Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!helios!n025fc From: n025fc@tamuts.tamu.edu (Kevin Weller) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: emergent properties Message-ID: Date: 1 Nov 90 01:39:39 GMT References: <1990Sep29.213139.2876@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <90302.163701JAHAYES@MIAMIU.BITNET> Sender: usenet@helios.TAMU.EDU Organization: Texas A&M University Lines: 101 In-reply-to: JAHAYES@MIAMIU.BITNET's message of 29 Oct 90 21:37:01 GMT In article <90302.163701JAHAYES@MIAMIU.BITNET> JAHAYES@MIAMIU.BITNET (Josh Hayes) writes: > I seem to be hearing that many out there believe there is no such > thing as emergence, reasoning that (paraphrased) "if we REALLY > and FULLY understood the system and property in question, we would > understand how that property arises, therefore it would no longer > be emergent". This seems to me to miss the point (and is probably > an unfair characterization, to boot, but where would we be without > rhetoric? :-) ), which OUGHT to be that systems describable as > hierarchical in some sense can have properties which "reside" at > particular levels in the system, or are observable only when the > system achieves some minimum level of complexity. Again, I harp > on ecosystem theory for examples. Ecosystems have properties, or > descriptors, which are meaningless when applied to the parts of > the system, or even to the collection of the parts without the > structure inherent in the system. That these properties are of > the ecosystem itself, and not just a conglomerate of some property > shared by its parts, is a non-trivial point, and I must add, one > which is not taken as proven in this case.... > > With respect to AI, I missed the initiation of this thread, but > I suspect it had something to do with consciousness and where > consciousness resides. The idea that a complete understanding of > the brain, mind, and the relationship between the two, would render > the question answerable does not vitiate the fact that consciousness > is not resident in individual neurons (or is it?), but somewhere > in there, as complexity accrues, it shows up. That is an important > property in human, or at least biological, cognition. Yes! After studying the problem on my own, I have come to agree with your interpretation of emergence. My original ideas on this were rather crude; please forgive me for that, since I was merely conducting a preliminary exploration of the topic. I'm pursuing something somewhat different (but related) now, so it may not be all that refined yet either. It has long been a problem of materialistic philosophies of mind to explain how a living organism could possibly result from the assembly of non-living atoms (or perhaps more to the point, how a conscious entity could arise from a set of non-conscious neurons). Emergence (the idea) was introduced to make materialism consistent with itself (i.e., to render it *non-self-contradictory*), NOT to disprove it! Without it, we are left with an absurdity. Mind you, all this proves is that materialism is *possible*, NOT that it's true (I think it is, in a way; more to come...). Now for my next trick, I'd like to try out a little argument on you all to demonstrate the absurdity of total reductionism. Be aware that an equivalent argument can be presented against total holism, so what a reasonable person should be after is the right balance for what he/she happens to be studying at a given time. It has long been a premise of reductionistic materialism that material things are the only things really existing, everything else being mere composites best understood in terms of the matter making it all up. Does everything make sense only in terms of parts? Or more to the point, can consciousness be said to exist at all in a materialistic universe, or must it be understood properly only by referring to those parts that produce an illusion of consciousness? I have been told that neurons are more real than conscious states because they are more concrete (material) (even though it's pretty obvious to me that consciousness, however we might describe it, is real since I experience it quite directly). Well, if we must always reduce to REALLY explain anything, let's start by breaking down the central nervous system into ever-smaller parts. As we pass from one architectural level to the next more fundamental one, we eventually come to the neuron. Can we say we REALLY explain consciousness when we fully understand neurons? But neurons can be reduced even further, so why stop now? We can reduce through the various levels of neuron structure until we come to, say, a complete understanding of the molecules making up a neuron. Now do we REALLY understand consciousness? Not according to the reductionist hypothesis, since we can render molecules asunder and examine atoms, then subatomic particles, then ... per modern micro-physics, we don't ever come to anything truly "elementary," but we do arrive at a description-level below which size and the idea of "parts" have no meaning. Hence, we can't REALLY explain anything in a completely reductionistic way as we can't reduce to any ultimately fundamental description, yet we are told that the more fundamental, the more real. If nothing exists but for its parts, then NOTHING EXISTS: not brains, not neurons, nor anything else! Here we have used an argument from reductionism to disprove reductionistic materialism, QED. I think this whole idea makes some committed reductionists uncomfortable because it shows that conscious phenomena are just as valid as brain phenomena. This seems to some like a form of dualism, but it might be more accurately termed a double-aspect theory of mind since there are (at least) two aspects of the *same* events (mental and neurological) rather than two separate *substances*. The need for a separate mental substance disappears (sort of like the need for phlogiston to explain combustion or caloric to explain heat) once we begin to realize that a single system can have many descriptions. An even better name might be indefinite-aspect theory, since there is an indefinite number of ways to describe a given system, none of which has any more claim to validity than any of the others. This is one reason why we have so many different scientific disciplines addressing different levels of abstraction (four general examples presented from more fundamental to more abstract: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology). -- Kev