David Chalmers - Why is Emergence Significant?

Emergence is how the world works differently at various levels or hierarchies of organization. It's what happens when the whole becomes more than the sum of all its parts.

[Spideysenses]

No matter how many people I've seen interviewed about consciousness my two favorites I keep coming back to are David Chalmers and John Searle. They are both able to so clearly express their views as if they've already thought of every counterargument that can be made to their position and can refute it seemingly so easily.

[ac-ukhs]

Spinal tap just found their next drummer

[firstal]

The interviewer is lucky. He has interviewed some of the greatest minds I never moderns age like Witten, Dyson, Searle, Chalmers etc etc.

[ozachar]

Actually very strange to me that all take consciousness as something so special. It seems to me to be a continuum from various animal brains. Would you say dogs or Chimps have zero, absolute zero consciousness? Because emergence, like phase transition in physics, is a jump difference between zero and something of significant value. I don't see any proof or solid argument that consciousness is so different from other mental sensations, like fear, or elation.

[shanelevene]

I'm just as interested to know how his hair emerged from his head like that. Weird.

[bernardofitzpatrick]

Dude is super bright. He is a mathematician and a philosopher.

[Human_Evolution-]

It seems a bit off to say consciousness is the only known example of strong emergence. I guess it depends how you define it.

[david]

Life does not emerge from biology. Biology is life.
Emergence would apply in a transition from chemistry to biology. To my knowledge this has never been either seen or done. So to say life or biology emerges from chemistry is a strong claim; just as it is to say consciousness emerges from biology.

[jamescutler]

It's funny how Chalmers just pronounces it to be true, nonchalantly, that Laplace's demon certainly wouldn't be able to predict consciousness. What an absurd idea! Why on earth should anyone agree with that? Does Chalmers know a guy as smart as Laplace's demon and did that guy tell him he had know idea there'd be consciousness or something?? Either Chalmers is right, and there's this INSANELY cool/crazy/wild thing going on that we're lucky enough to know is there because we experience it directly, or ... or consciousness really is just another example of weak emergence and we're actually really pretentious if we think we can predict confidently what science could or couldn't predict in a thousand or a million or a billion years. There's simply no evidence to believe that consciousness is a case of strong emergence. It could be, of course, but there's just no evidence that it definitely is, and, tellingly, Chalmers not only doesn't provide any (he only says, in summary "I believe consciousness is different than what happened with vitalism"--cool, but why is that belief rational?) but he also doesn't even seem to be aware that evidence is the most important thing he should offer when making such an extraordinary claim.

[infinitytoinfinitysquaredb]

Dude looks like he stepped right out of Spinal Tap.

[reason]

I disagree with Chalmers about consciousness being the only strongly emergent thing in reality. The idea that chemicals could become life is at least as big a jump as consciousness is from biology. Each of the levels are similar. Space-time emerges from energy. Matter emerges from space-time. Chemistry emerges from matter. Biology emerges from chemistry. Consciousness emerges from biology. Each level of these dependencies is strongly emergent from the previous, and that isn’t the end. Think about all of the things that emerge from consciousness.

[trignal]

I wish he could answer whether an ant colony, or bee hive behavior is weak or strong emergence. Does each bee know what it's contributing to the whole? Or does an individual neuron know that it's giving rise to consciousness.

[endover]

Can we say that life and DNA strongly emergence from chemistry?

[unclebirdman]

If something emerges from material (strongly) why then reject the materialistic world?

[plainjane]

I would argue that you cannot separate life from consciousness - that the emergence of life is in fact motivated by consciousness; or that in any case, part of the definition of life is conscious behavior - yes even for one-celled organisms and plants, albeit a more primitive version of what we would call consciousness - I would say, self-motivated behavior, which of necessity includes a subjective component. In any case my own argument about this is the following: if we posit that life and consciousness are merely (!) emergent properties of the physical universe, then we must logically conclude that life and consciousness are in fact intrinsic properties of the universe that manifest under the appropriate conditions.

[EraOneSamael]

Wow, this interview addressed everything I wondered about after learning about emergence. Fantastic questions.

[alainborgrave]

Why does the interviewer never ask D. Chalmers about the implications of his own "paradox of phenomenal judgement". If weak emergence can explain everything we SAY about consciousness, including that it's very special, non physical and "first person", it appears we don't need strong emergence after all.

[bobrolander]

Instead of a bottom up reduction, we need a top down reduction. Living beings needed to process their environment from _both_ objective _and_ subjective perspecitves. These functions formed consciousness, and this consciousness made the development of an organ that can handle these functions neccessary. So in this sense, through evolution mind created matter, consciousness created brains.

[jamesruscheinski]

Could energy organize neurons in brain to have subjective conscious experience?

[Koos_R]

If an entity is able to form an abstract representation of it's environment, it should feel like something, if not why would we be emotionally inclined to do anything with this "emergent" information?