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> ["emergent property"] is "just a magic word to cover over something no one understands." It is. Just like "consciousness". That's how progress works: you tak
by naasking 4y ago
> ["emergent property"] is "just a magic word to cover over something no one understands."
It is. Just like "consciousness". That's how progress works: you take something you don't understand, slice off a piece of the problem by grounding it in something you do understand (physics in this case), and then put a label on what remains to describe the reduced scope of the problem.
What a silly objection.
- toxik 4y agoYour argument works equally well to show that neither term is just magic incantation, but actually grounded in something.
- tasty_freeze 4y agoSince you have decided to not just disagree but call me silly, I will return the volley. Your objection is stupid. With your stance, one might as well say that no words have meaning, all of them are just labels. Trivially true, but not germane. My objection was the author claiming that all there was was a label (no matter which label is happens to be). Instead, there are man-millenia of investigation that go beyond just lumping it under the label "emergent property." It is like complaining that "the theory of evolution" is just a bunch of words that is just a hand wave that papers over the fact that science knows nothing, when in fact evolutionary theory is incomparably most vast than that single phrase.
- naasking 4y ago> Since you have decided to not just disagree but call me silly, I will return the volley. Your objection is stupid I wasn't calling your objection silly, I was calling the article's objection to the terms silly. Complex topics that aren't fully understood are given labels all the time, like the very topic of this whole debate, "consciousness". "Idealism" is also a "magic word" the author wants to wave to solve all the problems.