Olivier5

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 gro...

I agree with the criteria that an emerging "thing" or phenomenon must be more than the sum of its parts, must exhibit novel properties that its parts ...

Let's explore a few examples. I primarily have life in mind, but it may be useful to look at a few non-biological emerging structures to test the crit...

The scientific perspective, as far as I am concerned.

It is just arrangement of matter. Solid, liquid and gaseous phases are well known physical concepts about how atoms "connect" or not with one another.

Good question. I suppose that various chemical bonds and forces would need to exist between components, bindings them in certain ways, for an emerging...

Because schopenhauer1 is not a zombie, in the sense that he has got something called subjective experience. He maintains a difference between subjects...

I have not ventured outside our universe yet. Will tell you if and when I do.

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 ...

That could explain why Dennett rarely makes any sense: his intuitions are simply mistaken.

I don't know that this is a fact... Our eyes resemble cameras quite a lot. They have an aperture, a lense and a photosensitive surface on which the im...

I suggest you ask yourself why you don't expect anyone to mistake a horse-shapped cloud for a real horse. What is the essential difference between the...

Who said I didn't?

My entry: ... because of the mise en abyme allowed by our two brains talking to one another. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d3/9c/28/d39c28faac90e95a6...

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".

It's an illusion created be your perspective. It's only when seen from a certain angle that it looks a bit like a horse. If you see the same cloud fro...

Only Pi remains in the sky... :grin:

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 ...

Source? There are many, but the one I prefer is the capacity of a structure to repair and replicate itself. Re. abiogenesis, there are two leading hyp...

I think it does, Banno...

Why thanks, glad you liked it. Who said philosophy is the capacity to marvel?

What is emerging is a functional structure. How is the core of the problem. Embryology has made progress and so has evolution theory, but neither can ...

The now classic answer is: when the whole is more than the sum of its parts. That is to say, when there is a discernable and somewhat functional struc...

It is already. Biology cannot be reduced to physics.

Is there something you are trying to explain? If yes, what others are trying to explain is kinda secondary.

Sometime when you look at clouds you see patterns in them: eg a horse head, a cross or a dick. But this pattern is not real in the sense that you proj...

... artifact

No one can be compelled to faith: hence (each generation of historians have experienced this) the passionate character, the bitterness, the infinitude...

Both bitter and sweet, obviously... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste

There is always a distance between the observer and the observed, even when you observe yourself. That would be why being self-conscious is a problem ...

How would one prove that a particular belief is positively true? I don't think that can be done, there will always be an element of doubt, however sma...

Rationality is a means to an end, though, and the end, the goal, is always emotional. Even the love of wisdom is a form of love.

Emotions are not a bad thing. They are just another way to think, in fact.

I mean, concepts are tools for thinking. If a plumber decided to let go of wrenches because he can't really understand wrenches, and moreover wrenches...

To the naïve, self-denying materialists, yes. Which is why they fail. I am reading Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau-Ponty and liking his perspec...

Ii don't think so. Life is much more than physics.

As the thread creator, I grant you the freedom to talk about whatever you'd like to talk about here. But for me, what is interesting is NOT to shoot d...

As I am wont of pointing out, the obvious problem with that is that Quine was mindlessly referencing some kind of stuff when he said that, by using th...

"Physical" does not really work here. The body and brain are biological. Life is already far more than just "physical". It's about information. Your b...

I'm waiting.

Right on. Quining Qualia is one big straw man.

I remember when I remember, I remember when I lost my mind There was something so pleasant about that place Even your emotions have an echo in so much...

I'm just trying to keep us grounded in empirical data here. Kids can learn to name colours, predictably so, and these colours they name seem to corres...

And yet we all can agree than certain cars are blue, and others not.

Indeed. Especially when the writer keeps casually and carelessly using concepts that he also contends are meaningless. This can only lead to confusion...

Question for those who have actually read the paper and whose intelligence wasn't insulted by it (for some odd reason): Apparently Dennett doesn't lik...

I doubt it, seriously. One reason is that human beings are quite opaque to themselves, able to hide things from themselves. There are such a thing as ...

Seven, with the sense of equilibrium. You access these (reflexively) through some sense, in my view, through self-awareness, rather than directly.

Not sure what you mean here. To taste sweet is an objective property of sugar? Not really. When you say"The sweetness of the coffee I had today", it's...

There's no real difference between the three, it's all a language trick. Expression 1 sounds objective but what does "tasted sweet" mean, if not some ...