Tim Maudlin - What is Strong Emergence?

The world works at different levels—fundamental physics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology—with each level having its own rules and regularities. Here’s the deep question: Ultimately, can what happens at a higher level be explained entirely in terms of what happens at a lower level? If the answer is ‘No’, if complete explanatory reduction fails, then what else could be going on?

Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of science and a Professor of Philosophy at New York University.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, 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.

[KushagraaDubeyy]

1:50 breathtaking zoom in, kudos to the photographer🌟

[theotormon]

Maudlin seems to always see right through to the heart of the matter.

[samuele.marcora]

Clearly explained the differences between physics and other sciences

[haydenwalton]

the most unforgiveable of all the fallacies - the argument from person incredulity

[cemerson]

Has anyone noticed that what we perceive more easily as being “routine and regular” we accept more quickly and with less questioning as somehow being “resolved”?

And what we can’t perceive with our ordinary sensory inputs, like “consciousness”, we call a “hard” problem.

We can’t explain the laws of motion, or the 4 “fundamental” forces, any more than we can explain the laws of consciousness.

We just accept the first as existing and go on from there.

We need to do that with consciousness.

[farhadfaisal]

''Emergence'' is a quality that is n o t in the sum of the independent parts of a ''whole'' but, of a whole whose parts are under conditions of interactions/correlations.
(Whole = Independent Parts + Interactions/Correlations.)
For example, the quality ''red'' is not simply a frequency of the visible spectrum per se but it emerges under the condition of its interaction with the visual system of a brain and the specific sensation/emotion that it evokes in a body. It's the job of science to describe faithfully/fruitfully the conditions of the emergence of ''qualia'' up to their sensation/experience, directly in oneself and/or in other bodies by self consistent inference.
(In this view, there is no consciousness of a ''qualia'', say ''red'', without the condition of a brain and its body to experience the sensation or to proclaim it self consistently.)

[nyworker]

How do we make science in our brains? Our visual systems are the most advanced systems in nature and perform natural science by perceiving the movement and timing of objects. It is also highly integrated into the sensorimotor system.

[shephusted]

why the problem with emerging chaos once you have the right ingredients - chaos and emerging properties is interwoven into order on a base level

[-by-_Publishing_LLC]

I'm not a big fan of the *additional qualifiers* that get added to these constructs (i.e., hard, soft, strong, weak, etc.). We observe different stages of emergence and then assign "strong" or "weak" depending on the end result. But these qualifiers are based on *human-assigned value* that I don't believe "Existence" ever cared about during the emergence.

*Example:* Let's say over time, a certain type of matter starts joining together and forms a new mineral that has taken on different shapes over the time of its emergence. We'll call this mineral "Ballium." Early on, this Ballium was amorphic; later it' became more pancake-shaped, even later it ended up rhomboid. Then millions of years later, this new mineral ends up being spherical-shaped.

We would label this "Weak Emergence" because there's nothing special about it to earn a lofty "Hard Emergence" tag.

However, because the mineral is now spherical, it rolls down whatever hills it forms on and collects at the bottom along with millions of other spherical-shaped Ballium balls. A consequence of this conglomeration of Ballium balls is that it filters water and adds a special mineral that allows a specific lifeform to flourish whereas it cannot survive anywhere else without this specific mineral-laced water.

Suddenly our "Ballium balls" now get labeled as "Strong Emergence" because of its strangely positive impact on nature and it's inexplicable connection with the emergence and survival of the once-doomed lifeform.

Then we all write a bunch of scientific papers trying to decide if the Ballium Balls were intentionally designed to do what they do or if it was all just a random phenomenon.

[Rippinsteo]

Matter is energy and energy is motion, or movement. Time and space are not fundamental. They are both emergent from the presence of energy. The most fundamental question currently is, energy is the motion of ultimately what? Ripples in various fields? What are fields?

[patientson]

Consciousness have a character my dearest brother. I am really happy with you. I never expected that as a simple definition, yet it came out in a powerful manner.

[kimsahl]

Strong emergence = a conception that is refound as an outer existence.
Weak emergence = a conception that is't refound as an outer existence.

[SandipChitale]

In the discussions of about emergence and especially so-called strong emergence or top-down emergence there is some confusion as to how far back an analysis needs to be done about a particular topic of discussion. For example, strong emergence proponents say that economic/commercial cause/effects are not to be found in the laws of physics e.g. when the technology improves and the prices of computers fall, more people start buying computers, and they see - prices going down actually made a person buy computers is nowhere in the laws of physics. Checkmate! Not really. For this case one cannot only start arbitrarily at the point where the prices of computers dropped and that affected how many people bought the computer. For this you have to understand how the commerce evolved, how people want to maximize what they have based on the limited money they may earn. And all of this started when humans evolved and started doing barter (first) with exchange of goods, and so on....and before that how they evolved and so on....and ultimately we can got how the life came about etc. Yes if one insists on physical explanation of some of the higher level concepts, one has to some times go back tracking enough to understand the full phenomenon. In fact one of the other videos on CTT, George Ellis, a great scientists, makes such a comment (in the episode named "George F. R. Ellis - Metaphysics vs. Materialism?") about computer programs and how they can make thing happen in real word, which he claims is a top-down causation. Really, George? And frankly that really surprised me that he is doing such short-sighted argument based on a, what I call, past-truncated analysis. Higher order systems like Economics, have higher order explanations in the lingo/terminology/concepts of that level. If you want to downshift to the lower lever fields, you have to downshift the explanation and sometimes do a longer past duration analysis to find the explanation at the lower levels. For example the behavior of humans at social and economic level can be explained in social and economic terms. But if you want to start going down to biological, chemical, physical level, you have to downshift the explanations to evolution, biochemistry, molecular biology, molecular chemistry, and atomic physics as one descends the levels, and also one has to extends the past time horizon to complete the analysis to boil down to physical explanations. Sara Walker and Lee Cronin's Assembly theory explains this aspect very well.

[democraticman]

We've got to get off our high horse here. We have built our sciences around what we can physically see, the quantum world and the cosmos doesn't work the same and we shouldn't expect them to. Let's the drop the over 2, 000 year old conversation of god and embrace new thinking, its stifling us.

[Andrew-losc]

Art isn't art. It's just an ability to bend light in some form or fashion.

[dr_shrinker]

2:52 photons are only visible when they strike an object, as it is with electrochemical and consciousness.

The connection between motion/matter and pain = nocicereceptors that send neurotransmissions to the brain. Literally the word “transmit” means to send, to spread!! Sounds like motion to me.


And you think, this guy made a bunch of sense up to the 2:52 mark. 😅

[jjjccc]

The Challenge of Consciousness

However, consciousness presents a unique challenge. While we can explain many aspects of human behavior and cognition in terms of physical processes, the subjective experience of consciousness seems to defy a purely physical explanation. This has led some to argue that there may be aspects of reality that cannot be fully understood through physics alone.

This is classic argument from incredibility. A phenomena seems to defy pure physical explanation therefore some aspects of reality cannot be fully understood through physics alone. Most are vague about what is missing. I suspect the supernatural is what they don't want to say.

[ghaderpashayee]

Mental world is the foundation of laws of nature and space-time

[Mentaculus]

9:15 Complex (potentially nearly chaotic) systems do “unexpected” things when viewed from the perspective of someone whose understanding is at that “emergent level”.

[jamesruscheinski]

how might laws of nature emerge from mathematics?