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I don't think that's a very controversial point of view. Emergent behavior is all around us - ant colonies, neural networks, and yes, biological organisms. Whe

• ItsMe000001 8y ago
  > I don't think that's a very controversial point of view. So why do we have these threads right here, that prompted me to write this? > Whether emergence can explain everything Nothing can explain "everything". What does that even mean? I refer back to my comment. You use the right tool for the job, and that is a different one depending on context and "zoom level". See my comment? As I already wrote, even if you had a "perfect" low(est) level model, of what use is it to you on a much higher level? You cannot deal with an unmanageable amount of "low level" model (the "but in theory" argument is not even a good one in theory - reminds me of "but I can in theory imagine things happening at the exact same time light years away" before relativity became way too established for anyone to dare make that kind of statement to not be laughed at). You can't use the same model for everything. Even if you had the perfect knowledge of the lowest level you'd have "emergent models" on higher levels. You can't work with quantum theory to explain chess (which, in addition, is disconnected from the actual physical chess pieces used, it could even just be electrons in a computer instead of wooden or metal or plastic chess pieces). PS: Using the opportunity of the follow up comment to add to my original one: Another POV is - just another mental model, not "the ultimate explanation for everything", one model among many - is that the low(est) level just is the hardware, the silicon. When you write software you don't care about the (exchangeable, extremely variable) hardware underneath. Without it there would not be "chess" - there would be many "chesses" because the game in software would be something completely different from the game using wooden pieces. We would not see any of those high level concepts because we would drown in detail.
  • pka 8y ago
    > Nothing can explain "everything". I'm not saying I argue for the opposite, but that is very definitive statement in need of a very strong argument to be taken seriously. > What does that even mean? Things that we don't even know how to talk about yet, like consciousness. Even if consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon, this still doesn't explain the subjective experience of consciousness. Subjective experience might be irreducible, but it might not. We don't know yet. From what I understand, you're claiming that we can't explain higher levels of emergence in terms of lower levels. But that's not true, and your example of hardware/software is the prime example of that. We can explain or model every level of abstraction perfectly in terms of the preceding, lower level of abstraction, until we get to the quantum mechanical properties of the substrate your software is running on. Whether it's practical to talk about the rules of chess in terms of QM is another matter - it's not - but I'd maybe argue that's because we're not intelligent enough to hold enough information at once in our brains, not because of some inherent impossibility of doing so.