Refuting Strong Emergence

Refuting Strong Emergence

Craig Weinberg 

...Physics, chemistry, and biology may have their own special laws, but they are laws about physical, concrete, tangible phenomena, not feelings, perceptions, ideas etc. In the list “physics to chemistry to biology to psychology” one of these is not like the other. If psychology had laws, they would pertain not to organs, cells, or molecules but to aspects of conscious experience where no tangible object appears at all.

...To say that understanding is a mechanism of the brain assumes the conclusion that emergence is supposed to be explaining. We do not actually know that any such mechanism exists in the brain, only that we can see certain correlations between our direct experiences and our perceptions of activity in the brain through imaging devices. Any direction of causation from brain to experience is being inferred by our preference, not compelled by an understanding of how or why experiences emerge from unexperienced brains. The fact that a brain is itself a part of our experience is overlooked, as is the possibility that such images and appearances of brains could be generated by, for, and within conscious experience.

... We now have two filler terms, emergence and realization, to smuggle in unscientific, non-explanatory fictions into physics and conscious experiences that create a false bridge between them, doing unspecified non-physical things in both directions. In reality, we have not established or explained anything, only added abstractions to hide our ignorance and make ourselves feel clever. The explanatory gap remains as dualistic as ever, with Physics, Chemistry, Biology, brains, and ‘realization’ back in the Cartesian Res Extensa realm, and Psychology, ideas, emergence, eiπ +1=0, and logical argumentation firmly in Res Cogitans.

Also mentioned by this point is the seductively innocuous term level: “at the psychological level“, “at some levels, there is something that is absolutely non-reducible to the physical.” This idea of levels is itself completely non-reducible to the physical. It is an idea about our typical ranges of perception. Physical phenomena, if they could exist independently of all detection and perception, would have no levels...

Refuting Strong Emergence...

"The fact that a brain is itself a part of our experience is overlooked, as is the possibility that such images and appearances of brains could be generated by, for, and within conscious experience."

that's the key issue, which most people haven't gotten anywhere near challenging themselves with...

and the biggest issue about that for me, is that experience is a process and further that it is a shared process. Once you come to accept it's a shared process, all the anomalous stuff can finally be put into it's correct context.

Then you realise that all the effort in the msm, producing articles which promote, but then sow uncertainty, or debunk, common human anomalous experience, is to deflect the general public from this truth. Some of the elites clearly know.

Again, I'm not in the least bit religious, but the deep wisdom in the Gospel of Thomas mentions this: "It is not possible for anyone to enter the house of a strong man and take it by force unless he binds his hands; then he will (be able to) ransack his house."

*Saying 35, Lambdin Translation

A very good article. The following are a few other excellent quotes from it. These concentrate on explaining why "strong emergence" is a myth especially as it might be claimed to apply to the mind-matter divide. 

The only ghosts in the machine that physics allows are physical ghosts like charge, mass, and spin. Nothing physical is summing them up or transforming them into non-physical ‘seemings’.
.......................................................
H2O refers not to the water that we experience, but to a molecular arrangement that makes sense to us intellectually within the context of chemistry that can be applied to accurately predict and control many of the experiences in our waking consciousness of physical qualities. These are not necessarily different from dream qualities, as dreams can be quite exhaustively realistic, even under deliberate lucid inspection, however we can agree that while we are awake, our experiences of the physical world appear to us to have characteristics that *certainly must* separate it from mere dreams. 
........................................................
When we think more carefully about the relationship of H2O to the feeling of wetness, there is nothing that suggests an emergence relationship, or a bottom-top flow of causality or morphology. Wetness is a tactile sensation. It can appear in a dream. H2O is an intellectual concept. It too can appear in a dream. What H2O is supposed to describe, if it could exist independently of consciousness, would not be wet at any scale....Nothing that happens in a brain sheds any light on this gap. We remain forever on the phenomenal side of it. ........................................................
The expectation of material science eventually providing reductionistic explanations of immaterial appearances is what I like to call the fallacy of pseudo-credulity. It’s a betrayal of the very scientific spirit that it purports to champion.
.......................................................
There is no level of brain activity that is psychological. Microphysical states cannot be assumed to jump from geometric states of tangible objects/particles to intangible states like percepts or concepts. If such a jump could exist, there is no good reason to justify calling that jump physical.
.......................................................
At the very end, Robert Kuhn at least touches on other possibilities:

If fundamental physics would be forever not capable of explaining biology or psychology or anything else, if that reduction could not ever be made, then one must conclude
that there are mechanisms by which the microworld evolves which cannot be accounted for in terms of physics. Is this a contradiction? Yes, if reality is confined to the physical,
but there is no contradiction if one dares venture beyond the known physical world.

Refuting Strong Emergence

Craig Weinberg 

Thanks for posting this wonderful program.  The interview of Ellis was great and the rest very good.

With that said, I found no thought given beyond - it must be ALL physics or emergence is strong in terms of outcomes.

If the environment of physics interacts with an environment of information separately, with bridge laws showing how they correspond - then reduction can be achieved by reducing the physical phenomena to the physical environment and reducing informational/meaningful phenomena to information science scope - then we can move ahead dealing with the influence of mental events.   I did not hear a single point that would refute this.

The following are a few other excellent quotes from the article. These concentrate on explaining why "strong emergence" is a myth especially as it might be claimed to apply to the mind-matter divide. 

Emergence appears to be connected to the "state of being" resulting from outcomes.  There are physical outcomes and they have a decent case for modeling and then drilling down to fundamental laws. Causation can be analyzed as structured by materials science and physics across a wide range of scale.

Likewise, there are informational outcomes.  My assertion is that science can also model outcomes through analysis of the transformations resulting from logical  information processing and the "social" sciences defining ambient meanings driving the changing probabilities and agents' motivations.
 
Hence, physics resolves outcomes in the here and now.  And logic, organizational principles and mental outcomes resolve in informational space.  Each separately reductive but corresponding with each other.  (clearly explaining how is a long story)  But the means is that information objects and physical objects are isomorphic in the here and now - but information objects are transforming non-locally and in probabilistic space.  This is an interdisciplinary method.  I offer "correspondence" of objects and self organization as examples.

 Attempts to find bridge laws between psychology and neuroscience has so far not been achieved in a convincing manner, except perhaps with the concept self-organization.

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fas/psych/gl...principle/

Thanks for posting this wonderful program.  The interview of Ellis was great and the rest very good.

With that said, I found no thought given beyond - it must be ALL physics or emergence is strong in terms of outcomes.

If the environment of physics interacts with an environment of information separately, with bridge laws showing how they correspond - then reduction can be achieved by reducing the physical phenomena to the physical environment and reducing informational/meaningful phenomena to information science scope - then we can move ahead dealing with the influence of mental events.   I did not hear a single point that would refute this.

But surely what you are talking about is very different from the strict definition of "Strong Emergence".

And once we accept "laws" we then have to ask about how such laws interact with what they govern and why the laws themselves don't change.

Also unclear to me what it means to reduce meaningful phenomena to the "information science scope"?

But surely what you are talking about is very different from the strict definition of "Strong Emergence".

And once we accept "laws" we then have to ask about how such laws interact with what they govern and why the laws themselves don't change.

Also unclear to me what it means to reduce meaningful phenomena to the "information science scope"?

 We have seen that strong emergence, if it exists, has radical consequences. The question
that immediately arises, then, is: are there strongly emergent phenomena?
My own view is that the answer to this question is yes. I think there is exactly one clear
case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness - D. Chalmers

While greatly appreciating Chalmers professional work, I have a different view.  For me, consciousness doesn't emerge from the physical environment.  Nor does the physical environment emerge from mind/consciousness.  Each evolves from distinct and separate law/rule based ecologies.  Physics and Materials Science are an integrated environment and well documented to math relations.  In this ecology, reduction to fundamentals is a working method that has been highly profitable.

And maybe from "left-field", is my claim that the Information Sciences have an analogous methodology.  Shannon in formulating the equations for communications - specifically divided out meaning in messages from the variables.  Something like this happened when Newton and others segregated energy/forces from mass/matter.  Physics leaped ahead when this clarification was formalized.

Information can be broken into categories - then the structural aspects data can be likewise concentrated in Shannon's information theory, complexity and entropic studies.  They are like matter in its forms and objects can be quantified through analysis of the symbols used and their inner structures delineated.

With Floridi's use of information objects as what computer simulations achieve - then functional and purposeful activity that drives meaningful interaction becomes a class of variables similar to energy and forces.  Linguistics then becomes an information science.  Personal meanings are studied in Psychology.  Social meanings are a science decoding behavior at the level of groups.  There are as many or more sciences that can be seen to reveal the patterns of activity that objective meanings present in there usefulness in reality.

For me Information Science is a equal match to Physical Science.  And (the shocker) Information Science provides pathways for reductive analysis of information objects.  Logic and Systems Theory being the stand-outs.

While greatly appreciating Chalmers professional work, I have a different view.  For me, consciousness doesn't emerge from the physical environment.  Nor does the physical environment emerge from mind/consciousness.  Each evolves from distinct and separate law/rule based ecologies.  Physics and Materials Science are an integrated environment and well documented to math relations.  In this ecology, reduction to fundamentals is a working method that has been highly profitable.

And maybe from "left-field", is my claim that the Information Sciences have an analogous methodology.  Shannon in formulating the equations for communications - specifically divided out meaning in messages from the variables.  Something like this happened when Newton and others segregated energy/forces from mass/matter.  Physics leaped ahead when this clarification was formalized.

Information can be broken into categories - then the structural aspects data can be likewise concentrated in Shannon's information theory, complexity and entropic studies.  They are like matter in its forms and objects can be quantified through analysis of the symbols used and their inner structures delineated.

With Floridi's use of information objects as what computer simulations achieve - then functional and purposeful activity that drives meaningful interaction becomes a class of variables similar to energy and forces.  Linguistics then becomes an information science.  Personal meanings are studied in Psychology.  Social meanings are a science decoding behavior at the level of groups.  There are as many or more sciences that can be seen to reveal the patterns of activity that objective meanings present in there usefulness in reality.

For me Information Science is a equal match to Physical Science.  And (the shocker) Information Science provides pathways for reductive analysis of information objects.  Logic and Systems Theory being the stand-outs.

Chalmer's position is just confusing to me, since he says there is Strong Emergence of consciousness in standard physics but not in "physics-plus" (whatever that is exactly supposed to be).

It seems he is taking the term "Strong Emergence" and trying to make it mean something different than the original meaning, which seems to be the now standard deflation technique for people who want to justify AI becoming conscious and/or deny anything "paranormal". But as Chalmers himself has said this seems like a position less based on good arguments and more a worry about supporting religious orthodoxies.

That all said, I'm still unclear what "information objects" are. To me information is a modeling technique that can capture certain aspects of the irreducible mental but not actually ever fully describe it. We see similar limitations with physics trying to decipher what "matter" is or how to grasp causality when QM reveals stochastic patterns that are not strict input-output functional models but also not wholly unpredictable when it comes to the aggregate. See also Feynman noting that trying to define "force" leads to circularity...

So just as physics under-explains its domain of study so to does Information Science give us some grasp of the mental without actually fully reducing qualia. I would go even further and say nothing in reality is completely reducible to mathematical models, even the field of mathematics itself relies on the "quale" of logical soundness for its proofs...