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The issue is that emergence is just some arbitrarily picked meaning of something observed from a certain "distance" or from a certain perspective. Emergence is

The issue is that emergence is just some arbitrarily picked meaning of something observed from a certain "distance" or from a certain perspective. Emergence is not an intrinsic property of anything, it is just a (subjective) point of view. It is just another way of saying that things look different from different "zoom levels", hence we assign different models and/or meanings to them at each different level. But that's just our very human perspective, it is not some pre-existing/universal truth of a system.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
moonchild 6y ago
Why is that an issue? You choose, somewhat arbitrarily, a particular level of reductionism to apply. (It seems from what you are saying that you would agree that) atoms are real, but bricks are not; bricks are what we call a clump of iron, oxygen, silicon, aluminum, etc. which is mostly stuck together in a particular shape and size. Bricks are based on a human perception of togetherness and objecthood that is completely arbitrary; there's no real delineation of the edge of a brick, nor is there a real definition of 'brick' in the first place. All of this is (more-or-less) true. Yet, at the same time, not only can I move the slide to a place where the brick is very real (say, when it's smashing out your brains after being wrapped in a slice of lemon), I can also move it to a place where atoms are no less emergent than bricks. 'Atom' is just the name we give to a cluster of quarks in various configurations, with an electron (kind of, arguably) nearby. Yet, atoms are a construct present in physics because they're useful in making predictions about physical phenomena. Nothing fundamental about it. And bricks are a construct in engineering and architecture because they have a certain functional and aesthetic purpose in each of those disciplines. It's all always arbitrary. It's all always human understanding. Science is human understanding. The question is not 'is this just an artifact of human perception', the question is 'is this relevant to the questions I am asking'.
- glenstein 6y ago
  It's an issue because there's completely mutually exclusive conceptions of emergence that take you in potentially ridiculous directions, such as proposing new fundamental physics, violations of what we normally think of as causality, etc, and it has a funny way of showing up in arenas that are notorious for woo and mysticism, such as quantum mechanics, or consciousness, or explanations of how morality 'really' works, it seems to bring with it an entirely new idea of what it means to even explain something. Depending on which variant of emergentism people are talking about at different times, they could be talking about something that's fully consistent with the reductionistic program, something that's not making new claims but is just about levels of description, something that's vague but not obviously wrong, or some profound revelation proposing we overturn everything we thought we knew about physics or some natural phenomena or anything in between. The stakes are either utterly trivial, or as profound as they could possibly get. And depending on who you talk to about emergence at any given moment, you'll get a confident answer that could potentially fall anywhere on that spectrum, or worse, a strange kind of passiveness where this issue is kind of handwaved away.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

moonchild 6y ago

Why is that an issue? You choose, somewhat arbitrarily, a particular level of reductionism to apply. (It seems from what you are saying that you would agree that) atoms are real, but bricks are not; bricks are what we call a clump of iron, oxygen, silicon, aluminum, etc. which is mostly stuck together in a particular shape and size. Bricks are based on a human perception of togetherness and objecthood that is completely arbitrary; there's no real delineation of the edge of a brick, nor is there a real definition of 'brick' in the first place. All of this is (more-or-less) true. Yet, at the same time, not only can I move the slide to a place where the brick is very real (say, when it's smashing out your brains after being wrapped in a slice of lemon), I can also move it to a place where atoms are no less emergent than bricks. 'Atom' is just the name we give to a cluster of quarks in various configurations, with an electron (kind of, arguably) nearby. Yet, atoms are a construct present in physics because they're useful in making predictions about physical phenomena. Nothing fundamental about it. And bricks are a construct in engineering and architecture because they have a certain functional and aesthetic purpose in each of those disciplines. It's all always arbitrary. It's all always human understanding. Science is human understanding. The question is not 'is this just an artifact of human perception', the question is 'is this relevant to the questions I am asking'.

glenstein 6y ago
It's an issue because there's completely mutually exclusive conceptions of emergence that take you in potentially ridiculous directions, such as proposing new fundamental physics, violations of what we normally think of as causality, etc, and it has a funny way of showing up in arenas that are notorious for woo and mysticism, such as quantum mechanics, or consciousness, or explanations of how morality 'really' works, it seems to bring with it an entirely new idea of what it means to even explain something. Depending on which variant of emergentism people are talking about at different times, they could be talking about something that's fully consistent with the reductionistic program, something that's not making new claims but is just about levels of description, something that's vague but not obviously wrong, or some profound revelation proposing we overturn everything we thought we knew about physics or some natural phenomena or anything in between. The stakes are either utterly trivial, or as profound as they could possibly get. And depending on who you talk to about emergence at any given moment, you'll get a confident answer that could potentially fall anywhere on that spectrum, or worse, a strange kind of passiveness where this issue is kind of handwaved away.