Strong emergentism

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

From the Wiki article on Emergentism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism:

The latter group therefore holds a stricter definition of emergentism, which can be rigorously stated as follows: a property P of composite object O is emergent if it is metaphysically possible for another object to lack property P even if that object is composed of parts with intrinsic properties identical to those in O and has those parts in an identical configuration.
What in hell is this supposed to mean? The only thing I can take from this is that an emergent property must involve some randomness. Either that, or there is some dualistic notion that an object's "parts," "properties," and "configuration" do not necessarily exhaust everything about that object. The former is certainly a possibility and the latter is wordplay.

More here: http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/emergence.html

~~ Paul

[Beerina]

There are two uses for "emergent behavior".

1. Not (easily) predictable from the sum of the parts. E.g. chaos theory stuff. Nothing mysterious about this use.

2. Something akin to spiritual dualism, but dressed in pre-scientific clothing.


The latter primarily occurs in the philosophy of AI, in which it seems that the brain, which has a "job" of processing data, "and only that", thus indicates consciousness magically arises from the data processing itself. Hence you could swap neurons for electrical circuits, water pipes, or pure software, and get the same, real consciousness.

Set against this were guys like Searle, who pointed out that, whatever consciousness is, it is a real phenomena, and therefore arises from stuff "out there" somehow, however poorly understood. Hence a simulation, or even a swap of neurons for circuits, would not (necessarily) give rise to the physical phenomenon of consciousness any more than swapping software for a lightbulb filament would give rise to real photons flying away.

This is why I don't like Wikipedia that much. They take what should be a simple concept and, once the brainiacs regurgitate a reference manual, leave a bunch of symbols that are useful to nobody who doesn't already mostly understand the concept. They need to write it in more of a learning guide. E.g. Bell's Inequality stuff, as an astoundingly poor example.

[Beerina]

Re-reading that "rigorous" :big: description, yes it does seem to be lacking something if they mean something, anything, that's non-random that would differentiate the two Os. Of course, the religious have already presumed there's a third thing existant besides determinism and randomness: the mysterious free-will thingamabob spiritual whatchamacallit that is able to make decisions that are neither deterministic nor random*.




* Though, of course, the punishment (Hell) and reward (Heaven) for choosing...poorly...is highly deterministic in it's use of threat and promises to alter the decisions.

[blobru]

From the Wiki article on Emergentism,

[fixed wikilink]

What in hell is this supposed to mean? ...

-- That the article's last editor left out a negation. :p

It ought to read:
The latter group therefore holds a stricter definition of emergentism, which can be rigorously stated as follows: a property P of composite object O is emergent if it is metaphysically impossible for another object to lack property P even if that object is composed of parts with intrinsic properties identical to those in O and has those parts in an identical configuration.

-- just a standard definition for property supervenience.

[CFLarsen]

if it is metaphysically possible

*bing*

What is not "metaphysically possible"?

If nothing is, what is not "emergent"?

If nothing is....

*bing*