7 ms·

I recently had the (possibly flawed) epiphany that all behavior is emergent. If you think about it, all things that we consider objects are just semi-permanent

by hliyan 6y ago

I recently had the (possibly flawed) epiphany that all behavior is emergent. If you think about it, all things that we consider objects are just semi-permanent aggregations of fundamental particles that we recognize and label as objects for convenience of thought. When the patterns in such aggregations are outside the space and time scales that allow human minds to recognize them, the only label available is "complex".

jameal 6y ago
I'm curious how this epiphany came to you. This strikes me as very similar to the Buddhist concept of the Five Aggregates, which describe five elements that combine to make up our existence: Physical form -> Sensation -> Perception -> Mental formations -> Consciousness
- hliyan 6y ago
  I was just trying to understand what people mean when they say that "consciousness is an emergent property", which always felt like a hand-wavy explanation. I was weighing that explanation against panpsychism and then this thought emerged.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    I'm wondering which sort of consciousness is under scrutiny. We know when we're conscious and unconscious. E.g. Awake vs Asleep. Even animals exhibit that dichotomy. The other consciousness is self-awareness. Which is hard to detect from the outside. Some animals may have it. Do they understand when they look silly? Do they recognize themselves in a mirror? These may be diagnostic. It's important to know which one is intended since they are so very different, at least in their distribution among living creatures.
    - hliyan 6y ago
      Awareness, definitely. I'm using consciousness in the same sense Julian Jaynes used it (he used to call the other form "reactivity", a term that never quite caught on).
    - zikzak 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed I discovered this book in my early teens and it helped me in structuring my thinking about this sort of thing.
    - Smaug123 6y ago
      > We know when we're conscious and unconscious. I claim that this is not true as stated. The main bulk of the habit-forming nearly everyone needs to do when learning to lucid dream is to recognise when you're dreaming, because almost nobody natively knows when they're dreaming. You have to learn to spot it by paying attention to the things which the dream machinery is very bad at (like text, clocks, and your own breathing).
      - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        Sorry, I meant 'we' as an observer. Should have said "its clear from observation " perhaps. Anyway good point.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    > and then this thought emerged. I see what you did there...
tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
I've always found videos like these to be the most direct (and beautiful) examples of this principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiIUjPF060 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiIUjPF060
beaconstudios 6y ago
This is the reality of bottom up organisation, and is basically a completely different metaphysics to the current Western modernist one. Going further down this path of thought will lead you to ideas like constructivism, teleology, and non-dualism - all ideas that have long philosophical histories but are currently out of vogue.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  It would be nice if someone could untie them from religion, make them simpler to understand, and bring them back into vogue, if they're so useful.
  - rramadass 6y ago
    It has already been done. One of the oldest Schools of Indian Philosophy called Samkhya (which is atheistic) has a very beautiful model of the Universe/Elements/Evolution of the World which has influenced all other Schools (including Buddhism) and is worth studying. You might find the book Modern Samkhya: Ancient Spirituality for the Contemporary Atheist a good starting point.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    There are a few of us out there trying to do exactly that, including the above article.
  - carapace 6y ago
    Well, there was Siddhārtha Gautama, who became Buddha. His original teachings are non-religious. I can recommend the books of David Hawkins for a modern, scientifically-informed view on the subjective experience of Reality. https://veritaspub.com/dr-hawkins/ https://veritaspub.com/dr-hawkins/ > Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. was a nationally renowned psychiatrist, physician, researcher, spiritual teacher and lecturer. The uniqueness of his contribution to humanity comes from the advanced state of spiritual awareness known as ” Enlightenment,” “Self–Realization,” and “Unio Mystica.” Rarely, if ever, has this spiritual state occurred in the life of an accomplished scientist and physician. Therefore, Dr. Hawkins was uniquely qualified to present a spiritual path that is scientifically compelling to modern society.
crdrost 6y ago
Complexity is not just about these larger features, although they are certainly manifestations of complexity. So like a mechanical watch is complex, but it is complex in a very different way than weight gain or weight loss is. Nevertheless yes, this is the basic idea. Systems theory speaks about how you have substances flowing between different buffers or containers, as well as feedback loops that look at the buffers and adjust new flows based on those buffers. Or at least that is one of the most universal models. A nice general set of theorems about this are the fixed point theorems, which say that in a very large set of circumstances such systems find themselves in a “fixed point,” a set of buffer quantities and flows that is self-sustaining and usually healing from small perturbation. This is why when you stop dieting you gain back the weight; the same causes lead to the same effects. The complexity of systems theory in particular comes from a few different properties worth thinking about: (a) not being able to predict the whole from the parts and thus not knowing how to change the system to facilitate the overall behavior change [in other words “if dieting doesn't work, what does?] (b) metastability transitions where there is enough random variation to allow for spontaneous reorganization between multiple fixed points [in other words if I get skinny in the Netherlands and fat in the US, then maybe American pandemic-me is skinny but Dutch pandemic-me is fat—as a corollary there is no such thing as “best practices” really, the same “causes” do not produce the same effects: what is the difference with the above?] (c) when you do manage to create change, it is typically by thinking wishfully about what the system should do and then driving it to produce that “at whatever cost” and initially some “bottlenecks” emerge which appear to be resistant to the desired change, which you want to think is bad, but what actually starts to happen is that everything else about the system re-architects to reinforce that “bad” thing and that makes it okay. [In other words the journey from fat to skinny may seem to be limited at first by my love of food and joyous hedonistic eating... if that's the main bottleneck then unlike a diet’s plan to make me deny myself, my healthy relationship with food will actually feature more of that, indeed the reason that I was fat was that I did not love food enough and with delectatio morosa consumed whole boxes of cookies not for my truest enjoyment of them but because the pleasure of even a few cookies was always denied to me. If you read Marie Kondo's book you may be struck that her diagnosis of mess is that you have too much stuff and her prescription for having too much stuff is perversely not to love your stuff less and be more stoic but to actually love your stuff more. Ecclesiastes seems to come to a similar conclusion.] Yeah, I think those are the most outrageous parts of dealing with systems which makes me astonished by their “complexity.” I often find that if I ask “why can't we do that,” I get some response “because of such-and-so” and then I surprise my interlocutor by saying “but what if I accept the such-and-so?” and, we eventually arrive at a whole different self-consistent system. One example of this in a tech context since I feel I have overmilked the health context: “What if we don't have merge conflicts?” “psh, yeah right, you're never gonna get rid of merge conflicts.” “ok but pretend I am dumb, tell me why?” “because people modify the same code in different ways and you have a conflict!” “so if I could make them take turns then there would be no conflict?” “well you can't make us all take turns on the codebase! That would mean only one person is allowed to work at any given time!” “Ah I see your point, but what if it's more like a Google Doc where everyone sees other peoples' changes in realtime, that sequences the edits so that they never have merge conflicts.” “but then we couldn't do code reviews properly!” “why does that matter?” “because when I am setting out to rewrite the auth logic, I put the thing into a half-finished state! The code review protects those failing states from getting to prod.” “Ok, so is there a way to develop without failing states?” “Well, kind of. Like I can write `if (false)` and then write breaking code. But if our codebase were littered with those I would never be sure what I needed to re-enable.” “So there's no way to define your own version of true and false for this thing you're working on?” “I mean, I guess a boolean variable. But that won't work either.” “why not?” “if you have 10 of those then you have 1,024 different states that the system can be in, it becomes a nightmare.” “and you can't remove them when a developer is done?” “not without proper code review! That's what I am saying!!” “okay but what if you then have both mini review and proper review, mini reviews just check to make sure that everything is behind a feature toggle, very quick approval-at-a-glance of work in progress: then bigger reviews happen when you instate the new code path and delete the old one. We could detect those mass deletions, yeah?” “I mean, yeah, but, I mean, this is just not how it's done. Nobody develops code like this.” “Well, can we try it as an experiment for a month and see if we like never having merge failures more than we hate doing things a new way?”
walleeee 6y ago
Philip McShane wrote something similar "...a thing is defined by... systematizations of coincidental aggregates of the properties of lower things [and] the emergence of the systematic from the non-systematic"
joe_the_user 6y ago
If you are discussing the macroscopic day-to-day reality we human live in, sure, all things and all characteristics-of-things are emergent in broad sense. Every distinct, discreet thing here comes out of the interactions of quantum fields and gravitational fields, so yeah. The problem is saying "everything is X" makes X useless as an adjective. Usually, when you talk about this stuff, you look just a couple layers of reality. For example, if your lower level is water molecules and the upper level is observation, then "waves" "whirlpool" and so-forth are emergent objects/characteristics and water is a primitive object/characteristics - never mind that water molecules emerge from still lower level processes.
hntrader 6y ago
So-called emergent properties are just categorical abstractions that we've created in our mind to cognitively handle the complexity of the macroscopic world around us. These are evolved mental heuristics. There's nothing beyond fundamental physics that's required, in principle, to explain these emergent properties, so in this sense I'm a philosophical reductionist. Emergence is just an illusion created by our brain's inability to deal with the true nature of fundamental reality.
- kaba0 6y ago
  There is no point in talking about the temperature of a single atom/molecule, but it is an important statistical property of a group of molecules with unique “features”. The sum is more capable than each of it’s constituents. You could argue that a hyper-intelligent entity can explain everything due to temperature by the simple movements of atoms but that is not true, since with temperature, we can reason about a system we know only one property about, while the said entity would have to know every detail about every atom. In other words, we created a new thing that could not have existed alone. (Perhaps it is not the best example, but there are countless others :) )
  - hntrader 6y ago
    These emergent properties that you mention (temperature, intelligence) can in principle be described by the individual components (particles) along with the fundamental laws of physics that govern their interactions. The emergent property that we observe is just a cognitive abstraction designed to strip away the complexity and describe the aggregate behaviour of the group of individual components. Our mind was designed to work this way. The most advantageous way to perceive a rock is as a single object with properties pertaining to utility (hardness, potential weapon, etc). This takes the least cognitive load and is the most beneficial way to perceive the world from a fitness perspective. There's nothing epiphenomenal above and beyond the individual components (and the laws governing their interactions) except in our minds. In that specific sense, emergent properties are an invention.
    - kaba0 6y ago

by hliyan 6y ago

jameal 6y ago

I'm curious how this epiphany came to you. This strikes me as very similar to the Buddhist concept of the Five Aggregates, which describe five elements that combine to make up our existence: Physical form -> Sensation -> Perception -> Mental formations -> Consciousness

hliyan 6y ago
I was just trying to understand what people mean when they say that "consciousness is an emergent property", which always felt like a hand-wavy explanation. I was weighing that explanation against panpsychism and then this thought emerged.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  I'm wondering which sort of consciousness is under scrutiny. We know when we're conscious and unconscious. E.g. Awake vs Asleep. Even animals exhibit that dichotomy. The other consciousness is self-awareness. Which is hard to detect from the outside. Some animals may have it. Do they understand when they look silly? Do they recognize themselves in a mirror? These may be diagnostic. It's important to know which one is intended since they are so very different, at least in their distribution among living creatures.
  - hliyan 6y ago
    Awareness, definitely. I'm using consciousness in the same sense Julian Jaynes used it (he used to call the other form "reactivity", a term that never quite caught on).
  - zikzak 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed I discovered this book in my early teens and it helped me in structuring my thinking about this sort of thing.
  - Smaug123 6y ago
    > We know when we're conscious and unconscious. I claim that this is not true as stated. The main bulk of the habit-forming nearly everyone needs to do when learning to lucid dream is to recognise when you're dreaming, because almost nobody natively knows when they're dreaming. You have to learn to spot it by paying attention to the things which the dream machinery is very bad at (like text, clocks, and your own breathing).
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      Sorry, I meant 'we' as an observer. Should have said "its clear from observation " perhaps. Anyway good point.
- airstrike 6y ago
  > and then this thought emerged. I see what you did there...

tenaciousDaniel 6y ago

I've always found videos like these to be the most direct (and beautiful) examples of this principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiIUjPF060 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiIUjPF060

beaconstudios 6y ago

This is the reality of bottom up organisation, and is basically a completely different metaphysics to the current Western modernist one. Going further down this path of thought will lead you to ideas like constructivism, teleology, and non-dualism - all ideas that have long philosophical histories but are currently out of vogue.

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
It would be nice if someone could untie them from religion, make them simpler to understand, and bring them back into vogue, if they're so useful.
- rramadass 6y ago
  It has already been done. One of the oldest Schools of Indian Philosophy called Samkhya (which is atheistic) has a very beautiful model of the Universe/Elements/Evolution of the World which has influenced all other Schools (including Buddhism) and is worth studying. You might find the book Modern Samkhya: Ancient Spirituality for the Contemporary Atheist a good starting point.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  There are a few of us out there trying to do exactly that, including the above article.
- carapace 6y ago
  Well, there was Siddhārtha Gautama, who became Buddha. His original teachings are non-religious. I can recommend the books of David Hawkins for a modern, scientifically-informed view on the subjective experience of Reality. https://veritaspub.com/dr-hawkins/ https://veritaspub.com/dr-hawkins/ > Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. was a nationally renowned psychiatrist, physician, researcher, spiritual teacher and lecturer. The uniqueness of his contribution to humanity comes from the advanced state of spiritual awareness known as ” Enlightenment,” “Self–Realization,” and “Unio Mystica.” Rarely, if ever, has this spiritual state occurred in the life of an accomplished scientist and physician. Therefore, Dr. Hawkins was uniquely qualified to present a spiritual path that is scientifically compelling to modern society.

crdrost 6y ago

Complexity is not just about these larger features, although they are certainly manifestations of complexity. So like a mechanical watch is complex, but it is complex in a very different way than weight gain or weight loss is. Nevertheless yes, this is the basic idea. Systems theory speaks about how you have substances flowing between different buffers or containers, as well as feedback loops that look at the buffers and adjust new flows based on those buffers. Or at least that is one of the most universal models. A nice general set of theorems about this are the fixed point theorems, which say that in a very large set of circumstances such systems find themselves in a “fixed point,” a set of buffer quantities and flows that is self-sustaining and usually healing from small perturbation. This is why when you stop dieting you gain back the weight; the same causes lead to the same effects. The complexity of systems theory in particular comes from a few different properties worth thinking about: (a) not being able to predict the whole from the parts and thus not knowing how to change the system to facilitate the overall behavior change [in other words “if dieting doesn't work, what does?] (b) metastability transitions where there is enough random variation to allow for spontaneous reorganization between multiple fixed points [in other words if I get skinny in the Netherlands and fat in the US, then maybe American pandemic-me is skinny but Dutch pandemic-me is fat—as a corollary there is no such thing as “best practices” really, the same “causes” do not produce the same effects: what is the difference with the above?] (c) when you do manage to create change, it is typically by thinking wishfully about what the system should do and then driving it to produce that “at whatever cost” and initially some “bottlenecks” emerge which appear to be resistant to the desired change, which you want to think is bad, but what actually starts to happen is that everything else about the system re-architects to reinforce that “bad” thing and that makes it okay. [In other words the journey from fat to skinny may seem to be limited at first by my love of food and joyous hedonistic eating... if that's the main bottleneck then unlike a diet’s plan to make me deny myself, my healthy relationship with food will actually feature more of that, indeed the reason that I was fat was that I did not love food enough and with delectatio morosa consumed whole boxes of cookies not for my truest enjoyment of them but because the pleasure of even a few cookies was always denied to me. If you read Marie Kondo's book you may be struck that her diagnosis of mess is that you have too much stuff and her prescription for having too much stuff is perversely not to love your stuff less and be more stoic but to actually love your stuff more. Ecclesiastes seems to come to a similar conclusion.] Yeah, I think those are the most outrageous parts of dealing with systems which makes me astonished by their “complexity.” I often find that if I ask “why can't we do that,” I get some response “because of such-and-so” and then I surprise my interlocutor by saying “but what if I accept the such-and-so?” and, we eventually arrive at a whole different self-consistent system. One example of this in a tech context since I feel I have overmilked the health context: “What if we don't have merge conflicts?” “psh, yeah right, you're never gonna get rid of merge conflicts.” “ok but pretend I am dumb, tell me why?” “because people modify the same code in different ways and you have a conflict!” “so if I could make them take turns then there would be no conflict?” “well you can't make us all take turns on the codebase! That would mean only one person is allowed to work at any given time!” “Ah I see your point, but what if it's more like a Google Doc where everyone sees other peoples' changes in realtime, that sequences the edits so that they never have merge conflicts.” “but then we couldn't do code reviews properly!” “why does that matter?” “because when I am setting out to rewrite the auth logic, I put the thing into a half-finished state! The code review protects those failing states from getting to prod.” “Ok, so is there a way to develop without failing states?” “Well, kind of. Like I can write `if (false)` and then write breaking code. But if our codebase were littered with those I would never be sure what I needed to re-enable.” “So there's no way to define your own version of true and false for this thing you're working on?” “I mean, I guess a boolean variable. But that won't work either.” “why not?” “if you have 10 of those then you have 1,024 different states that the system can be in, it becomes a nightmare.” “and you can't remove them when a developer is done?” “not without proper code review! That's what I am saying!!” “okay but what if you then have both mini review and proper review, mini reviews just check to make sure that everything is behind a feature toggle, very quick approval-at-a-glance of work in progress: then bigger reviews happen when you instate the new code path and delete the old one. We could detect those mass deletions, yeah?” “I mean, yeah, but, I mean, this is just not how it's done. Nobody develops code like this.” “Well, can we try it as an experiment for a month and see if we like never having merge failures more than we hate doing things a new way?”

walleeee 6y ago

Philip McShane wrote something similar "...a thing is defined by... systematizations of coincidental aggregates of the properties of lower things [and] the emergence of the systematic from the non-systematic"

joe_the_user 6y ago

If you are discussing the macroscopic day-to-day reality we human live in, sure, all things and all characteristics-of-things are emergent in broad sense. Every distinct, discreet thing here comes out of the interactions of quantum fields and gravitational fields, so yeah. The problem is saying "everything is X" makes X useless as an adjective. Usually, when you talk about this stuff, you look just a couple layers of reality. For example, if your lower level is water molecules and the upper level is observation, then "waves" "whirlpool" and so-forth are emergent objects/characteristics and water is a primitive object/characteristics - never mind that water molecules emerge from still lower level processes.

hntrader 6y ago

So-called emergent properties are just categorical abstractions that we've created in our mind to cognitively handle the complexity of the macroscopic world around us. These are evolved mental heuristics. There's nothing beyond fundamental physics that's required, in principle, to explain these emergent properties, so in this sense I'm a philosophical reductionist. Emergence is just an illusion created by our brain's inability to deal with the true nature of fundamental reality.

kaba0 6y ago
There is no point in talking about the temperature of a single atom/molecule, but it is an important statistical property of a group of molecules with unique “features”. The sum is more capable than each of it’s constituents. You could argue that a hyper-intelligent entity can explain everything due to temperature by the simple movements of atoms but that is not true, since with temperature, we can reason about a system we know only one property about, while the said entity would have to know every detail about every atom. In other words, we created a new thing that could not have existed alone. (Perhaps it is not the best example, but there are countless others :) )
- hntrader 6y ago
  These emergent properties that you mention (temperature, intelligence) can in principle be described by the individual components (particles) along with the fundamental laws of physics that govern their interactions. The emergent property that we observe is just a cognitive abstraction designed to strip away the complexity and describe the aggregate behaviour of the group of individual components. Our mind was designed to work this way. The most advantageous way to perceive a rock is as a single object with properties pertaining to utility (hardness, potential weapon, etc). This takes the least cognitive load and is the most beneficial way to perceive the world from a fitness perspective. There's nothing epiphenomenal above and beyond the individual components (and the laws governing their interactions) except in our minds. In that specific sense, emergent properties are an invention.
  - kaba0 6y ago