Charles Harper - Can Emergence Explain Reality?

Is emergence a mystery? Does ordinary stuff have mysterious properties? Take anything; find and separate all its parts and catalogue their properties. Then recombine those parts. What would you get? Nothing at all like what you expect from the sum of all those properties. It's called 'emergence' and it describes how wondrously our world works on every level.



Charles L. Harper Jr. is former Executive Director and Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation.


Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[paryanindoeur]

This series is a much needed complement to the method & theory videos out there, and an antidote to the reductive materialist videos. Keep 'em coming!

[Laffy-ixxy]

Can emergence explain reality?
Slugs...
Actually, he made a lot of sense. I enjoyed this video.

[simianbarcode]

A simple pendulum made from three hinged pieces instead of string can move in chaotic and seemingly unpredictable ways, and yet it still follows basic physics and has no mind or magic involved in its motions. Complexity emerging from combined simplicity.

[catherinemoore]

Language is truly amazing. 👍
We also have an innate ability to appreciate music and arts, we fall in love, we are moral creatures and we know that we are going to die: all of this is amazing. There's no need for any of them to just survive. Strangely, we become mentally and emotionally sick if we cannot experience these aspects of our own humanity.

[rondennis]

Thank you for your show. The topics that you and your guests discuss; I think, are ones, which will hold center stage for years to come. Like a favorite song of written. "What's it all about Alfie"? "Is it just for the moment; we live"?

[ronhudson]

The slug comment - are we like slugs in our limited ability to understand more complex levels of reality? I think so. We intuit more complex levels of reality but cannot get a handle on them or understand what they might be. I think that’s correct.

[danielsayre]

In reference to the last thing mentioned, language, I like to think of it as a set of tools to give things context within our canon reality and reduce their relative uncertainty to us. If we have a name for something, we can influence its trajectory (edit: within the context of its relationship to us as individuals)

[mondopinion]

Slugs probably do appreciate Mozart in their own way, as being harmonic. Visual beauty can be found in the creatures of the darkest ocean floors. Probably this unseen beauty results from their response, over time, to deep harmonics in the atoms of their bodies. Not perhaps unlike the emergent beauty of Mandelbrot patterns.

[francesco]

Isnt language just a more refined from of communication ? Some sort of communication exist between basically all things

[havenbastion]

Emergence only means a new metaphor for a higher complexity level of understanding. Consciousness is an emergent attribute of cognitive complexity, for instance.

[Dion_Mustard]

the older i get and the more i watch these kind of interviews i just become more and more perplexed and frustrated. i sometimes wonder if everything is here with absolutely no relevance behind it, that it's purely an accident, then other times i think there must be meaning and purpose especially when i listen to stories about near death experiences, ufos, miracles etc. who knows.

[TGBurgerGaming]

Energy never dissipates. It simply changes form. You are an electrical signal within the brain which is energy and can therefore change form.

[uninspired]

Most neuroscientists say top down causation doesn't occur.

If we are going to say it does occur, we should have testable predictions. If we look closely at subjects, brain states and their reports of their experience, we should be able to identify top down causation, but this doesn't happen.

The testable prediction that bottom up causation occurs is that changes to the brain affect mental processes, which of course they do. Surgery, medication, and injuries confirm this all the time.

[anthonycraig]

Cause and effects isn’t how the world really works. We only think so because of our size, mass and speed. Increase of decrease those variables, the causation disappears.

[jeff]

I think the reality of it is that we cannot know what we don't know. How can a slug even be aware of the concept of a symphony never mind the concept of a wheel. We think that because we have this thing called 'consciousness' that we are at some sort of pinnacle. There could be an entire universe of reality happening all around us and our brains simply have no method to sense nor understand it.

[ujjwalbhattarai]

Why need to search reality? reality are in front of eyes.

[TheLlywelyn]

Right here: very articulate set of q & a that turn a generation of thinking (my lifetime) potentially on its head that has influenced modern thought from physics through philosophy, psychology and ultimately society. It's like knocking a hole in the Big Brick Wall - and asking if there's something else behind it.

[stephencarlsbad]

No observations are trivial. All observations are connected in a way that lead to a deeper and complex understanding of the universe as a singular system. Triviality doesn't exist in this respect.

[SH-knut]

Language (or at least human language) is not required for thought - Nature proves this fact all the time.

[neilcreamer]

Maybe top-down causation can’t be understood because it’s illusory? Sometimes I have a thought to do something and I do it but sometimes I don’t. There’s no necessary connection. I'm not sure I even choose what I think.

When it comes to music, many really good musicians at their best say that it’s sometimes unclear whether they are playing the music or the music is playing them. Maybe it all comes from the bottom up and we just think we are doing it?