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34 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

How would

a causal process or property exhibited by a complex system which is not “emergent”

differ from

a causal process or property exhibited by a complex system which is “emergent”?

Here is an analogy: motion, alteration, destruction etc. are things that can happen to entities. These concepts are not a separate process from causation, but instances of it.

This does not make motion, alteration and destruction 'useless' concepts; in life, we need much more than metaphysical concepts in order to understand the world.

You'd be hard pressed to find things that are not in motion, and likewise, things which are not emergent. Nevertheless, what is the difference between a thing in motion, and one not in motion? The same as that between an emergent and non-emergent thing.

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47 minutes ago, KyaryPamyu said:

Here is an analogy: motion, alteration, destruction etc. are things that can happen to entities. These concepts are not a separate process from causation, but instances of it.

This does not make motion, alteration and destruction 'useless' concepts; in life, we need much more than metaphysical concepts in order to understand the world.

You'd be hard pressed to find things that are not in motion, and likewise, things which are not emergent. Nevertheless, what is the difference between a thing in motion, and one not in motion? The same as that between an emergent and non-emergent thing.

Relative motion is a property of an object's velocity or change in relative position.  An object with the property of relative motion with respect to you or any other object is an identifiable and measurable property.  It is both qualitative, closer ... versus farther, as well as quantitative 1 foot versus 3 feet, 1 mile per hour versus 10 miles an hour, and it is also directional in three degrees of freedom in space.

There real identifiable observable differences in reality between objects which are moving or not (relative to something else) are the observations in reality which GIVE meaning to the concept motion in the first place.  If there were no observable differences... such as the observation "hey that thing keeps looking bigger and bigger in my field of view as it 'somethings' in front of me"  ... then there would be no reason to use the concept.

Yes there are different processes, that goes without saying, falling, exploding, expanding, rolling, eating, breathing, shining, freezing.. and they all different, usefully different concepts which are governed by causation.  The class of identified processes are different from things which are not falling, exploding, rolling, etc. and they identify specific kinds of processes which may or may not coexist or happen concurrently. 

The very necessity of concepts come from something recognizable, even something as universal as "existing" (although not technically a special property of a thing in addition to its properties and attributes).

If I point to something and say 'now THAT exhibits "Ish de triddle de plunkeblub"', I better have a REASON for making such a claim.  At the very BASIC level that is why I am asking:

 

How would

a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is not “emergent”

differ from

a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is “emergent”?

 

EDIT: Added brackets for clarity

Edited by StrictlyLogical
brackets added for clarity
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44 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

The very necessity of concepts come from something recognizable, even something as universal as "existing"

Are you claiming that, for example, life cannot be shown to depend on chemistry for its arising?

If your reply is that this is simply a causal connection (no life without chemistry), then you are right, but also missing the point.

If you put togheter a few wooden sticks, you might get a stick puppet, but in the end, the sticks add up to a pile of sticks.

In contrast, take two atoms of hydrogen, add one atom of oxygen and you get a water molecule with completely different properties. You have an 'emergent' property, unlike the previous example.

Perhaps this answers your question:

44 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

How would

a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is not “emergent”

differ from

a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is “emergent”?

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3 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

How would

a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is not “emergent”

differ from

a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is “emergent”?

Whether the process or property is emergent might depend on how we view the complex system.

If we view a computer as a tool designed and built by humans to perform a certain type of task, the computer's ability to perform such tasks is part of its fundamental nature and is not emergent.  If we view a computer in a concrete-bound way as a bunch of electronic components attached to one another in a specific physical way, then under that view the computer's ability to perform those tasks becomes emergent.

(Since it is possible to give a complete fundamental description of human productive achievement without mentioning computers, the computer itself is an emergent result of human productive achievement.)

A Deist who holds that "God" designed the universe to give rise to life would not consider life to be emergent.  

 

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3 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

If you put togheter a few wooden sticks, you might get a stick puppet, but in the end, the sticks add up to a pile of sticks.

In contrast, take two atoms of hydrogen, add one atom of oxygen and you get a water molecule with completely different properties. You have an 'emergent' property, unlike the previous example.

Based on your example, can't we say that the water molecule is also an "adding up" of a "pile of" protons, neutrons and electrons, its constituent parts?

Why can't we make the case that a stuck puppet "emerges" from a pile of sticks by some sort of change/motion?

I suppose you are saying that water-ness as opposed to stick-puppet-ness is beyond an epistemological artifact, emerging from a rearrangement of protons neutron electrons or whatever the constituent entities du jour are. (I am emphasizing the constituent parts having the same properties in my examples as you were doing with the "sticks".)

The key to your argument seems to be that the stuck puppet has no new properties as opposed to water. But even a stuck puppet can't fit the hand like it's constituent stick used to.

The rearrangement of the same entities inevitably causes different properties and they can be recognized with proper context to recognize it.

Epistemologically, pictures that "emerge" can be solely a result of focus, like magnifying glass when you magnify or zoom out.

Non-epistemologically when you physically arrange dots in picture, it is beyond just focus or shifting of attention or panning or zooming. Many different pictures "emerge" depending how the dots are arranged outside of the mind.

Why not just say the resulting images are "caused" by the rearrangement? Why the added complexity? 

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30 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:

Whether the process or property is emergent might depend on how we view the complex system.

How we view a system is not anything about the system and certainly nothing about a process or a property OF that system… how we view something is about us and our capacities and knowledge. 

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4 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:

Are you claiming that, for example, life cannot be shown to depend on chemistry for its arising?

If your reply is that this is simply a causal connection (no life without chemistry), then you are right, but also missing the point.

If you put togheter a few wooden sticks, you might get a stick puppet, but in the end, the sticks add up to a pile of sticks.

In contrast, take two atoms of hydrogen, add one atom of oxygen and you get a water molecule with completely different properties. You have an 'emergent' property, unlike the previous example.

Perhaps this answers your question:

I know from your previous posts that you are intellectually honest.

You ask me if I am making a claim that life cannot be shown to depend on chemistry for its arising.

First of all I am asking about a possible  or purported trait of reality, specifically I am trying to identify it conceptually, if there is anything there.

I am not making any claim about “showing” anything from anything else.  In your specific question you talk of life depending on chemistry.  If you mean the processes in reality which involve molecular and atomic interactions which we study and use chemistry to understand and predict, then I would say life as a thing and a process includes a lot of various processes and structures that include molecules and atoms which are interacting in reality and which we would, at that level of understanding describe and analyze using the science we call chemistry.

I’m not sure any living organism depends on anything, it is what it is and does what it does.  Our understanding of a dog depends on our understanding of biology, chemistry, physics… but the dogs electrons photons nuclei atoms molecules enzymes cells and organs simply all are being and doing continuously as a complex integrated whole.

Different kinds of molecules behave differently.  Chemistry has been around for over a hundred years… it never needed a concept such as this so called emergence.  

You need to point at something more specific.  You cannot use the term emergence to define itself.  The mere fact that different combinations form different things with different properties has been around forever.

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7 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

I suppose you are saying that water-ness as opposed to stick-puppet-ness is beyond an epistemological artifact...

Yes, precisely. 

Every 'pile' of something will exhibit, as a whole, different properties than its components.

It seems that, here, this is what emergence is claimed to be. It's not. 

To answer this as well:

6 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

You need to point at something more specific.  You cannot use the term emergence to define itself.

Emergent properties result not from joining things, but from the reactions caused by the joining.

Water is not merely two gasses stitched togheter, with your mind seeing the collage as 'watern-ness'.

The 'stick-ness' of the puppet can be reduced to its components, the sticks. The liquidity of water cannot be reduced to the gaseousness of its components if you can't differentiate between the two examples.

The claim to 'epistemological artifact' turns all properties into a way of regarding two things glued togheter as a whole, putting (for example) consciousness on equal footing with piles of vinyl discs adding to a stack.

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1 hour ago, KyaryPamyu said:

Emergent properties result not from joining things, but from the reactions caused by the joining.

Water is not merely two gasses stitched togheter, with your mind seeing the collage as 'watern-ness'.

The 'stick-ness' of the puppet can be reduced to its components, the sticks. The liquidity of water cannot be reduced to the gaseousness of its components if you can't differentiate between the two examples.

The claim to 'epistemological artifact' turns all properties into a way of regarding two things glued togheter as a whole, putting (for example) consciousness on equal footing with piles of vinyl discs adding to a stack.

I see, so something other than cause and effect is happening.

Does this analogy fit:

2+2 of Xs join to cause 4Xs as this is simply joining.

Emergence seems to imply that there is an X, such that 2+2 Xs can react in such a way that 5Xs emerge.
    This goes beyond simply joining, something different is happening.

  • Based on the reaction within the X's.
  • And it also satisfies the requirement of the inability to reduce back to the constituent components as 5 cannot be reduced to 2+2 X's.

If we go with this analogy, for one thing, such a thing is arbitrary.
Beyond that, assuming we subscribe to the inflection point brought up in the OP in that this point is an "amount" of complexity that "causes" a change in the rules. If so, the amount of complexity at this point would be in fact the causal agent.

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1 hour ago, Easy Truth said:

And it also satisfies the requirement of the inability to reduce back to the constituent components as 5 cannot be reduced to 2+2 X's.

No. It means that the natures of each 'X' might be such that their mere joining (with no additional consequence) is not possible.

The sticknes of the puppet can be explained by its parts, the sticks. The gaseousness of water can't be explained by its parts, the gasses, because water is not gaseous, it's liquid.

If X represents the gasses, then the cause of liquidity is not wholy in hydrogen, nor wholy in oxygen, but in their interaction. 2+2X adds up to 4X, because you've properly taken the natures of the X's in account, you're not merely playing with empty abstractions.

If X represents the sticks, the cause of the puppet's stickness is wholy in the sticks, as their joining does not lead to, for example, a gelatin-like substance distinct from wood.

1 hour ago, Easy Truth said:

I see, so something other than cause and effect is happening.

Nothing in the quoted post warrants your interpretation.

I refer you to OPAR pg. 192-193 for a statement on reductionism.

 

Edited by KyaryPamyu
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10 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

Chemistry has been around for over a hundred years… it never needed a concept such as this so called emergence.  

This is a historical claim. Was it based on research, or was it asserted without studying the issue?

A cursory glance at articles such as this one will give an account of when and where the concept began to be used in relation to chemistry.

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17 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

How would

a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is not “emergent”

differ from

a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is “emergent”?

The distinction is between emergent and fundamental.  Something is emergent from a system if it is caused by the system but is not fundamental to it.

 

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In the 19th century, German Romantic philosophy was in part a reaction to the reductionism of English philosophy. Germans protested against the implications of reductionism to morality: if a man killing another man is just a bundle of atoms acting on another bundle of atoms, and those atoms act in one way and only one way (i.e. according to past events), then the universe is determined and your free thoughts are, in fact, unfree movements of atoms - and so is your moral outrage at rape or genocide.

Agreeing with the Brits, the Germans claimed that the only way to save things like selfhood, love, punishment of evil etc. was to do away with matter (materiality) entirely. If you start with mind and derrive the world from that, you don't have to worry that life, free will and emotion are mere mechanical effects of blind lawfulness.

Johann Fichte, the father of German Idealism (a movement distinct from Kant's Transcendental Idealism) proposed that the self is only truly a self if it is an independent agent, its own thing - not a sum of completely foreign parts determining every single thing about its identity. His theory was that when the self asserts its own existence (I am I), it conceptualizes the Self in contradistinction to anything other than that (he calls this Not-Self, or nature), and in distinction from a self that is not itself (hence the plurality of selves aggregating into families and nations). He deduces Kant's categories out of a primordial act of self-recognition, Ich=Ich.

Ayn Rand disagrees with the reductionists, but does not go the idealist route like Fichte. O'ism is anti-reductionism. Paraphrasing Peikoff in OPAR pg. 193, a man and a bullet are not 'interchangeable' because they are both a collection of atoms; one collection can die, the other can't. Likewise, what's out there is not a collection of neat rational constructs, such that you can deduce the nature of reality from mathematical equations or boxing observations into a pre-established notion of what a concept should reasonably mean in practice. That type of rationalism is what makes reductionists deny what's right under their nose, e.g. the existence of consciousness, because their logical deduction denies that such consciousness is real.

A while back, a poster on this forum argued against emergence, opting for an interesting theory that mind and biological evolution are impossible, magical, unless you hold that mind has always existed, and that mind and matter 'inter-penetrate', neither having metaphysical primacy. I think he would have some interesting takes on the arguments in this thread.

Edited by KyaryPamyu
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  • 1 month later...
On 6/24/2022 at 1:54 AM, Easy Truth said:

Sounds like this means that: out of a deterministic universe/existence, a non deterministic entity emerges.

As if some areas of the universe are deterministic and some areas are not. Well, how do they intersect? They seem to be in the same universe but contradicting each other (they coexist?). How?

There is no contradiction if the our "universe" is actually a holographic diorama of the entire Universe which is a multiverse of multiverses such that E^\[Pi]I +\[CurlyPhi] [HBar] = G\[Mu]\[Nu]

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On 6/26/2022 at 11:13 AM, Doug Morris said:

I wish EC would define "emergent" as he is using the term.  While he's at it, maybe he could define "informational phase change" and "complexity inflection point".

 

I will, but not here I think. 

Also, sorry for not logging in since. I was more or less just using this as a public storage area for this idea as I developed it and integrated it with the physics more explicitly.

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1 hour ago, EC said:

There is no contradiction if the our "universe" is actually a holographic diorama of the entire Universe which is a multiverse of multiverses such that E^\[Pi]I +\[CurlyPhi] [HBar] = G\[Mu]\[Nu]

Not sure what a holographic diorama is. Is it a hologram of something within the universe?

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31 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:

Not sure what a holographic diorama is. Is it a hologram of something within the universe?

No, it is our "local" universe. The universe that Miss Rand refers too. It just doesn't include all that exists. This paper describes the concept mathematically. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267211322_Split_Fibonacci_and_Lucas_Octonions

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On 6/26/2022 at 9:53 AM, Doug Morris said:

The distinction is between emergent and fundamental.  Something is emergent from a system if it is caused by the system but is not fundamental to it.

 

Exactly correct. The Universe is Symmetry. Each spacetime (such as ours) is a inverse holographic manifestation of quantum computation on the event horizon of any given Plank Length area within it with each possible possibility represented as a change within the error bar of the Uncertainty Principle. So emergent in this context means more symmetrical, specifically data symmetry in the case of volitional consciousness.

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Our specific local universe and timeline is just a holographic diorama of the quantum computation of this data. Entangled data is what the universe is as such.

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  • 10 months later...
On 6/22/2022 at 4:32 PM, StrictlyLogical said:

This is a naked contradiction.

It wasn't. I just didn't explain it in detail. I meant the physics of the universe is deterministic when taken as a whole, which requires the existence of a multiverse of multiverses, while conscious minds are emergent properties of "brains".

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