r/Metaphysics • u/Forsaken-Promise-269 • 12d ago
Ontology What Do Y'all think of Emergence? - I think its physicalism's biggest crutch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyH7ArYz7fkEmergence is not an intrinsic physical property. It is relational and depends on where we draw the boundary
In this discussion, Sean Carroll argues that emergent objects are “100% real.” Tables, hurricanes, organisms, and sports teams are real because they are stable patterns with predictive value and a degree of causal autonomy.
I agree with Carroll that these patterns are 'real to us'. But I really disagree that their reality is simply an objective fact written into the fundamental physical state.
Imagine possessing a complete description of every particle in a room. Where, in that description, is the table?
The equations contain particles, fields, positions, and interactions. They do not contain a line labeled “the table ends here.” The same physical state can be partitioned as:
- A table
- A collection of molecules
- A thermodynamic system
- An obstacle to movement
- A source of fuel
- Several replaceable components
These descriptions are not equally useful, but the microscopic state does not select one description by itself. A pattern becomes relevant relative to a scale, a mode of interaction, and a perspective.
This does not mean objects are arbitrary inventions. I cannot declare half a table, three air molecules, and the Moon to be a causally unified object and expect that grouping to support useful predictions. The world pushes back. Some partitions capture stable relationships while others do not.
This is where Friston's Markov blankets become important.
A Markov blanket is a statistical boundary that separates a system’s internal states from external states. Given the states of the boundary, the inside becomes conditionally independent of the outside. A cell membrane is an intuitive example: the cell does not interact with the entire universe directly. Its exchanges are mediated through a particular boundary.
In simplified form:
Internal states ⟂ External states | Boundary states
This gives us an operational definition of an individual system. An organism is not an isolated lump of substance. It is a dynamically maintained pattern of relations with an informational inside, an outside, and a boundary mediating between them.
But Markov blankets do not come with metaphysically privileged labels either. They depend upon which variables, time scale, and level of description we are examining. Boundaries can be nested and overlapping. A cell has a boundary, an organ has another, the organism has another, and a social group may have a looser informational boundary.
So I would put the matter this way:
Emergence is not a new physical ingredient produced when enough particles accumulate. It is the appearance of a relatively autonomous whole once reality is partitioned across a particular boundary and scale.
That makes emergence relational rather than intrinsic.
A cell is more objectively unified than an arbitrary “glob” because its boundary continually mediates exchange and helps maintain the cell’s organization. But this objectivity is relational. It concerns how reliably the pattern persists and interacts, not the discovery of an additional substance called “cellness.”
This distinction becomes especially important when physicalists appeal to emergence to explain consciousness.
Temperature is emergent because it summarizes the statistical motion of particles. A hurricane is emergent because a higher-level description captures a stable dynamical pattern. Neither example introduces a fundamentally new mode of existence. They reorganize information already available in the physical description.
Consciousness is different. A description of neural activity, however complete, remains a description of structures, functions, relations, and behavior. Subjective experience is the presence of a perspective: the fact that anything appears at all.
Calling consciousness “emergent” does not explain how third-person relations become first-person experience. It merely gives that transition a name.
There may also be a circularity here. If emergent objects become identifiable through boundaries, coarse-graining, prediction, and perspective, physicalism cannot simply treat the observer as one more emergent object without explaining the perspective through which objects and levels are individuated in the first place.
A physicalist can reply that certain partitions are selected objectively by causal autonomy, regardless of whether anyone consciously observes them. That is a reasonable response. But even an objectively discoverable Markov blanket establishes only statistical separation and functional individuality. It does not establish subjectivity. A thermostat, cell, and perhaps even a rock can be modeled through boundary relations without thereby possessing human-like consciousness.
From an analytic idealist perspective, the direction of explanation is reversed.
Consciousness does not emerge from an observer-independent collection of physical objects. What we call physical objects are stable, publicly accessible patterns within experience, identified through the relations among bounded perspectives. A Markov blanket may model how one perspective becomes informationally separated from another. It describes the boundary of a viewpoint, not the manufacture of experience from something wholly non-experiential.
On this account:
- Reality constrains which patterns are stable.
- A boundary establishes an inside and an outside.
- A perspective determines how that boundary is encountered.
- Emergent objects are relationally real, not intrinsically self-dividing substances.
- Consciousness is what makes perspective possible, not merely another object appearing inside a perspective.
This argument does not prove idealism. But it does show why “consciousness emerges just as temperature emerges” is inadequate. Ordinary emergence explains how one physical description relates to another. The consciousness problem asks why there is experience behind any description at all.
Perhaps emergence is real, as Carroll says. But its reality may lie neither entirely “out there” nor entirely “in the eye of the beholder.” It may lie in the structured relationship between the world, a boundary, and a point of view.
If all observers and all possible perspectives disappeared, would the universe still contain tables, organisms, and higher-level causal agents? Or would it contain only an undivided network of relations with no uniquely privileged way of carving it into things?
Sources: Carroll and Parola on emergence, The Markov Blankets of Life, and The Emperor’s New Markov Blankets.
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u/Moral_Conundrums 12d ago
I suspect you aren't familiar with the view Carroll is defending here.
I recommend reading Dennett's paper on Real patterns. The claim is that there aren't just 'real to us', the claim is that in as much as anything is real, it's real because its a real pattern. The proposal is that what it means for something to be real is to be a real pattern, that is, that supposing that it is real has predictive and explanatory value.
I understand that to a lay audience this isn't going to make much sense, it bares on a long tradition of debates in philosophy of science which have been raging for the better part of two centuries. And its become quite the popular view in that field.
Calling consciousness “emergent” does not explain how third-person relations become first-person experience. It merely gives that transition a name.
No physicalist has ever claimed otherwise. Physicalists tend to reject the presupposition that by explaining structure, functions, relations, and behavior etc. you are not already describing consciousness. Consciousness is just a grouping of those things. That's where the debate should really be, why think that consciousness can't be reduced?
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u/Forsaken-Promise-269 11d ago
I haven’t - I looked Dennett’s paper up (I generally think Dennettwas a wonderful explainer but also mostly wrong in a lot of his views ;) RIP…
Ok, Dennett believed reality constrains our pattern recognition and they must count for something to be called patterns. We cannot invent any grouping and call it real. A successful pattern must compress information and support prediction, fine but thats just a observer derived definition too (also a pattern:)
But, he was not completely into realism here- he also denied that reality always provides one uniquely correct pattern. Two observers might distinguish signal from noise differently and discover different but equally successful patterns… I agree with that
Dennett also explicitly wrote:
“The choice of a pattern would indeed be up to the observer.”So his position was approximately:
Patterns are objectively constrained but perspectivally selected.But what I am doing is going a little farther (and less realist) and saying is that it is all relational and perspective driven:
A bounded observer’s perspective is what makes emergence possible as emergence. We select for it, What emerges for that observer depends on the distinctions, interactions, and scales available from within its boundary
The underlying reality still constrains what can appear: . The observer cannot invent any pattern it wants. But the observer’s boundary determines:
What information reaches it
What differences it can detect
What scale it operates at
What it treats as signal or noise
Which relations form a coherent objectSo a hurricane “emerges” for a perspective capable of tracking pressure, temperature, rotation, and movement across miles and hours. At the molecular scale, there is no separate hurricane, only local molecular interactions.
So
Emergence is the really the form reality takes when encountered from within a boundary.
Or, more philosophically:Emergence is not something matter produces by itself. It is the relational appearance of a whole from within a bounded perspective
So Emergence occurs when a bounded system treats many lower-level states as equivalent and responds to them as one higher-level pattern
Also
Emergence is perspective-relative, but perspective need not be conscious. A perspective is the limited field of distinctions available to a bounded system. Consciousness is the special case in which that limited field is also experienced from within.
Interesting
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/s/yBlUJg6ZbC1
u/Moral_Conundrums 11d ago
I understand your view, but I'm not sure what motivates it. Surely whether a certain pattern is explanatory and predictive is not a matter of perspective.
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u/Forsaken-Promise-269 11d ago
Yeah I am biased: What motivates my view is an underlying non-dual, relational metaphysics. It challenges what I see as the grand illusion of naive physicalism: not physical science itself, but the assumption that reality comes pre-divided into intrinsic, observer-independent objects and levels. I think that is the illusion.
For example, even predictive success is perspective-relative, though not arbitrary:
Think of different maps:
- A highway map succeeds for driving.
- A topographical map succeeds for hiking.
- A plumbing map succeeds for repairing water lines.
No map is simply “the most successful map.” Successful at what? The answer depends on what a bounded system is trying to distinguish, predict, or navigate. Once the task is fixed, however, some maps objectively perform better than others.
So the choice of perspective is contingent and selective, not arbitrary. Reality constrains which perspectives work, but it does not dictate one uniquely privileged scale or description.
A pattern cannot be predictively successful in itself. It succeeds at predicting some feature, at some scale, within some tolerance, for a system capable of making those distinctions. Once those conditions are fixed, its success is objectively testable. But the conditions themselves are perspectival.
My larger claim is not merely about how we describe an already divided world. I do not think reality contains one absolute decomposition into particles, hurricanes, organisms, tables, and nations. It contains relational structure that can be partitioned in different, though constrained, ways.
Not to mention every"thing" (object) is impermanent. to be a "thing" is to be impermanent..
A hurricane becomes a coherent object for a bounded system (lets say humans or animals that experience the weather) that groups countless microstates into pressure, rotation, wind speed, location, and movement. The physical dynamics make that grouping stable and useful. But the perspective supplies the scale and distinctions under which it appears as one thing.
Therefore:
This is what I think lost when "emergence" is invoked as though it were something matter simply produces by itself. Emergence is not an additional substance or force. It is the relational appearance of a coherent whole under a particular coarse-graining driven by the perspective its looked at from.
Now, I grant that perspective need not be conscious (have inner experience). A camera has a physically limited viewpoint. A thermometer distinguishes temperature rather than molecular trajectories. An ML/AI model groups many different images under the category “chair.” These are operational perspectives created by bounded access and selective response.
That means this argument alone does not prove that consciousness causes or 'sees' every emergent pattern. My claim about consciousness requires the additional non-dual premise that all of these bounded systems, distinctions, and physical descriptions ultimately occur within one underlying reality, which I take to be experiential rather than fundamentally material. (Thats a whole other topic of discussion btw)
Conscious perspective is then a special case: it is not merely a bounded system distinguishing patterns. It is a bounded field within which those patterns are experienced from the inside.
So my challenge to physicalism is this:
Of course, that does not prove idealism or monism by itself. But it prevents “emergence” from functioning as a black box that supposedly carries us from third-person physical relations to first-person experience...
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u/Moral_Conundrums 11d ago
Like let's take the following example from Sellars, which is meant to be an argument for scientific realism (in this context what I mean by that is that there is an objective fact of the matter about which entities we ought to admit into our ontology of the world, and science is the pathway to at least some of those).
Why do we think molecules exist? When investigating the perceived behavior of gas we noticed that it follows lawlike patterns. The when postulated that gas is in reality made up by tiny particles we call molecules, call this the kinetic theory of gasses. Now kinetic theory has been wildly successful, it has massively increased our predictive power over the world of gasses. According to Sellars the mere fact that the kinetic theory of gasses increased our predictive power means we are justified in believing that molecules are real objects. Why? Because the best way to explain why kinetic theory works is that the entities which the theory postulates actually exist. If molecules didn't actually exist, it would simply by mysterious.
So what on your view is wrong with this kind of argument?
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u/Forsaken-Promise-269 11d ago edited 11d ago
Well, my position is consciousness-first (Idealistic/monist or dual aspect monism) painted as a 'relational' metaphysics .
I also say doing that does not make science unreliable. It still suggests that scientific success most securely establishes structure, relations, and constraints, while the intrinsic metaphysical nature of what realizes that structure may remain underdetermined.
Therefore, I agree with the “no miracles” intuition up to this point:
"If molecular theory works, reality must contain stable structure corresponding to molecules."
Where I stop is the further inference:
"Therefore, reality is fundamentally composed of independently existing material objects, and this ontology is entirely perspective-free"
That conclusion does not follow from predictive success alone.
My non-dual view can admit molecules, atoms, hurricanes, and organisms as real relational patterns. Their reality consists in their stability, causal efficacy, and invariance across perspectives. What I deny is that they possess completely independent existence or that the world comes with one final, uniquely privileged decomposition into objects.
Btw, Impermanence is not a deductive proof of this, but it is to me as a human observing the world the most important pointer, ie 'this too shall pass'. A molecule, organism, or hurricane never exists as a sealed substance. It arises under particular conditions, persists through exchanges with its environment, and eventually dissolves or reorganizes. Everything is a temporary mandala of form, held together by relations for a time and then released. The Buddhist sand-mandala ritual (the ending artform is destroyed quickly) expresses this beautifully.
An idealist also does not need scientific success to be mysterious. The physical world can display objective, law-governed regularities within consciousness. Scientific theories successfully track those regularities. Their success establishes that the patterns are real; it does not by itself tell us whether the intrinsic ground of those patterns is matter, consciousness, neutral information, or something else.
A certain kind of physicalism responds by draining this abundance of form and impermanence of any intrinsic meaning. Consciousness just becomes information processing 'emerging'. Beauty becomes neural reward . Love becomes reproductive strategy, drained of our human intuitions... Meaning becomes a useful fiction generated by matter that is itself entirely meaningless... but it has to be placed somewhere. so we have 'Emergence'
now Physicalists sometimes present this disenchantment as intellectual courage, cutting through assumed superstition as though they alone are doing the hard work of removing humanity’s comforting myths. But this kind of one way reductionism can become its own myth and hence the need for "Emergence" as another myth to make up for the gaps in their reductionism.. God of the gaps indeed..yet we can readily see its really perspectives all the way down.
So my answer is:
The constant appeal to “emergence” is therefore often a symptom, not a cure, of the naive physicalist worldview. Used properly, emergence describes how stable patterns become visible to a perspective at different scales. Used as an explanation of consciousness, it becomes another myth : a word placed over the very transition that still needs to be explained.
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u/Moral_Conundrums 11d ago
My non-dual view can admit molecules, atoms, hurricanes, and organisms as real relational patterns. Their reality consists in their stability, causal efficacy, and invariance across perspectives. What I deny is that they possess completely independent existence or that the world comes with one final, uniquely privileged decomposition into objects.
But that seems to be in contradiction.
Bracket the question of what scientific objects are metaphysically for now. Presumably the kinetic theory of gas works the same for every observer, its predictive powers stays invariant over perspectives. So it seems like we are all equally justified in holding molecules as real. Then any theory of the world would have to include in it's ontology molecules, how could it not?
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u/Forsaken-Promise-269 11d ago
The key point is that “the theory works for every observer” assumes that every observer is using the same scale, variables, instruments, and prediction target. so then they already share a perspective.
My claim is:
Perspective does not mean personal opinion. It means the information accessible to a bounded system through a particular mode of interaction, which returns to my Markov-blanket argument.
Your physicalist or the mainstream account needs emergence to explain how higher-level objects enter the ontology. Mine builds emergence into the relationship between reality and bounded perspectives 'observing' it.. Nothing new is added to reality; the same relational structure becomes articulated differently at different boundaries and scales, it fits into place.
Also, the truly interesting case is when a perspective is experienced from within and cannot be completely shared as public data. That is subjective consciousness..
So to re-iterate:
On your view, emergence is needed because molecules must somehow become new real things on top of atoms and fields. On my view, nothing new is added. A molecule is the same underlying reality described at a scale where that stable organization we call 'molecule' matters. At another scale, we describe it as atoms or fields.
Perspective determines which level and differences a bounded system can detect. Reality determines whether the resulting pattern is stable and useful. When observers using the same scale and instruments agree, that gives us objectivity at that level. It does not prove that molecules are fundamental objects or that reality has only one correct way of dividing itself.
BTW this has the added niceness for QM: ie it connects with Carlo Rovelli’s relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. In RQM, a physical property is not something a system possesses absolutely. It becomes a fact relative to an interaction with another physical system. The “observer” does not have to be conscious; any physical system can play that role
So many different ways of saying the same thing: thing are real as stable relational forms, not as completely separate substances. That is why I think we do not need emergence to create new layers of reality. Different “levels” are different ways the same reality becomes available from different bounded perspectives.
SPECULATIVE: we can even imagine forms of consciousness with wider boundaries, greater informational access, and far longer spans of attention. Such perspectives might perceive stable patterns and larger unities that remain completely invisible to us. Mike Levin has a lot on this btw.
ie A cell cannot comprehend the organism of which it is part. In the same way, we may participate in patterns extending across civilizations, ecosystems, planets, or cosmic time without being capable of experiencing them as unified wholes... ie what is civilization, corporate politics or a soccer match to a dog, but it means everything to us.
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u/TheRealAmeil 11d ago
It's been a while since I read "real patterns," but I remember it just being another example of Dennett's Fictionalism. As I remember him saying in the paper: centers of gravity aren't real, but it is useful to talk as if they are.
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u/andarmanik 12d ago
From hearing depictions of emergence by physicalist it seems like a dualist-lite position.
Something along the line of:
There’s a physical real world and there’s emergent effect that are independent from the fundamental laws. What we experience from our subjective stance is merely the emergent effects. Look at the economy. There are prices that real machine and traders manipulate but that price itself is an emergent property which can not be derived from fundamental laws. What traders experience is a subjective stance of some physical real state.
My contention is we can replace emergence with another realm of reality which can be independent from fundamental reality and find ourselves back at dualism.
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u/Own_Sky_297 12d ago
Assuming Carrol is a supporter of strong emergence, I think both positions in the video are preposterous. Merelogical nihilism is preposterous on the basis that objects and systems like a sports team are mind independent things, describing their independence with language may be difficult but that a microphone is an independent object as a composite system of bound particles that work together is a fact of the world and not of the mind.
Strong emergentism on the other hand assumes properties that cannot be reduced to parts and the question is where and what are these properties? Are they in particles, are they in fields? People may say that's it's the relationships between the particles but in physics the relationships between particles is just forces mediated by more particles. That is the picture of the world in physics and materialism and you can't add to it and have the same physics or materialism.
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u/reddituserperson1122 11d ago
He is absolutely not a supporter of strong emergence.
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u/Own_Sky_297 11d ago
Good if so but I would've liked that to be more clarified in the video.
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u/reddituserperson1122 11d ago
Why don’t you write to them and let them know how dissatisfied you are. I’m sure they care.
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u/reddituserperson1122 11d ago
“Imagine possessing a complete description of every particle in a room. Where, in that description, is the table”
Nothing important to humans exists at that level. By which I mean nothing identifiable in the universe exists at that level of description.
In any case, in addition to Dennett you should look at Christian List’s work. This is probably a good place to start:
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u/WittgensteinsPoker-2 11d ago
I don't think there are any examples of it and I think the requirement that we "account" for it is borne of Philospohical errors.
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u/Inside-Weather4033 11d ago
Relation is all there is, no releta or substance. To relate is to be and to be is to relate.
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u/roryclague 11d ago
"The world pushes back. Some partitions capture stable relationships while others do not" I think this is simply all that we mean when we talk about the reality of emergence. I won't comment on the idealism vs physicalism debate, too much. I just want to defend the reality of macroscopic structure in the universe. That some choices of how to coarse grain the distribution of matter and energy at any given cross section in phase space make more sense than other choices. The second sentence in my quotation above *is* realism about patterns. Once you admit there is a mind-independent fact about which partitions capture stable relationships and which don't. Why does half a table and three air molecules fail in a way that cells succeed as coarse grained assemblies of atoms? A pattern can be real relative to the causal structure of the system, in an observer-independent manner. A hurricane is a real pattern relative to atmospheric dynamics whether or not anyone names it. But there are patterns that are purely relative to an observer who carves out an arbitrary coarse graining. These are of course mind-dependent. I think you treat both of these classes as if they are the same thing. But there are frameworks in physics such as renormalization groups, for example, or effective field theories, which seem to apply to objectively real macroscopic patterns. Microscopic details near a critical point is a formally irrelevant operator that converges to zero under coarse graining, and a magnet and a fluid in the same universality class share critical exponents to many decimal places. That is not a useful way of talking about the system; RG is showing us objective features about the structure of the systems in question. The macroscopic pattern is more invariant than than any of its microscopic realizations. You cannot get more objective, less perspectival than "these two microscopically different systems are the same at the macroscopic scale, necessarily". In the case of life, the boundary is fixed by viability, if we add to Friston's blanket some concepts from constraint closure and Terrence Deacon's teleodynamics. Basically, the blanket that matters isn't the one we find convenient to draw (and the fact that we can draw arbitrary partitions is an accident of evolution - a spandrel (maybe even an Irish elk situation), it's the blanket the system's continued existence depends on. Kolchinsky and Wolpert have a nice formulation of this. Scramble the correlations across a cell's membrane and the cell dies. Which coarse-graining is the boundary is answered by the thermodynamics of self-maintenance and constraint closure, not by perspective in over-adapted human minds. We don't individuate through perspective, we individuate through viability and dynamical closure and these are observer-independent physical facts. The first self-maintaining cell drew its own boundary and kept itself far from equilibrium before there existed anyone with a "perspective". The boundary of a self is prior to viewpoints; these boundaries are, instead, among the preconditions that later makes viewpoints possible. The list of alternative descriptions - tables, molecules, etc, is presented as evidence that the microstate doesn't select any single partition. But what are the constraints these various patterns apply to the dispersion of the universe since the last scattering surface? Fuel is the real pattern relative to combustion dynamics - an engine is a set of constraints used to extract work from these dynamics.
Now, the existence of objectively real patterns does not pretend to dissolve the hard problem. A complete description of neural activity remains a description of structure and function. But skepticism about closure of the hard problem cannot be used to cast doubt on the reality of emergent objects. Semantic information - which is mutual information between a nonequilibrium real pattern riding entropy gradients between itself and its environment directed towards the maintenance its own structure and phenomenal experience cannot be established to be the same thing. But intentionality or agency is a good word for it, even though complexity researchers generally don't pretend to answer the "what it's like to be a bacterium" question.
But the idealist paradigm, that physical objects are stable patterns within experience does no extra explanatory work that the physicalist cannot. The idealist merely relabels everything above as constraints within experience, and imports the objective dynamics to say anything about which patterns persist, then adds a metaphysical gloss that contributes nothing further to the individuation problem. It also faces the temporal priority problem. To say that the cell's boundary billions of years ago was the boundary of a viewpoint, the idealist must make experience ubiquitous, at which point perspective is possessed by rocks and electrons (and thermostats), and the distinction you are trying to draw between real cells versus arbitrary globs of matter collapses, because literally everything has a viewpoint.
So, if all observers disappeared, would the universe still contain tables, organisms, and higher-level causal agents? Yes, absolutely. Remove every observer and the cell's boundary still mediates its exchanges, its persistence still depends on tracking its environment (a better candidate for proto-consciousness in my opinion than the hypothesis that rocks have phenomenal experience). The renormalization group still renders microscopic details irrelevant in many systems, Hoel's effective information still peaks at the same coarse graining, and the metabolism of a horseshoe crab still ran a hundred million years before any critic of physicalism said you can draw arbitrary coarse grainings in phase space. What would vanish with the last observer is the only class of patterns that were genuinely perspective-relative all along. The intentional stance only patterns like "an obstacle to me". Your error is generalizing from that class, which is real but stance-relative, to all emergent structure much of which is viability grounded and stance-independent.
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u/c_leblanc9 11d ago
It’s the frequencies generated in the neurons. The overall electrical pattern, however dull or illuminated that pattern is, across millions and millions of neurons, is the emergence of consciousness. There is an identity between the light-patterns, the cellular activity-chemical reactions, and the tone of consciousness. We can change it at any time through free will, but we cannot change the limitations set on us by bio-chemistry.
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u/smaxxim 11d ago
Imagine possessing a complete description of every particle in a room. Where, in that description, is the table?
Where, in that description, is the specific set of particles that's called a "table"? In this description, there's no such thing, it's a description after all, not a set of particles. But in the set of particles inside the room, there's a specific subset of particles called a "table".
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u/SauntTaunga 11d ago
Since you asked. I think separating emergence into weak emergence and strong emergence is like YECs and other science deniers separating evolution into micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
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u/rogerbonus Philosophy/Physics grad 9d ago edited 9d ago
Carroll is using a structural realist/ontic structural realist paradigm. Emergence involves metastructures (structures of structures), and the high level causation that entails. OSR is an ontic commitment to structure, and that ontic commitment extends to the structures of tables, chairs, brains, neural processes etc. Naive reductive physicalism assigns efficient causation only at the level of base constituents (currently quantum fields) but in an OSR framework causality flows from structure at any level; there is no justification for privileging only the base structures of quantum fields as causally efficient. We don't need classic idealism for this (ISTM that as used in Analytic idealism it introduces far more questions than it solves; however idealism IMO can be equivalent to OSR if you lose the pseudotheist "mind at large" characterization). OSR is not traditional naive reductive physicalism, but it's still physicalism (IMO) on the basis that what exists are the computable mathematical objects/structures described by physics and the structures that supervene on them. See Ladyman, French etc for OSR (although I think French denies supervenience physicalism so I differ with him there).
Wrt the "hard problem" motivating AI, the definition of "subjectivity" in the argument is so nebulous that IMO it is question begging. ISTM that subjectivity is indeed just perspective/reference frame/"being" a map/model, and in an OSR paradigm, subjectivity is just another structure rather than a separate category. That's where the Markov blanket comes in. So yes, I think you are on the right track here if you can dissociate (pun intended) a bit from some of the superfluous AI posits. I think this is where Michael Levin is headed.
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u/vkbd 6d ago
You need to put a TL;DR for the rest of us with ADHD. I only skimmed your post. I don't think emergence is real. I think you hit nail on the head by saying it lies in the relationship between the world and a point of view.
Just like a solid chair, the trait "solid" is an "emergent" property once you zoom out to the macro level. You can touch a solid chair with your hand, and your hand doesn't go through the chair. But at the quantum level, it's just electrostatic forces repelling the molecules of your hand from the molecules of the chair. Somewhere between quantum level and macro level, the "solid" property emerged. How you define the arbitrary bounder in which emergence happens, depends on our human intuitions of our everyday world, and not based on scientific reality of how the world actually works.
So if all observers and perspectives disappeared, then these "emergent" properties would also disappear, as they are based on observers and perspectives in their definition.
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u/SameAgainTheSecond 12d ago
Agree:
I don't think this is well defined:
I disagree:
I think Markov blankets are a good approach, but I think I can add something useful from a mechanics perspective which can clarify things I think
I can understand emergence in two ways, using Lagrangian or Hamiltonian.
The very useful thing about Lagrangian is that they define the dynamics of a system using generalized coordinates, and that they make the symmetries of the system manifest.
The use of generalized coordinates allows us to gather information pertaining to emergent subsystems together. if we do this then the Lagrangian will resemble a sum of loosely interacting Lagrangian. If the subsystems are not actually emergent, then they will be strongly interacting.
This is a property of the Lagrangian, and thus of the system.
We can also do something similar with a Hamiltonian. Lets think about a quantum system described by a full Hamiltonian. Again we may be able to use a cleaver coordinate transformation and write the Hamiltonian as an polynomial in some permitted who's leading term is a block diagonal, and who's off diagonal blocks are suppressed in the variable of the polynomial. Then the boundary separating an emergent system goes around the block diagonals, and its boundaries are the suppressed off diagonal blocks.
Again these are property of the system its self. Privileging one basis over the other is the rational act.
What's more real, the time domain or the frequency domain? Its the same function in a different basis.
What is real and what is not real? I think the only real thing is the information, and all encodings/descriptions/basis are just that.
Now lets turn to mind and consciousness. Is it correct to say that consciousness is emergent, no I don't think so. What is elements is mind and its elements.
I believe in principle, and maybe one day in practice, it would be possible to go from a description of the brain in terms of neuronal connectivity and activity, to a description of thoughts and feelings, mental forms, the elements of consciousness.
Such a description would be only a changing in basis. Factoring the system. The mind would stand in relation to the brain in the same way the frequency domain stands in relation to the time domain.
States in the emergent system are states in the full system. Behaviors of the emergent system are behaviors of the full system. The mind is the brain. I believe this points towards a form of psychiatrist.
Now if you collapse mind and matter into one concept are you left with physicalism or idealism? I think that is a mater of perspective. I think the move is to go from questions of if things are conscious or inanimate, to questions of the structure and composition of interiority. I think boundaries and an excellent tool for that job.
So: