Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ns-mx!iowasp.physics.uiowa.edu!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uupsi!sunic!news.funet.fi!funic!nic!vinsci From: vinsci@soft.fi (Leonard Norrgard) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: emergence Message-ID: Date: 20 Oct 90 14:25:30 GMT References: <3531@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct4.152527.28413@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1990Oct4.173933.7319@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1990Oct5.170535.15023@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1990O Sender: vinsci@nic.funet.fi (Leonard Norrgard) Organization: Soft Service, Inc. Lines: 66 In-Reply-To: cpshelley@violet.uwaterloo.ca's message of 20 Oct 90 00:55:19 GMT >>[computer system example deleted, see the referenced messages] >> A simpler example: For a fire to start (and continue) you need three >>things: 1) material to burn 2) oxygen 3) heat. Combine them and fire >>emerges. Remove any one and it ends. The fire is not a property of any >>of the components. > >Ouch! Your observation is an example of the very thing I was trying >to avoid! The properties of a computer system are (for the most part) >a direct result of design, so that most of its properties are simple >compositions of the properties of its parts, and thus uninteresting >in a discussion of emergence. The fact that removing a part causes >the system to cease functioning (in the case of most parts) addresses >the redundancy of the design and/or its robustness - but these are >also the results of design and not unforseeable features of the whole! > >Indeed, fire is not a property of anything since it is a physical >entity. If combustion is an inevitable result of the right material, >oxygen, and heat, and flames are an inevitable result of combustion, >then there is nothing 'emergent' here to discuss... I think perhaps >you are using the term "emergent" in a colloquial sense that isn't >generally meant when the subject of philosophy comes up. I think the problem here is the usage of "designed". We design a computer to behave predictably, it is at all times a predictable system given that we know besides the internal states also what external signals are fed to it. We call a computer that doesn't work according to its specifications broken, it doesn't obey the design anymore. A broken computer has of course not changed the rules for how the computer is to work (its "design"), but is a result of some external force or a part that goes bad because of purely physical reasons. No matter what, the computer system can't change its design nor the rules that it must follow. "It" has to live with the logic design we give it. In the same way the above fire can't change its design, ie. no matter what, it must start burning given the three components are present. We could view this as a consequnce of the design of natural laws. And as above for the computer, the fire nor we can't (presently, at least) change the laws of nature. "It" has to burn by following the laws of nature. If consciousness now is an emergent property of the brain (or some other physical entity), must it not obey the same laws of nature? This of course, is the divider of dualism and materialism. If we somehow concludes that the answer is "no" then we use "emergent" to describe something we do not understand, we make it a synonym to either "magical" or "unknown pysics". This effectively makes the phrase meaningless even if it turns out to be "unknown physics": we can not understand what we do not know. I think that the same argument would hold for emergent properties of complex systems. Some thinkers might want to differ between "emergence" in simple systems that we understand well and "emergence" in complex systems that we understand only vaguely, if at all. I don't think this can be done without giving the same word different meanings, and if we do so, we loose our grip on possible connections between the two meanings. So are the natural laws designed? I do not think it matters what the answer is (and maybe there is no answer), we can't change them and it seems hard to disregard them. I hold that I'm conscious in either case, just as the fire will start in either case. (This is not to ask for flames, I hope ;-). (Note: I use "dualism" as a catch-all for "presently unknown physics" and "non-existant physics, wether we presently know that or not".)