined with respect to an essential absence. This could be a state of things not yet realized, a specific separate object of a representation, a general type of property that may or may not exist, an abstract quality, an experience, and so forth—just not that which is actually present. This paradoxical intrinsic quality of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, but it is a defining property of life and mind." -- page 3
Yeah I've started reading the intro of the book too. Like Schopenhauer1, I not entirely sure I'll buy into it, but it looks interesting. And I remember seeing the author on some discussion panel a while back, and he looked like he knew what he was talking about, at least... so i'm willing to give it a try.
Vacuum is never really nothing right? There's always the vacuum-energy and fluctuations, and so there is something "physical" going on which is why I suspect (I'm only a few page far) it wouldn't qualify as absence like he wants to use it.
Thus: solidity, liquidity, gaseousness, are group properties. One molecule of H2O on its tod is none of these, because it is the relations between molecules that is the emergent property in question.
You need three or more ducks to get them in a row, or fail to get them in a row. Rows emerge. From ducks. Or other stuff.
People write books about all this.
People even read them.
Terrance Deacon says that when we pile stuff together it usually just makes a mess and then disintegrates toward the heat death of the universe. He says it's when we see arrangements, especially ones we love, that's when we attribute the cause to something absent.
Like with natural selection, every critter is reaching for something, food or sex or security. The engine of life is this ever present absence.
But natural selection is based on natural profligacy of species, environmental chaos, and shear dumb luck of being in the right place just at the right time. Natural selection is not directional nor emergent.
There are plenty of counter-examples though which remain baffling mysteries, like the early development/emergence of feathers and light air-filled bone structure for dinosaurian birds which are necessary for a much later emergence of flight.
[quote=Lao Tzu]Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.[/quote]
Quoting magritte
True. He's saying that science and philosophy focus on what's present, but would benefit from noticing the potency of lack, especially regarding life and consciousness. I'm just at the beginning, though.
I suspect there is no qualitative difference here, that "strong emergence" is just what a billion years of "weak emergence" looks like.
I would add a few criteria, as follows:
Structural strength: for an emerging form to perdure at all, the form must be structurally cohesive and/or self-sustaining. Otherwise the slightest perturbation in the environment would erase the form. A structure that emerges and then vanishes (like the waves in the OP) is not building up any emerging property over the long term. It emerges and then goes back to zero, and so does the next wave.
Cumulative: for emergence to go anywhere over the long run, it needs to build upon past emergence. So to qualify as real emergence, a structure or form has to maintain some of its structural gains over time (criteria of structural strength), long enough for another emerging form to happen, AND this new emerging form has to build upon the previous one (i.e. be cumulative).
Self-maintainance: because of entropy, an emerging form is generally subject to degenerescence and destruction. In order to satisfay criteria of structural strength and cumulativeness, an emerging form must therefore be able to repair itself, otherwise it is not going to last long enough for cumulative emergence to happen.
Okay looks like you have the book already! What page are you all on? I would like to discuss his cogent understanding of Cartesian Theater. Does anyone want to reference that and provide some of his examples?
Quoting Olivier5
What is the nature of a new property to inhere in something? Solidity of an object let's say. At what level is solidification happening? To what? Where?
Good question. I suppose that various chemical bonds and forces would need to exist between components, bindings them in certain ways, for an emerging object or form to have any solidity. So one level of solidity is chemical.
When is this binding solidification though and not just arrangements of matter?
I guess I should say, at what perspective is this happening? I presume, you the human has a set of images of this playing out.. some sort of latice forming from free flowing links, or chemical looking diagram or 3D graphic in your head.
Nevertheless, the famous but quite old double-slit experiment suggests a Cartesian divine observer. Electrons, it's safe to say aren't capable of observing either the experimenters, themselves or anything at all for they matter. Yet, their behavior (interference pattern or a single point of light) seems to evince, among other possibilities, a conscious decision to act in one way and not the other. God? Your guess is as good as mine.
The scientific perspective, as far as I am concerned.
I think I'll make another thread to discuss the book in, this one can remain for more general discussion of emergence.
1. A stalactite: it "emerges" from a cave ceiling by the slow accretion of limestone and other minerals brought by percolating water. The emergence of a stalactite takes thousands if not millions of years to happen. The cave environment shields the phenomenon from wind erosion and other entropic forces. So it doesn't need to be self-maintaning, but it is self-sustaining because flowing water will tend to follow an already formed bulge in the ceiling, precipitating its minerals at the tip of the bulge.
2. A river: it's an earth topographic structure "emerging" from water erosion over a raised area of land. Here too the phenomenon is self sustaining: water flowing digs down the river bed (typically) so the structure remains more or less there, stable in spite if the fluctuation in water flow. An ecosystems develops around it. Sometimes the river dries up for a period in summer; and sometimes it floods the plains around it. The banks can get eroded or built up by silt, so the bed of the river evolves over time.
So self-sustainance is a better criteria than self-maintainance because it doesn't exclude purely physical emerging phenomena.
When we talk about emergence, aren't we talking about something more general than only emergent forms?
From the earlier posted Chalmers definition :
"If we were pressed to give a definition of emergence, we could say that a property is emergent if it is a novel property of a system or an entity that arises when that system or entity has reached a certain level of complexity and that, even though it exists only insofar as the system or entity exists, it is distinct from the properties of the parts of the system from which it emerges."
From wiki :
"In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole."
I feel like something need not necessarily be self-sustaining to be called emergent. Or put another way self-sustaining emergent forms seem only a subset of emergence in general, an important subset no doubt, as life would fall under that, but not all emergence.
Yeah, probably better to start a new thread. I've only skimmed to first few pages to see if I would commit to reading it.
:ok: Too tired to make sense of anything. Rambling...rambling...but, thankfully, not gambling.
Emergence is a small step, and then another small step, and another one, cumulatively adding up to a journey.
Ok, I wouldn't limit emergence to that just yet... but fair enough.
And you'd be right. I'm talking of what it takes for emergence to build up over time. Ocean waves are emergent but they don't last, and they don't grow upon one another.
Quantum Bug (don't let this into your quantum computer!)
Sometimes philosophical discussions can be dry and it helps to look at graphic examples in reality. :cool:
So at what epistemic level is a non-viewer based emergent event happening. You keep giving me the human picture of how emergence looks. The viewer is baked in. Next it's going to be shoehorned in by some generic level of "forces" but what does that even mean without the epistemic viewer? Then people will make the odd epistemic imaginative leap to pretend they are the first person view of a localized physical event that combines forces and matter. Nope.
This is a contradiction in terms, because "epistemic" implies a viewer. More generally, there is no such thing as a view from nowhere.
I agreed with you. It also think some kind of perspective-taking is baked into the concept of emergence. That's not to say there not something there regardless of our perception of it which we capture with the concept. Just that it doesn't make sense to try to look at it completely divorced from any perspective... because the concept is invented so that we - who necessarily view things from a certain perspective - could make sense of the world.
If there is no view from nowhere, then "what" is happening? Can one speak of this?
Correct, so can you see where this fits in with things like mental phenomena "emerging"?
There are two choices here 1) I know that x, 2) We know that x. Belief and justification are quite different for the two, so they're not the same. In the first person, belief is subjective and private, justification can be deduction or personal experiential or a reference to a public or conventional fact. We know that or it is known that is a publicly conventional belief justified by expert evidence.
The number of dots on the face of a die has two answers, It's either the side facing me or what is publicly known of all six sides. Neither of these is from nowhere.
Spatial scale causes similar problems: Browning motion might be an emergent rule or heuristic that we can derive by looking at a system at the molecular scale, but zooming out we might be able to instead derive something like the ideal-gas law (the fact that pressure and temperature tends to average out when a gas contained).
... One molecule of hydrogen doesn't do much when it is alone. A few million hydrogen molecules don't do much either... But if we get like... an octo-dectillion of them... all together within a certain radius, their sheer cumulative gravitational pulls will cause them to begin clustering at their centre of mass...Wait long enough, and once they get close enough together, they start heating up, until eventually the heat and pressure is so great that they start fusing into heavier atoms, while releasing tons of photons/radiation.
If we keep adding more mass, gravity keeps rising, and we eventually get a black hole... (I wonder what happens if we over-feed a black hole...)
It would be very hard, if only given the details of how a single atom of hydrogen behaves, to deduce what would happen if you get enough of them together (stars or black-holes). Unless we're capable of making detections/sensory observations over the scales required to observe these phenomenon, we could likely never have anticipated them. Although vast time and scale changes are not required for emergent phenomenon to exist (certain complex systems are especially good at giving rise to emergence, where others take eons), the human scale of time and space is one of the primary factors that boot-straps our ability to make observations (and therefore boot-straps our ability to make inferences about the emergent phenomenon we are confronted with).
In other words, pressure and temperature are either irrelevant inconsistent, or inaccessible if you're a quark or a solar system. The way/length that the observation is carried out inexorably shapes and constrains how we then define and interact with it.
Isn't it just that as your perspective changes, the rules change for the stuff you're looking at?
The cogito is happening: I think thus am, and the world appears to be as well; as well as its phenomenological reduction: our subjective experience at (as much as "of") the world is happening. We are part of the world, historical like it, physical like it.
From this it follows quite a few things, including that science is happening, as a human effort to make sense of our subjective experience at the world.
Science that can study, document, test and try and understand emergence.
Make sense?
2 is just 1 multiplied by 2.
Nope. I think we are so used to having a view of emergence that we don't know that is epistemic, not metaphysically happening. Emergence has a view from one thing to another. I'll call it a an epistemic leap. In fact, I don't even know if there was a view to start from that leaps, so perhaps nothing is leaping anywhere.
1 is not only subjective and private but (in that special sense only) also possibly absolute, unquestionable, and irrefutable. 2 Public knowledge, like all scientific facts, changes or evolves over time. 1 I am hungry is an absolute fact because I say so. 2 Rome is the greatest Western empire. This is an expired fact.
If we're talking emergence, then is that private, scientific, or both? Scientific emergence is already a puzzle but at least it has some history.
Is this another version of "if a tree falls and no one sees it fall, did it really fall?"
You're making a good point. I'm missing at least a third kind of knowledge. If I am hungry is subjective and private to me, then we are hungry is still not a scientific fact but is dependent on each of many people asked. This is an example of facts dependent on individuals, one of many kinds of relativism. Other examples are all around, it is raining, it is hot, my pocket is empty, the sky is red and purple.
Scientific laws and facts are often thought as being universal, as being everywhere and nowhere. That's just a conceptual oversight of something Newton understood which is that there is always an implied and unavoidable origin in space and time to every law and observation. That origin is not absolutely fixed within the absolute 'I' (God is the only other absolute) but is 'arbitrary' in the sense that any imaginary daemon may place it anywhere in the universe and the laws will still be correctly applicable (not 'true'). For this to so the universe must be uniform at sufficiently (whatever that means) large scales, and this is axiomatically assumed. Newton didn't know about black holes.
As telated to specifically emergence question.
No its all intertwined. We can view emergent events. But at what level do emergent events occur? It's like matter and forces are given extra layers of epistemic value that are not there. You are going to constantly either give me the third person or first person (as imagined by the object) account, but do you see how that's not right?
What is an "extra" layer of epistemic value, may I ask???? Something you haven't yet read about in a book? Something non-canonical? And how can you possibly check if some "layers of epistemic value" are "there" or "not there"??? What are the criteria for the existence of layers of epistemic value?
In other words, could you clarify your perspective? Seem you are making many assumptions here that you are not aware of, assumptions that you are not prepared to challenge or even explore, and as a result you can't arrive at a clear question.
It's to do with the view from nowhere and everywhere. What event is localizing at the level of objects? And I said:
Quoting schopenhauer1
You are asking the wrong guy. The view from nowhere and everywhere is the view of God, and I am an atheist.
So was Schopenhauer.
It doesn't have to do with God as a necessity. So where do events localize?
I am going to try and interpret this in my own language, if you don't mind. Correct me if I am wrong. The question would translate in my language as: is scale only in the eye of the beholder, an arbitrary choice of the viewer, or are there events (e.g. related to causality) that objectively happen at a certain scale and not below or above that scale?
To precise even further: are the laws of nature -- as seen or even designed by a hypothetical all-knowing god, not the laws of nature as we feeble humans apprehend them but the noumenal laws, if they exist -- the same at all scales, or are there certain noumenal laws, certain objective forms of causality that only crank up and become applicable at certain scales, and not below?
Did I understand the question?
Quoting Olivier5
Yes, that above paragraph very much so..
Quoting Olivier5
This actually, has a few assumptions baked into it, leading to certain kind of answers, so I'd rather focus on paragraph one.
You need language that is as objective as possible, apparently, and to give it to you, I need tools to spot and guard against my natural subjectivity. I need these assumptions explicitly laid out, to flag "the view from nowhere and everywhere", which is not my usual frame of reference. I must remind myself that you are not asking for my point of view, my view from somewhere, but for a theoretical god's view on the laws of nature.
So unless you withdraw your "view from nowhere" request, you are forcing me to use those assumptions. And therefore they must stay.
This being clarified, the first paragraph makes for more natural, less kantian language:
Quoting Olivier5
Can we test the question on a few examples? E.g.:
1. An atom decays and emits radioactivity.
2. A chaperone protein corrects the folding of another protein.
3. A tiger in a zoo kills a keeper.
4. Biden was just named the winner of Pennsylvania, and
president elect.
Is that an acceptable way to go?
We can use those examples. I'd like to explore the ideas of scale and localized events as they pertain to those phenomena.
1. An atom decays and emits radioactivity.
At what scale is this event happening? Assuming that the laws of nature are local, it starts at the atomic scale. But of course, it can set in motion other events, such as radioactivity. So it depends where the atom is located. Assuming the decaying atom is located on earth allows for a few interesting possibilities:
1.a At worse, at the heart of an atomic bomb it could create a chain reaction and kill millions.
1.b Biologically, it could hit some DNA in a living organism and induce a mutation. Or hit a protein and give it a suboptimal, innactive or even toxic steric geometry, or breaks it in toxic oligomers (bits and pieces of broken proteins, see example 2).
1.c The radioactivity could get lost in the cosmic noise, escape earth and get absorbed in a gas cloud around Betelgeuse or something.
1.d it could just get absorbed by a nearby atom, changing almost nothing (remain just an atomic event).
As you can see from this example, a lot of different scales could be affected. So it is possible for an atomic-level event happening on earth to kill a bacteria for instance, by breaking a key part of its DNA (assuming the bacteria won't repair the DNA, which is a big "if"). Or to destroy an entire city. Or to land on Betelgeuse... It is even theoretically possible that this radioactivity event on earth creates a mutation on another planet, around Betelgeuse or elsewhere. Highly unlikely of course, but conceivable.
You want to discuss this case, or shall we deal with 2?
I guess then, let's start there. What does this really mean?
Ah so as suspected, the perspective of the object is being taken in some third person or first person form. But yet if it's not that, what?
What would that imply for metaphysics?
Let's try a different route. Maybe the event is the focus. But what is an event?
Since your rejection of subjective points of view now extends to a rejection of logical frames of reference, no event can be described to you in a logical language.
Nothing can happen in the view from nowhere.
But what stage is the event happening? Panpsychism and process philosophy gives a first person perspective to the object itself. There are "occasions of experience". That sounds weird, so what else is there? We can keep pretending that we are narrowing in on some specific "object in action" from the third person imaginative perspective, but that's not the case.
So yes, it does go back to "If a tree falls in the woods.." that makes the problem no less tricky.
Why the anthropocentric perspective? When an actual tree does fall in the forest, humans may or may not notice it but the tree seems to notice, as well as many other critters.
As some one who defends a pansemiotic ontology, I would point out how a brutely physical level of reality would be organised by the failure to care, or the indifference of the system.
So emergence, rather than being a way to insert some kind of mentalism into the fundamental picture, is highlighting the way that differences in physical scale lead to a generalised blindness to detail, a generalised stochastic blanding out of physical interactions.
Stan Salthe nailed this with his hierarchy theory work and his notion of "cogent moments".
For any observer - or scale of physical interaction - there is some spatiotemporal region in which a forceful or energetic exchange is taking place. Atoms react with other atoms in their vicinity. This action can be captured by general physical models of the usual type. And if you have some collection of atoms, they will fall into some collective state as their interactions go to equilibrium. A collective state - defined in the language of probabilty theory – will emerge to characterised the atoms as a system with generic properties like temperature and pressure. The system will be thermalised and predictable and so have what Salthe is terming cogency.
There is nothing "mental" happening. And from any internal view, it is just atoms mindlessly bashing about in accidental fashion. But from a larger scale of observation - as might be adopted by a scientist or even any larger physical system having an interaction with the thermalised atomic state - this little system of atoms is instability stabilised. From a distant in spatiotemporal scale, all the specific details of the interactions are information that has been discarded, to leave only the core statistical properties like pressure and temperature. Or rigidity, conductivity, etc.
So emergence is a product not of the mindfulness of some higher scale point of view. And especially not the product of small scale mindfulness expressing itself as some higher collective property.
Instead it is about a higher scale of interaction emerging via an ability to ignore the physics of the internals of a lower scale of organisation. The higher scale now only sees the stable, long-run, statistical view. And that stability of view is what in fact allows there to be a new higher hierarchical scale of material organisation. The ability to ignore the small scale physics - treat its "determinism" as "randomness" - is the foundation for constructing a next level of causal order.
Of course, the key to sealing off a lower level of materiality like this is all about being able to impose the constraints that allow the detail to be ignored. The larger scale is the entropy sink or heat bath environment which permits a closure via a generalised information forgetting.
So the atoms might be modelled as a bunch of deterministic interactions in which every informational detail is heeded. That seems very mindful. Yet emergence is predicated on being able to treat all this action as purely statistical - a pattern encoded in some stochastic attractor.
The whole of classical physics is then itself emergent from a blanding out of the quantum scale of material action. The difference for our modelling is that we now have to include the fact that it is the environment that constrains the material freedoms to some wavefunction state of possible outcomes. The quantum "internals" no longer have the taken for granted stability and deterministic predicability of the classical view.
From Satlhe's cogent moment point of view, nature is thus organised as a hierarchy of thermalising scales. From any (classical) point of view, we are going to look down in scale and see a lot of deterministic detail blur into a single flat statistics. All the atomistic interactions are going to have some stable average that thus supports are own more complex scale of observation. We can now have our own definite and particular physical interactions as we have no need to care at all about the micro-detail supposedly supporting our own.
Our ability to ignore such detail is what makes our level possible as its own thing. And also by definition, we have to be unwittingly imposing the right constraints on that lower level to be keeping it stable and untroublesome. Whatever we are doing, it must be bounding that lower level in a long-run fashion.
That is the view looking downwards from where we are - which is a place capable of a classical description, and thus a scale which can emergently take its scale of interactions for granted.
And likewise, there is the view we have looking upwards. We must be embedded in turn in the same arrangement where we become the indifferent elements of some much larger cogent moment. We become the statistical blur of some still larger spatioscale of statistical indifference.
So there is us here as entropic systems, complex life feeding off the solar flux. And we can do this because we live within a cosmos that is so large and slowly changing that it seems like an eternally fixed backdrop, with a constant temperature, pressure, energy density, chemical composition, etc.
We don't need to care the sun will rise tomorrow, or that protons won't decay. We can be blissfully indifferent to physics on the largest scale, just as we are to physics on the smallest.
The small scale is furiously changing, but that just blurs into a generic statistics from our point of view. Likewise the cosmic scale is making a wild change from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. But that is so large a change that is completely fills our entire possible point of view. We only sample a tiny fraction of that reality during our own cogent moment of emergent existence.
So the pansemiotic view of nature does build on "mentalistic" concepts like observation and information. But it is anti-mentalistic in that its stresses the fundamental importance of achieving stability by means of forgetting, ignoring, becoming indifferent.
And as I have pointed out before, even the biology of life and mind is dependent on being able to ignore and forget. The brain doesn't want to be exquisitely mindful of every possible detail. It wants to master the habits that allow it to deal with the challenges of reality as if they were meaningless trivialties.
Not every road bump can be flattened out by good suspension. But the basic principle of good suspension is to be able to notice as little as possible. And that mindlessness is what - by its contrast - produces the further potential to construct some new level of telos and material directedness.
And as I have also pointed out, we need to look closely at what humans use their undoubted mindfulness for. Entropy production. We can persist as a level of physical emergence as we are smart as serving the underlying thermodynamic flow the Cosmos has established.
And what is it that we are so good at ignoring? This very fact. We are indifferent to climate change and ecosystem wipeout as just something that goes along with the nature of being an emergent system. We construct a point of view on the back of being blissfully indifferent to the smaller and larger scales of physical being in which we are embedded.
That is why "cogent moment" is such an apt term. Cognition emerges as the ability to obsess about "internal" detail ... because the capacity to maintain a generalised indifference to actual worldly physics has become some sophisticated.
Let's take the critters out of it then.
I don't know but I tend to think yes.
But even this simple statement seems so simple in human understanding and so bizarre outside of it, as an event in itself without a perspective.
Quoting apokrisis
Temperature and pressure are measured. They are properties of the observer. What would that be in itself?
Hold on.. I have to read the rest but that was my first read.
It's just a model. That is stated up front. And models are about frames and their events - some set of laws and some collection of components.
So sure, atomism did make "action at a distance" interactions, like gravity, seem bizarre to Newton and Descartes. Descartes struggled to make things work with a corpuscular theory of the vacuum. Newton just got on with the maths and gave up trying to fill in the gap with his imagination.
Einstein fixed things with a new model of the spacetime frame in which energy density shaped its global dimensional metric. We then had a "still more bizarre" reality that really made explicit a cogent moment approach to modelling classical emergence. The whole shaped its parts as the parts shaped their whole.
So I don't get your complaint on this. Atomism might have seemed so simple and obvious to us humans. But as I say, that is because it was the way of thinking that allowed us to ignore the most about reality. It allowed us to picture a purely mechanical world of relations. A world ruled by immaterial laws and brutely existent matter. A world described without the point of view that scale brings, and thus the canonical view from nowhere.
Physics has even since been building hierarchical scale and cogent structure back into this way-too-simple atomism.
But my point is about how this is all to do with the emergence of generalised indifference - a stochastic picture of nature. We shouldn't zero in on atomistic interactions (like Whitehead) and expect to find anything mentalistic going on. The mentalistic thing that is going on is instead the "cognitive" process of developing a global capacity to ignore details, stabilise a "world", by establishing points of view that are safe from the thermal fray.
If we want to unify physics and mind science, pansemiosis is how we can do that. Both the cosmos and the brain run on the same principle of being able to impose habitual predictability on an essentially unstable world. Both become what they are by imposing statistical constraints that turn all action into some unchanging average.
Quoting schopenhauer1
They are what can be measured from a larger scale - if that larger scale is imposing the right constraints on the smaller scale.
With human observers, that imposition is pretty literal. We have to trap some quantity of gas in a flask and let it come to equilibrium in a heat bath. So as humans, we are inside the physical world. But we do experiments by flipping positions on nature.
Nature just is nature. Stars have a steady-ish temperature and pressure as they are the product of the forces of gravitation and fusion reaching some long-run equilibrium balance.
I'm going to pick this quote because it might encapsulate a lot of the rest regarding scale. Let me put these words in succession to show where I'm coming from:
Scale: Can things have scale without a viewer? Where do objects and events obtain in space/time if there is no stage of scale?
Properties: Can things have properties without a viewer? Where do properties inhere if there is no stage of properties?
Events: Can there be events without a viewer? Without scale or properties, what kind of events can happen?
This was my first thought -- the difference between the mereological sum of whatever bits make up a boulder and a boulder. Do we call the boulder an "emergent" object? Certainly a boulder has properties of its own that the bits don't have on their own or as an abstract set of bits. The boulder can roll down a hill and smash through a tree. Is that an "emergent" property of something, like the bits arranged in ways that "produce" or "constitute" or "give rise to" a boulder?
I'm not sure what an observer has to do with any of this. Either that set of bits is heaped or scattered around or whatever, or it's arranged as a boulder. If we're only asking because of the metaphysics -- whether we countenance the existence of the boulder, and in what way -- that doesn't look all that interesting to me, unless it's to call attention to larger system within which boulders play a part.
Again, how events play out, how things scale, how properties inhere without an observer is the question. Objects on their own are different than objects as we perceive them. This seems simple yet bizarre because it is unusual to think of objects separated from our perception of them. An objects scale, property, and event on its own, is just an odd thing.
The problem is that "viewer" already implies a passive notion of consciousness - the classic Cartesian mistake. So it builds in the conclusion that the mind could exist in some separated res cogitans.
My reply is built around an active, Peircean, understanding of consciousness. What you call a viewing, I would call an interaction. There is always the semiotic wholeness of things in a triadic sign relation.
So scale itself becomes defined by cogency, or the question of whether things can or can't be in an active, informative, relation.
To have a viewpoint in regards to some object or event means it can matter to you - physically - whether it is changing or not changing, pushing or pulling, hot or cold, etc. But if something is so small that it becomes part of a backdrop blur, or so large that it just is the backdrop, then you can't "view" it. You just interact with some statistical level effect.
So differences in scale are what create "viewers" in the first place. If all differences had the same scale, there would be no effective differences. Once difference breaks up across many scales, then you start to get the emergent effects where there are the interactions you have at your own level vs the interactions you have with the finest grain, and also the coarsest grain, of being.
The Cosmos started with no scale difference. Everything was Planck scale at the Big Bang. Spacetime extent was so small, and energy density was so large, that there was no effective separation of the two.
But then it expanded and cooled with exponential speed. And matter could clump out and even start to move at less than the speed of light. You started to get the possibility of a Universe of "medium sized dry goods" – our "everyday" world of people, tables, fridges, boulders, cows, puddles. All the similar scale objects and events that we see as being particular, concrete and deterministic in terms of our interactions with them.
And at the same time, you got a backdrop of a Cosmic backdrop void. You got your stage that is a combo of completely cold and completely expanded physics – a 2.75 degree K sizzle of cosmic radiation filling a 93 billion light year visible light cone.
So scale was born of a cosmic division – two kinds of exponentially receeding limits. The global light cone the local average energy density. And our "view" is now divided into the world of objects/events that have material meaning to us - like fridges and puddles – and the contrasting realms of a giant spacetime void, and near zero temperature sizzle, which we only relate to in the most averaged-out of view way.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again the reply that if you demand that there be "viewers", you are taking a Cartesian mind~world dualism for granted. And I agree that is a very "classical physics" way of looking at reality.
But my whole position - for both physics and mind science - is relational (indeed, semiotic). And so a "viewer" is simply another term for speaking of things in meaningful interaction.
Properties are thus contextual. Something has properties in contrast to other things. And both have properties in contrast to whatever constitutes the general averaged backdrop.
Does the Cosmos have a temperature? We can say it is 2.75 degree K in contrast to the heat it had earlier in its evolution and the near zero degrees it will have by its Heat Death. So that is a comparison we make by standing outside the current Universe itself.
Then the stove can be hotter than my hand as a more particular statement. It depends whether it has been turned on, etc.
So properties = meaningful distinctions. And meaningful distinctions can be both between individuals and even between the general states of the embedding context, if it was one thing before and another thing later.
But yes, that means there must always be a stage, the contrast that a generalised backdrop provides for the foreground of particularised events. And that is precisely what the Salthe/semiotic/hierarchical approach brings to the table. It shows how once scale is born by a symmetry breaking - such as cooling~expanding - then you must get the secondary distinction between those things that are within reach of your interaction, and those things that are so far out of scale as to turn into a generalised blur of smallness, or a generalised view-filling of largeness.
A semiosis of interaction just drops out of the whole shindig in a natural fashion. And life followed on from physics in being able to apply its constraints on the world - fix things so that it divided more sharply into what was general and what was particular.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What is stopping events from happening? They are going to happen pretty freely over all scales if that is possible.
The real question is how can I - as a pragmatic organism - minimise my need to care about events? How much can I push out of my zone of concerned interaction so as to maximise my "own" capacity to pick and choose the events that occur.
So I can't stop the weather. But I can build a roof. I can establish a generalised indifference to the rain.
You are arguing for an ontology where there are objects with properties in a spacetime context that is then characterised by interactions or events. And sure, that is what emerges as a good account of the Cosmos about halfway through its entropic journey in the sparsely located locales that are planetary lumps of matter.
But I'm talking about the developmental whole and how to characterise that. I'm talking about the emergence of an object oriented ontology itself, and how it arises due to the geometric logic of scale differences.
I would see boulders as part of a fractal entropic flow. Every boulder is on its way - over eons - to being crumbled into fine sand. And every boulder was once part of a historically cooled lava flow.
So any emergence here - ie: some distinction in terms of a particular size or temperature - is not really of any physical consequence. A boulder behaves like a boulder. Drop in lava and it will melt. Roll it down the mountain and it will smash.
The boulder has an identity constrained by the generality of the laws of thermodynamics. But beyond that, its size or temperature - its relative scale - is a matter of uncontrolled chance so far as nature is concerned.
So emergence speaks to the emergence of a reason to constrain events in the world. A lava flow is an emergent self-organised thing. A scree slope or sandy beach is likewise a self-organising feature of the world.
But a boulder mixed in with general landscape debris - rock outcrops, rocks, pebbles, dust - is a statistical accident. It emerges out of the complementary fact that what isn't constrained can freely happen.
So there is a duality to emergence here - that which is being produced as a necessity and that which is being left to the vagaries of chance.
What actually emerges in natural physical processes is then some balance point. A certain balance of geological forces will tend to produce a bunch of boulders rather than a beach of sand or a rocky outcrop. Context and event tend towards some particular statistical attractor that we could call "boulder-prone".
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The point I would make is that the anthropomorphic response would be to see the boulder as either something very definite and meaningful, or completely random and meaningless. Whereas my approach sees every object as a product of some balance of contextual constraints and local freedoms.
So who does it have an "interesting" size for? Or temperature for?
Humans might have one kind of answer - one that can range from the boulder being sacred to being the most random object imaginable.
Nature - as a thermodynamic process - can also have its more general physical answer. Is the boulder typical or atypical given the general environmental context in play? To the degree that it is not yet statistically typical, we might expect it to become more so as time passes. The appropriate thermal balance is what we should expect to emerge.
Yeah that's a really funny thing. People seem to reach for "emergence" when expecting a story about how such-and-such unlikely something-or-other (usually consciousness) -- "unlikely", of course, in the eye of the theorist -- came about, what caused it, what made it happen.
And you might very well answer, in some cases at least, "It happened because nothing was stopping it." That's quite a serious shift in worldview.
From my time in mind science, this is a reason I came to dislike the use of the term. Emergence is invoked in the sense that "something pops out" as the product of bottom-up reductionist causes simply as some kind of happy accident.
So liquidity is a bottom up emergent property - unmysterious because that is just the collective statistical behaviour of a bunch of dipole molecules interacting with weak bonds. And consciousness was suppose to be a similar kind of neural magic.
Put together enough quantitative interaction, and a new qualitative state would emerge in spontaneous and supervenient fashion.
But in theoretical biology, I found that emergence was modelling as a composite of the bottom-up and the top-down. The two levels of action have to be mutually reinforcing - each synergistically producing the other in emergent fashion - for the whole to have stably emergent existence.
So life as an emergent state is the product of informational constraints - the information provided by genes, membranes, molecular machinery of all kinds - acting top-down to stabilise the material processes that produce the chemical body. And then the organic chemistry also had to exhibit the right kind of self-organising properties to assemble into cellular structures on a statistical basis.
Every protein folds by chance. But it is also nudged in the proper direction by where the genes place the bonds that tug the strand into a compact shape.
So there are indeed two contrasting worldviews here - and one of them is still basically reductionist about its emergence. Properties pop out as some surprising collective accident instead of being a more complex negotiation between top-down contextual constraints and bottom-up degrees of freedom.
My problem with top-down causation is that the consequence is already assumed at the top. For example, evolutionary adaptation at the microbiological level is explained by changes at the macro level of the environment. But the environment was already in the equation. Can top-down be a sort of shoehorning or bootstrapping that is illigitimate? It could be a subtle way of shifting the Cartesian Theater again, no? There it is as top-down causality. It used to be integration of neurons, or this or that, but it's the new place for the theater to play.
By the way, are you familiar with George Ellis?
I think I agree with that. Emergence thinking is not a negation of bottom-up causality, it is a reminder that causality is a two way street: it can also work top-down.
Not sure what you are arguing precisely but I would talk about top-down constraints more than top-down causation to emphasise that this is about a regulating or limiting context. So the larger environment does set the determining conditions for a physical system.
My post simply sought to show how scale itself creates a bounding effect. A qualitative difference must emerge due to a division in the nature of possible interactions.
Interactions between things of the same general spatiotemporal and energetic scale are going to have one quality. Then the lack of specific interactions - the turning of deterministic specificy into a statistical generality - as you approach the scale of both the very large and the very small, is going to have a different emergent character.
So you were asking about observers or points of view. You were talking about the need for a choice between a first and third person perspective. The first person is the completely local or subjective POV. The third person is the external God’s eye view - Cartesian coordinates - as imagined by classical physics.
I was describing yet another choice - the semiotic or internalist perspective. And this speaks directly to an emergentist metaphysics.
Having a position becomes a thing simply by the fundamental emergent feature I described - the three way separation into a hierarchy of being where there are all the second person interactions an object can have with other objects of the same scale. And then the two boundaries or horizons of the objects that become too small for particular interaction, so becomes a generalised material blur, and the objects that become so large that they totally fill the field of view, so cease to be objects and are now simply the embedding environment.
You get a world that has action in the middle ground and which becomes closed over by generality at the upper and lower boundaries of scale.
Again, this is a way to bypass the view from nowhere externalism of classical physics and also the mentalistic view from me pushed by some kind of Panpsychism. It is its own emergentist paradigm of pansemiosis where position in scale is what creates the contrasts between specific interactions and completely general ones.
As a metaphysical model, it applies directly to cosmology. It is obviously the case that we exist in a world where our kind of particularity and hence complexity of local interactions is possible as the quantum fine grain of differentiation is so small and cold, the cosmological light cone scale of integration so large and empty, that they have both become background statistical generalities.
We interact classically because quantum uncertainty is reduced towards its limit by distance. And also because the emergent “laws of nature” - the generalised balancing act - are now apparently frozen into an unchanging global scale of being.
It is because we can’t interact with the quantum scale, or the cosmological scale, in any meaningful way (until we invented the technology) that there only seems to be classical interactions playing out against a fixed universal backdrop that itself never changes.
But the internalist perspective of pansemiosis sees that the fixity of the upper and lower scales of being is itself an emergent effect of scale. It presents the second person POV alternative here.
Quoting Olivier5
I was thinking of Wheeler’s aphorism on GR. “Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve”.
In a self organising system, there is no fixed foundation. Neither direction of action has reductionist priority. Instead it is all about the dynamical balancing act. A co-creation.
It often seems that emergence is about things at different levels of description.
A flock of birds emerges from individual birds, or a chair emerges from a bunch of particles seemingly because they are the same things but being described at a different level.
I think that’s our clue. Emergence is about language, at least in part.
- A flock of birds is an emergent property of individual birds.
Here the words ‘a flock of birds’ is not sufficient to give information about (particular) birds seeing as it could be giving information about a different flock of birds. However ‘a collection of birds’ is sufficient to give information about a flock of birds, seeing as this phrase always gives information that is true of a flock of birds.
That combination of non-sufficiency and sufficiency - I think - is enough to tell us when something is a) one of Aristotle’s four causes, namely the final cause, and b) emergence.
Note that if we use this same permutation of non-sufficiency to talk about consciousness it also explains so called ‘strong emergence’.
- ‘Consciousness’ is not sufficient to give information about a (particular) thing seeing as consciousness might not always involve a particular thing, but ‘a thing’ is sufficient to give information about consciousness, (perhaps in a surprising way: the way that all language gives information about consciousness.)
However with both examples we still see that permutation of sufficiency we typically see with emergence, letting us know we’re dealing with emergence (and Aristotle’s final cause.)
As a result both examples are about emergent properties:
- A flock of birds is an emergent property of a collection of birds and
- Consciousness is an emergent property of a thing (in fact any thing you could name)
As a result it seems panpsychism is true in a non-mysterious way.