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How do you mean emergent phenomena? Like with gliders and stuff in Conway's game of life? Where the rules of the game are trivial, but the higher level behavior
by kosievdmerwe 3y ago
How do you mean emergent phenomena? Like with gliders and stuff in Conway's game of life? Where the rules of the game are trivial, but the higher level behavior is not.
That said, if that's what you mean, then it's been my belief for a long time that if we were given a book with all the true laws of physics at the lowest level we would still need to spend centuries deriving useful approximations for our practical concerns at the larger scales.
- hgsgm 3y agoIt's a pretty standard belief. We've spent centuries as a species investigating the consequences of simple approcimate rules like F=ma.
- nathan_compton 3y agoWell, consider the art installation called Descension by Anish Kapoor[1]. The vortex which makes up the piece emerges from the constraints imposed upon the fluid by the artist. If we replaced the water in the installation with any fluid with similar viscosity, the vortex would remain. Thus it appears to be the case that the vortex does _not_ supervene upon the actual substances which makes it up per se. In the case of Descension the constraints are somewhat artificial and imposed by the artist. Arguably, the phenomena supervenes upon the physical structure of those constraints. But consider some living organism. It's various physical parts might be replaced by other parts with similar properties (with respect to their function) and the organism would keep existing as itself. But there isn't any particular substance which maintains the constraints which define the organism. Some philosophers of science (eg Terrance Deacon) uphold that this means emergent phenomenon do not supervene upon their material constituents per se, and are thus not determined by the laws of physics which dictate their properties. I don't buy it, but it is a position. [1] https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/02/anish-kapoor-decension-vortex/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/02/anish-kapoor-decensio...
- kosievdmerwe 3y agoInteresting. I definitely don't agree with that myself. It sort of reminds me of the Philosophy of Mathematics[1], where there are some schools of thought that I consider vaguely ridiculous too. Like some schools of Platonism suggesting mathematical objects actually exist somehow instead of it just being a convenient linguistic shorthand. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics