Stuart Kauffman - Is Emergence Fundamental?

How critical is emergence in how the world works?

[megavide]

5:11 "We don't even know what can happen... In the evolving biosphere, in economy and in life... and that means something huge for us as humans ...It means that reason is an insufficient guide for living your #life..." [5:28]

[michaelmcmaster]

The beauty of this video is that Stu shares the wonder and joyfulness of life itself. This is the most stunning, and insightful, presentation of emergence that I've ever heard. Not surprising as I know Stu from my days studying complex adaptive systems at SFI where Stu was the most human and lucid thinker of the lot - and that is saying something.

[BMerker]

6:30 - "It means that without any selection doing so, the biosphere is creating its own future possibilities of becoming"
First of all: It did involve an episode of selection, though not for that. Secondly: That is the hallmark of history, of all genuinely historical processes.

[RalphDratman]

In this context, if I understand correctly, "radical" emergence describes a situation in which a new "adjacent possible" comes into existence from an existing situation which is already at a very high level of complexity and therefore outside the range of predictable possibilities. By contrast Kauffman's boolean nets are inherently simple, so that critical behavior based on their interactions could have been forseen as a possibility, though perhaps could never have been predicted as a certainty.

[JACK_TheAllSeeingEye]

When the internet was formed and became a thought experiment for many, I'm sure that I'm not alone in stating that public chat forums and sales platforms were envisioned almost immediately. My first thought as an anthropologist upon hearing of the internet was 'My god, this will radically accelerate social dynamics beyond the capacity for social stabilizing feedback mechanisms to function efficiently.'
So..in essence...FB was absolutely imagined almost immediately.

[earthjustice]

"It means that without any selection doing so, the biosphere is creating its own future possibilities of becoming, and it's not Darwinian." Really fascinating discussion here. Pretty deep. Merits watching many times over.

[injinii]

That's a pretty big jump. Going from 'we can't predict the shape of the space of all possible outcomes' to 'reason isn't enough' feels like it needs some intervening steps. And some context.

I'm not even sure I disagree with the conclusion, but it doesn't follow from the premises.

[johnvonhorn]

I bet his home lighting system is complicated

[yuda]

I always celebrate internally when a great thinker or scientist affirms things I've understood by myself years back but couldn't explain until the moment they are verified.

[rv]

Wait, wait, wait. How on Earth can a swim bladder (or a new ecological niche for worms that live inside it, for what it matters) be an example of "ontological emergence"?? (which I take to mean "strong emergence") - The physical laws that allow you in principle to compute the existence of the bladder/niche are all there, and quantum mechanics randomness is not even involved cause we're talking about a definitely macroscopic system. So how can you even call it emergence? It's just computational complexity, or at most what you called epistemological emergence.

[oscarromero-izzo]

I have watched this video multiple times because of the exceptional discussions and points it presents. For months, I have been thinking about the swim bladder example. The concept of an empty niche being formed by the emergence of a swim bladder is fantastic. However, I am unsure whether it is a sequential process, where the swim bladder first emerges and is later colonized by bacteria. It could be the case that multiple swim bladders co-evolve with different populations of microbiomes, with natural selection filtering swim bladders where microbiomes might have negative effects or perform poorly in improving the functionality of the swim bladder. So, in this case, the niche becomes affected by critical interactions which reshape both the structure of the fish and the structure and function of microbiomes. Sorry if I missed t he point here, but glad to hear some reflexion and clarification in that direction.

[ML-hpkd]

interesting...audio recording could use work but interesting ideas to say the least

[danzigvssartre]

"Emergence of consciousness from neurons is gobbledygook, " totally agree with him there. However, I think by Kauffman's definition of "ontological emergence" all Evolutionary adaptations must be seen as "radically emergent." It is only after inspecting the history of biological Evolution that we can surmise what a heart evolved for. There would have been no way to predict the state space of the Evolution of biological systems that have complex things like hearts before they actually evolved.

[NothingMaster]

If the possible physical complexities permit something (anything at all) to emerge in a Universe subject to the laws of nature, then there is a nonzero probability that the observable phenomenon could or would happen at some point in time — regardless of whether we consider a specific observation to be a weak or a strong emergence. What’s fundamental is the allowable organizational states that are possible in accordance with the laws of nature (of our Universe); the rest is merely subject to the probability of occurrence, and conveniently categorized as chemical, biological etc.

[wordprocessbrian]

a point with two sides, force is applied to one side. a radius is formed. 90 degrees is equilibrium and the second motion generated. at the no force side a vacuum will occur as all moves towards inside of the noforce outside.

[RickB]

Something new and unexpected can happen. Sure. This is chaos, or is similar to the Three-body Problem. But this is what is meant by radical emergence? Always thought consciousness as an emergent phenomena means new properties, qualities and rules on a higher level. Did I miss the point?

[nts]

Is "radical emergence" the same as "strong emergence"?

[brucepattie]

"Radical emergence"; A great variety of radical forms emerge at the edge of chaos, and this diversity generator is common in most phenomena across time, space, energy and complexity scales. In short diversity of form is immense and the potential for radical emergence is ubiquitous especially in the geosphere. However, only certain forms will be fitted and persist in a given milieu. Darwin is prebiotic too.

[Wol]

Overthinking.
And the Gobbledegook argument is specious, IMO, when considering emergence as a possibility of some form of neural net (for want of a better word.)
Our brains have massive numbers of neutrons and uncountable numbers of connections - but they also receive inputs from our senses. That’s critical in this context.
A sufficiently complex neural net WITH audio, visual and analogous of all other senses would be a different animal to one without. It’s conceivable that in time it would become conscious in a manner that we could recognise.

[hasen_judi]

so to summerize: emergence is when an unexpected consequence of something changes the space of possibilities for the future.