4 ms·

There are no uncontroversial examples of non-reductive emergence. Of course you could understand the dynamics of a hurricane by analyzing each individual partic

There are no uncontroversial examples of non-reductive emergence. Of course you could understand the dynamics of a hurricane by analyzing each individual particle. There are practical limits in doing so, but there are no theoretical limits to predicting the behavior of the whole from the parts.

Barrin92 6y ago
>Of course you could understand the dynamics of a hurricane by analyzing each individual particle that's actually an article of faith because scientifically speaking we can't. And that's important because it's where reductionism subtly goes from being treated as a scientific method to a sort of belief system. It's not actually obvious at all that say, complex mind states or intentionality can be reduced to physics. It even seems extremely unlikely, because there's no conceivable way to me how the 'aboutness' of intentional mind states are supposed to be reduced to particles. Another good example is maybe life itself. Schrödinger in his book What is Life? categorised life as local 'negative entropy', ordering matter at a local level and exporting excess entropy to the outside, in a sense locally 'breaking' the second law of thermodynamics. When our civilisation warms the planet up and produces heat what it really does is exporting disorder, I think it's quite a good description actually. Aside from the fact that we scientifically haven't proven it, it's hard to imagine how this sort of top-down causal behaviour and complexity is supposed to be reduced to mostly linear particle interactions.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  It's certainly unproven whether complex systems are reducible, but this doesn't mean the alternative is on equal footing. Science since its inception has been one long process of reducing that which was previously thought irreducible. Standard physical processes, like hurricanes, can easily be though of as reducible by inference to the best explanation, as they present no apparent difficulties with reduction aside from access to information and sufficient computation. There are other phenomena from which one can make a case for non-reduction, but I don't think even the best case to be made is all that strong. In my opinion, the only phenomena to present a real challenge for reduction is phenomenal consciousness. I don't personally consider intentionality and life to be insurmountable problems for reduction. The 'negative entropy' of life is really just a computational problem: find the configuration that has the property of being self-sustaining in the face of disordering forces. But some natural processes have a natural computational description, e.g. systematically producing variations of states, and preserving 'successful' states to seed the next generation of state space search. In other words, evolutionary processes are natural computational processes. I don't see the need for an extra ingredient. Intentionality is about meaning, i.e. how can some process have some intrinsic meaning. The answer is probably similar in spirit to the answer of negative entropy. Meaning has an external relation in the sense of being substantiated by context (e.g. a binary digit means heads/tails vs day/night depending on its context). But if you have enough of these meaning units in relation to one another, the system as a whole bootstraps the meaning of itself. E.g., some neuron in a brain means Jennifer Aniston because of the context it sits in the milleu of neurons that collectively create a disposition to respond appropriately to Jennifer Aniston.

Barrin92 6y ago

>Of course you could understand the dynamics of a hurricane by analyzing each individual particle that's actually an article of faith because scientifically speaking we can't. And that's important because it's where reductionism subtly goes from being treated as a scientific method to a sort of belief system. It's not actually obvious at all that say, complex mind states or intentionality can be reduced to physics. It even seems extremely unlikely, because there's no conceivable way to me how the 'aboutness' of intentional mind states are supposed to be reduced to particles. Another good example is maybe life itself. Schrödinger in his book What is Life? categorised life as local 'negative entropy', ordering matter at a local level and exporting excess entropy to the outside, in a sense locally 'breaking' the second law of thermodynamics. When our civilisation warms the planet up and produces heat what it really does is exporting disorder, I think it's quite a good description actually. Aside from the fact that we scientifically haven't proven it, it's hard to imagine how this sort of top-down causal behaviour and complexity is supposed to be reduced to mostly linear particle interactions.

hackinthebochs 6y ago
It's certainly unproven whether complex systems are reducible, but this doesn't mean the alternative is on equal footing. Science since its inception has been one long process of reducing that which was previously thought irreducible. Standard physical processes, like hurricanes, can easily be though of as reducible by inference to the best explanation, as they present no apparent difficulties with reduction aside from access to information and sufficient computation. There are other phenomena from which one can make a case for non-reduction, but I don't think even the best case to be made is all that strong. In my opinion, the only phenomena to present a real challenge for reduction is phenomenal consciousness. I don't personally consider intentionality and life to be insurmountable problems for reduction. The 'negative entropy' of life is really just a computational problem: find the configuration that has the property of being self-sustaining in the face of disordering forces. But some natural processes have a natural computational description, e.g. systematically producing variations of states, and preserving 'successful' states to seed the next generation of state space search. In other words, evolutionary processes are natural computational processes. I don't see the need for an extra ingredient. Intentionality is about meaning, i.e. how can some process have some intrinsic meaning. The answer is probably similar in spirit to the answer of negative entropy. Meaning has an external relation in the sense of being substantiated by context (e.g. a binary digit means heads/tails vs day/night depending on its context). But if you have enough of these meaning units in relation to one another, the system as a whole bootstraps the meaning of itself. E.g., some neuron in a brain means Jennifer Aniston because of the context it sits in the milleu of neurons that collectively create a disposition to respond appropriately to Jennifer Aniston.