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It's not difficult to accept that consciousness could be an emergent property, but it doesn't provide any insight. How do we get the abstraction layer of coher
by alpaca128 5y ago
It's not difficult to accept that consciousness could be an emergent property, but it doesn't provide any insight.
How do we get the abstraction layer of coherent thoughts from just a collection of neurons? We have no idea.
Sure your explanation makes sense. But it's a bit like explaining the creation process of black holes with the words "they're an emergent property of gravity". It doesn't tell us anything, and if we want to understand it deeply we can't be satisfied with such a simple non-answer.
- davrosthedalek 5y agoI wouldn't call black holes "emergent". They do behave very similar to other gravitational objects -- just more "extreme". Another example are atoms: Most of their properties are easy to predict from the properties of their constituents and from the physical laws: The mass of atom is the sum of the mass of the constituents, minus the binding energy, which we can easily predict. But, for example, nucleon mass is emergent. Most of it is created dynamically by QCD, and we cannot easily predict it. We can, for example, not easily predict how the mass changes if we change properties of quarks or gluons. A brute-force lattice calculation is required. Weather is a similar example. We understand the basic rules, but weather patterns are only predictable with limited success and a lot of forward simulation.