
What is emergence? - got-any-grapes
https://axispraxis.wordpress.com/2020/05/27/what-is-emergence-and-why-should-we-care-about-it/
======
jbay808
The classic paper "More is Different"[1] is another good essay that touches on
this subject, and opens with some really interesting examples showing why it
can be hard to apply low-level laws to anticipate the behaviour of complex
systems, even when you can prove that the complex systems must obey those
laws.

1 -
[http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo...](http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Sometimes I think there is other information that gives the physics its
meaning.

For example, if you took a Shingled Magnetic Recording hard drive filled with
VP9 encoded movie files on a NTFS partition, even if you perfectly understood
the physics, and figured out all the individual magnetic fields, you would
still have a rough time making sense of the of what was on it without this
higher level information information.

~~~
mhh__
Sure, but part of the issue is that we can make accurate predictions of pretty
much everything we can readily observe today. If there is higher structure, we
can't even see the noise yet.

There's much work to be done, but unless something really amazing happens
it'll be a long time before we get anywhere near new fundamental(there's still
loads of work to be done elsewhere) physics

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> Sure, but part of the issue is that we can make accurate predictions of
> pretty much everything we can readily observe today.

Actually there are a lot of predictions we can’t make today. Stuff that are
very important

1) Why do most young people do fine with COVID-19 but some apparently healthy
people do not?

2) How exactly do proteins fold

3) Will it rain tomorrow at location x at time x

4) when will my pet tiger decide to maul me?

5) will a drug with this molecular structure for this disease actually treat
the disease?

We know a load about the basic building blocks. About quarks and protons and
electrons. But once we get to more complicated systems composed of these
building blocks, we struggle to make predictions.

See for example the scrubbed SpaceX launch due to weather.

I am sure NASA and spaceX have scientists who are experts in physics, but they
could not predict in advance that there would be bad weather on that exact
day.

What we do now is make calculations on “spherical cows” and call everything
else “chaotic” and “too many variables” and pat ourselves on the back for
reducing everything to its basic blocks.

~~~
trixie_
None of the things you listed depend on explanations outside of the realm of
physics that we already understand. Theoretically with a simulator powerful
enough and using the principles we already know, all of the items you listed
could be solved.

~~~
Thorentis
I think there's a difference between understanding a system well enough to
make predictions, and recreating a system (a simulation) and then seeing what
it does. Many times in history before the physics was properly understood, the
best scientists and engineers could do was create some kind of "dry run" and
simulate/recreate whatever process they were testing, and use that to predict
outcomes of the real one. But actually being able to look at the state of a
live system and predict what it will do next accurately is quite different.

~~~
antepodius
It seems to me to be more of a spectrum, where a 'well-understood' system is
one we can simulate accurately with extremely pared-down models. (I.e., we can
simulate it much more cheaply than running the whole atomic simulation)
because we found symmetries/simplifications/shortcuts. Approximating
ballistics arcs with parabolae, for example, is sort of a compression
algorithm on the full simulation.

------
knzhou
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the word "emergence". In pop science, it
was spoken in reverent tones. Never mind that they never gave a definition of
it that didn't sound trivial -- the word was dripping with meaning and the
promise of hidden wisdom.

I went to college and studied physics. I learned how the behavior of many
atoms leads to thermodynamics and the properties of materials. I learned how
elementary quantum mechanics leads to atomic physics and chemistry. I learned
how the strong force gives rise to nuclei. I learned how the Standard Model
produces everything on this list. I learned how, at each layer, the
correspondence was fiendishly subtle, but the work of thousands of physicists
over decades had built the bridges.

At the end of it, I was still dissatisfied, because I hadn't learned what
_emergence_ was. I'd see crackpots presenting their personal theories of
everything, declaring that they knew what no physicist ever could, because
their model had _emergence_. They knew about it, and we didn't. But I still
didn't know what it was.

Then I dug deeper and it became obvious. Emergence is a beautiful idea that
has _always_ been present, in some form or another, in _every_ field of
science. It is so well-developed in some fields, such as particle physics,
that it has become a suite of quantitative methods with incredible accuracy. I
had been learning it the entire time, and now use it every day without a
second thought. Meanwhile, "emergence" is a brand name. It's a specific word
passed down over generations of pop science used to convey mystique. It's a
tool some charlatans use to pretend they know more than they do.

No offense meant to the article, but I often hear people say they're most
excited about some substanceless theory because it "has emergence", and this
is part of why.

~~~
bonoboTP
I agree it's wooey in many cases, and is used as a near synonym of miracle or
magic.

But I think a good summary is that emergence happens when relations between
things on a finer level of analysis become the things themselves on a coarser,
higher level AND that these new things also have rich and complex interactions
among _them_ , making the levels roughly equally interesting, complicated and
useful. Overall the bottom level is "enough" in theory but rising up the
levels allows us to gain orders of magnitude more "practicality".

Sometimes by common sense we stumble upon a mid-level concept and then when we
learn about the lower level explanation, we proclaim that the original
phenomenon was "emergent".

Now it's a great (but I think not very fruitful) philosophical debate to
decide which level has how much "realness", is the higher level just a
convenient fiction, an illusion, a practical description and there is a
lowest, rock bottom level which the universe/God really "cares about", or are
all levels just as real and the whole hierarchy/ladder is just our
conception,and not only can rising up the abstraction be an artificial action,
but maybe descending lower can also be a illusory/non-natural and a result of
our search for practicality and the rock bottom isn't really that real and the
universe doesn't know to care about it.

Just as in math the naive explanation is we have fundamental axioms and we
derive the higher level theorems from it. But in reality what happens is we
know what theorems we want (to make things interesting or empirically useful)
and then look for ways to structure the axioms to give rise to the "real"
theorems.

Or, what view of a signal is more real and fundamental, the time-domain or the
Fourier-domain? Both can be equally real or equally fundamental, and can give
rise to equally interesting Analyse. Or perhaps not, and the time domain is
what the universe cares about and has in its "source code" (which is probably
a misplaced metaphor though) and Fourier is just for convenience...

Other times when making the relations into thing (reifying them) and vice
versa we don't really move higher or lower, we stay roughly on the same level.
An example is duality in graph theory (faces to nodes, nodes to faces) or in
optimization (exchanging the role of variables and equations). And at the risk
of sounding wooey, this _is_ similar to the duality, non-duality ideas in
Eastern philosophy, looking at the same stuff but interpreting "the gaps" as
"the things" and vice versa. And then saying neither is more real, both are
real and neither are, together they are real, separately they aren't etc.
Maybe the levels are not a strict hierarchy, maybe they loop back, maybe
consciousness is indeed such a feedback loop across different levels (a la
Hofstadter), then you get to resonances in feedback loops and if you push it
far it gets quite wooey. But it's still very differently wooey than some
quantum healer fixing the resonances in your liver through the TV.

~~~
Thorentis
Isn't this what abstraction is? A computer looks magical if you don't
understand binary logic gates and transistors etc. Even though I understand it
all, the things my computer can do seems magical. I think this is what people
mean when they say "emergent" but for some reason don't use more widely
understood terms like "high levels of abstraction".

Perhaps this hints at us not even understanding the lower levels of many areas
well enough yet.

~~~
bonoboTP
I expanded my comment because an important thing is to discuss whether the
different levels are actually a property of the universe or just a property of
our description? Is math discovered or invented. What is part of the map and
what of the territory.

I think people use emergence more when it's viewed and suggested as
independent from our description, it really emerges on its own and we just
discover and describe this. And "abstraction" is used when we view _our_ role
greater, we invented an abstraction to easier manage the complexity. So
emergence is more incidental, accidental, serendipitous and unexpected, while
abstraction is intentional and purposeful and designed.

Now which is which and whether the distinction itself touches on something
real or is just a different view of the same thing, is another great topic for
discussion.

------
jiggawatts
This reminded me of the hard science fiction novel Dragon's Egg by Robert L.
Forward.[1] Its core idea is that complex, intelligent life could be possible
on the surface of a neutron star.

He went to a lot of effort to try to come up with a plausible description of
what "life" would be like in such an environment. That fired my imagination
also, and I wondered how we could do such a thing in a scientific manner.
Given the rules of the Standard Model, in principle almost all aspects of the
surface conditions could be elucidated, but I feel we would be missing almost
all of the _essence_ of it. Just like a deep understanding of Quantum
Electrodynamics won't help you determine from first-principles that Earth has
pretty sunsets or that your hair stands up if you take a wool jumper off.

For example, the surface of a neutron star would be very bright in gamma rays,
but those are subject to pair-production in the strong magnetic field of the
star, making light effectively a _short range_ sensory mechanism. Meanwhile,
the enormous density of the crust means that it transmits sound incredibly
well and at enormous speeds[2], making acoustics the equivalent of our photon-
based vision sense! But it would hemispherical at short range and 2D in a
complicated way at long range. Spacetime itself would be strongly polarized,
atoms would be distorted into spindles and have strongly anisotropic
behaviour, general relativistic effects could be felt in everyday scenarios,
and there are likely dozens of other effects the we can't even fathom by
merely staring at a handful of field equations that we developed in our
comparatively cold, flat spacetime.

1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg)

2] The speed of sound in Neutron stars is just under 0.578 times the speed of
light! [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/54684/is-the-
spe...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/54684/is-the-speed-of-
sound-almost-as-high-as-the-speed-of-light-in-neutron-stars)

~~~
kodoque1
That's all quite interesting, do you have some ressource on how I could
understand it more deeply given that I have a highschool physics level
understanding of physics more or less?

I'm particularly intrigued by why the range would impact the sound based based
sensing? Is it because of spacetime curvature or something?

~~~
jiggawatts
No one knows! That's kind of the point. We know some of the fundamental limits
and constraints of what goes on around and inside a neutron star, but the
essence of it is still a giant mystery. We'd have to go and look, and that's
not likely to happen any time in the next ten thousand years or so.

~~~
kodoque1
Oh ok, but what in our current understanding could let us suppose this
difference in sensing? And by hemispherical do you mean somekind of fisheye
projection? I would really like some beginner ressource on this subject.

~~~
jiggawatts
A dolphin is surrounded by water, and its sonar sense is truly 3D, in that it
can go in any direction. Up, down, left, right, ahead, or behind.

A creature living on a neutron star might use sonar like we do light, because
the speed of sound in the star crust is more then half the speed of light. In
many ways it would be comparable. But the crust is only below the creature,
not above. So its "sound sense" would only work for one hemisphere surround
the creature, the other side would be silence, its equivalent of total
darkness.

Neutron stars have thin crusts, possibly mere meters thick, and almost
certainly with layers of some sort. Again, sound would probably travel at
different speeds in the various layers, just like sonar does in oceans, where
salinity affects propagation. There would be complex effects with distance to
do with this. Locally, the sound could travel outwards in a hemisphere, but at
long range it would likely be more 2D.

This is all speculation, but it's based on real science. My point is that we
cannot really know, and no amount of staring at equations will help paint a
realistic picture.

~~~
kodoque1
Oh so I guess that At long distance it would behave like a map splatted on a
sphere? Still hard to wrap my head around, but it is cool stuff!

------
BrandiATMuhkuh
Emergence is my all time favourite topic. I can highly recommend this video:
[https://youtu.be/16W7c0mb-rE](https://youtu.be/16W7c0mb-rE)

When I learned during my computing and philosophy class about emergence it was
like I found the missing puzzle pieces so everything (I mean that) makes
sense.

I love how all things in existence emerge simply via self organisation. All
that is needed is communication. This can be gravity for stardust to form
planet systems; using once eyes to form bird flocks; using chemicals for
communication to form ant colonies; using human communication to form
societies.

Once during my diving lecture, the lecturer pointed out, that we can, in many
cases, call self organisation simply an eco system. Which makes it much easier
to explain this topic to people.

He said, a lake will self organise when you rob it from an important fish, and
so will our body when we start doing sport (grow muscles). Every system will
react to change, and will try to re-organse itself.

~~~
chiefalchemist
> All that is needed is communication.

When applied to behavior I would say that all that is needed is a shared goal,
a shared understanding. The individual units don't necessarily have to
communicate. They only need to share some common direction or goal. For
example, the infamous starlings don't formally conspire. Yet the result
functions as a conspiracy, so to speak.

------
jackcosgrove
I must say that reductionism is my default position. And that this is at base
a value I have chosen. I did not consider the usefulness of reduction or unity
until I encountered the ideas of Sabine Hossenfelder. The idea that reduction,
unity, and elegance might be holding inquiry back is a new idea that I am
increasingly sympathetic to.

Something I also did not consider much was the sociology of science. It seems,
at least from my outsider perspective, that the highest status scientist is a
theorist who either predicts an experimental result observed decades in the
future, or a theorist who synthesizes disparate observations. This value,
insofar as it is true, stems from a reductionist perspective. I see
reductionism being harmful to inquiry if only because it favors some
scientific roles over others, theoretical over applied, theorist over
experimentalist, discovery over reproducibility.

------
tpetrina
This whole article reeks of "science is BS, we need free will for humans to be
real and morally responsible".

For all of its smart wording, this amounts to the same old issue Aristotle had
with describing the mathematical universe in which somehow humans are
different enough to warrant "higher stuff".

Is there any useful criticism of science besides pseudo-attacks always coming
from antropocentric, and usually religious, corners? Can't we just do the one,
final Copernican shift and frickin' move humans from the centre?

~~~
wizzwizz4
The development of quantum mechanics suggests not. When we come up with a new
field, even the brightest minds will struggle to ignore anthropocentrism,
coming up with wild theories like:

> These equations seem to govern the behaviour of all our toy experiments,
> with multiple superimposed world states interfering with each other when
> they happen to transform into the same state as each other… except when a
> human looks at the result, whereupon all but one of the world states just
> _vanishes_!

The first person I know of¹ to propose that the world states _don 't_ just
vanish – it's just that "brain that sees event X" and "brain that sees event
Y" don't converge to the same state, so you don't see quantum interference
when people get involved – was Hugh Everett III. This is a simpler
explanation, stops quantum mechanics contradicting special relativity, solves
the EPR paradox, side-steps Bell's theorem, stops God playing dice with the
universe… in short, it solves every problem² _except where the Born rule comes
from._ ³

When he proposed it to Niels Bohr, he was laughed out of the room.⁴

In principle, we could probably eliminate anthropocentrism in physics models
from popular consciousness entirely… but then we wouldn't be prepared for
_new_ fields, where we'd introduce it right back again.

\---

¹: Okay, technically Erwin Schrödinger mentioned the idea five years earlier,
but he didn't do much with it. Apart from, you know, coming up with the
equation in the first place…

²: Edit to add: I didn't know about Grete Hermann's flaw in John von Neumann's
proof that all non-local hidden variable theories were impossible. Such
theories still violate special relativity, but they're not _impossible_ ;
many-worlds doesn't solve _this_ problem because it isn't actually a problem.
(Many-worlds is still the simplest theory I know of, but I'm less certain that
it's the simplest _possible_ theory consistent with the evidence… making this
comment less relevant than I initially thought it was.)

³: Some people think many-worlds explains the Born rule. I haven't heard all
the arguments, but all the ones I've heard have been wrong.

⁴: Artistic license. But Léon Rosenfeld certainly considered him
"undescribably stupid" and unable to "understand the simplest things in
quantum mechanics".

------
evdev
> But subscribers to a scientific worldview often make a more ambitious claim:
> that the best theories are isomorphic with the fundamental nature of the
> universe.

This is not an "extra" claim on top of conservation laws/fundamental
symmetries.

> Reductionism can be understood as a combination of (1) the claim that the
> intelligibility of the universe depends on the unity of scientific theories

It's strange and frankly likely just projection to say that it's the
reductionists that claim the universe must be a certain way in order for it to
be intelligible.

> Despite its limited usefulness as a guide to scientific practice,
> reductionism is a powerful cultural idea. We might call it the Lego-block
> conception of reality: only the Lego blocks are real, so ‘fundamental’
> science involves identifying what the blocks are and how they interact,
> while ‘applied’ science involves discovering the right combination or
> permutation of blocks that accounts for the phenomenon in question.

The question of realism is separate than reductionism of fundamental law, and
it's not a good sign to (deliberately?) confuse them. EDIT: Just to be clear
to people skimming this stuff, I can hold two theories: a) your dog is real,
b) your dog is not real, only quarks are real. We can debate this for as long
as we'd like, but what I am _not_ necessarily saying is that your dog's
_dogness_ corresponds to some suspension or modification of fundamental
physics.

> that parts and wholes have ‘equal’ ontological priority, with the wholes
> constraining the parts just as much as the parts constrain the wholes.

Again, if ontology means "realism" this is a confusion, if it means the way
things work, it's simply wrong or completely unsupported.

------
dvt
This essay feels like "philosophy lite[0]." One one hand, it's great to
introduce new eyes and ears to these deep concepts, but on the other, there's
a deep historico-philosophical morass that one needs to wade through to get to
the modern state of the art. There's an incredibly rich corpus discussing
emergent properties[1] (most notably of which is, arguably, consciousness) but
even the SEP article (which is orders of magnitude more informative than the
blog post) is quite terse.

[0] For example, putting emergentism and reductionism on two ends of a
spectrum is not _strictly_ correct. There are reductionist emergent theories
out there (in both phil. of science, as well as phil. of mind).

[1] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-
emergent/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/)

~~~
joe_the_user
I think the description feels klunky and kludgy because it leaves out a key
aspect of what physics sees in emergent properties[1]; these are properties
arising out of the interaction of an ensemble of elements. And looking at your
link, it seems most "emergentists" also were specifically considering
ensembles. But article just says: "Emergence occurs when there is a conceptual
discontinuity between two descriptions targeting the same phenomenon.", which
seems too broad and so unilluminating.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence)

------
jamesrcole
Entities have state (including position) and ways of interacting with each
other. This leads to new state in the next moment, which leads to new state in
the moment after, and so on. Thus the more global state affects the future
state. There’s nothing mysterious about any of this.

Usually when people make a deal about emergence they’re confusing the map for
the territory. They couldn’t predict the overall state evolution just by
considering the parts.

They’re thinking of their notion of the generic entity type. But all that’s
out there in the territory are the entity instances with their specific state.

The parts can’t exist in a stateless fashion. It’s just that in our heads —
the map — we can consider them in that fashion.

------
omazurov
_> In this post I haven’t really provided any references, but hopefully in
future I’ll do short posts explaining where these ideas came from._

One such reference might be "Strong and Weak Emergence" by David Chalmers [0],
given the fact that "weak" emergence was introduced but "strong" emergence was
not even mentioned (though indirectly implied).

[0]
[http://www.consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf](http://www.consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf)

~~~
raincom
Philosophical theses need empirical support. The biggest issue wrt emergence
is "downward causation". If there is strong emergence, it is going to be
ontologically different: that's why it is ontological mergence.

As a consequence, this new entity has to function as a causal agent.
Otherwise, why populate the world with entities that don't work as causal
agents. Upward causation is consistent with both ontological and epistemic
emergence. Downward causation is consistent with epistemic emergence. Are
there examples of ontological emergence that can play a role in downward
causation?

Until then, it is all unbounded philosophical speculation. These speculations
get bounded (constrained) by empirical sciences.

~~~
glenstein
And to take your argument just one step further: physics operates on causal
closure, and I don't know how proponents of emergentism reconcile it with
causal closure.

~~~
raincom
One of the toys philosophers use to explain away anything is to
divide/classify. If there is an issue with X, make a distinction between
strong-X and weaker-X. First, it is strong emergence (ontic) vs. weaker
emergence (epistemic). Later, it is "strong" downward causation vs. "weaker"
downward causation.

This endless subdivision is a pass time.

------
ta1234567890
The issue is that emergence is just some arbitrarily picked meaning of
something observed from a certain "distance" or from a certain perspective.
Emergence is not an intrinsic property of anything, it is just a (subjective)
point of view.

It is just another way of saying that things look different from different
"zoom levels", hence we assign different models and/or meanings to them at
each different level. But that's just our very human perspective, it is not
some pre-existing/universal truth of a system.

~~~
moonchild
Why is that an issue?

You choose, somewhat arbitrarily, a particular level of reductionism to apply.
(It seems from what you are saying that you would agree that) atoms are real,
but bricks are not; bricks are what we call a clump of iron, oxygen, silicon,
aluminum, etc. which is mostly stuck together in a particular shape and size.
Bricks are based on a human perception of togetherness and objecthood that is
completely arbitrary; there's no real delineation of the edge of a brick, nor
is there a real definition of 'brick' in the first place.

All of this is (more-or-less) true. Yet, at the same time, not only can I move
the slide to a place where the brick is very real (say, when it's smashing out
your brains after being wrapped in a slice of lemon), I can also move it to a
place where atoms are no less emergent than bricks. 'Atom' is just the name we
give to a cluster of quarks in various configurations, with an electron (kind
of, arguably) nearby.

Yet, atoms are a construct present in physics because they're useful in making
predictions about physical phenomena. Nothing fundamental about it. And bricks
are a construct in engineering and architecture because they have a certain
functional and aesthetic purpose in each of those disciplines.

It's all always arbitrary. It's all always human understanding. Science is
human understanding. The question is not 'is this just an artifact of human
perception', the question is 'is this relevant to the questions I am asking'.

~~~
glenstein
It's an issue because there's completely mutually exclusive conceptions of
emergence that take you in potentially ridiculous directions, such as
proposing new fundamental physics, violations of what we normally think of as
causality, etc, and it has a funny way of showing up in arenas that are
notorious for woo and mysticism, such as quantum mechanics, or consciousness,
or explanations of how morality 'really' works, it seems to bring with it an
entirely new idea of what it means to even explain something.

Depending on which variant of emergentism people are talking about at
different times, they could be talking about something that's fully consistent
with the reductionistic program, something that's not making new claims but is
just about levels of description, something that's vague but not obviously
wrong, or some profound revelation proposing we overturn everything we thought
we knew about physics or some natural phenomena or anything in between. The
stakes are either utterly trivial, or as profound as they could possibly get.
And depending on who you talk to about emergence at any given moment, you'll
get a confident answer that could potentially fall anywhere on that spectrum,
or worse, a strange kind of passiveness where this issue is kind of handwaved
away.

------
evrydayhustling
If the author sees this, please post the journal club syllabus that this grew
out of! Would be very interesting even without aligning references to your
text. Thanks for the post.

~~~
yohanjohn
You are most welcome! Glad you liked it. I've never logged in here before, and
I am amused that someone posted this little emergence post here. I intended it
mostly for circulation among friends. But you have inspired me to collect the
'syllabus' of my informal journal club. Here is an annotated reading list:

[https://axispraxis.wordpress.com/2020/05/30/an-emergence-
rea...](https://axispraxis.wordpress.com/2020/05/30/an-emergence-reading-
list/)

~~~
evrydayhustling
Much obliged and glad you visited. Your characterization of emergence as how
we experience a jump between conceptual frameworks, rather than progression
through an objective hierarchy, scratched an itch. Appreciating science as a
set of frameworks floating in sea of unknown, rather than tiling and
comprehending our world, would fix a lot of issues in science and a lot of the
ongoing crisis of faith in expertise. Look forward to reading what informed
the writing.

~~~
yohanjohn
Wow! Your summary of what I am getting at is spot-on.

------
plutonorm
If you imagine the physical world as a vast machine. Something like a cellular
automata, you can imagine theories about the universe as ‘compressions’. Parts
of the universe which show repeating patterns can be explained by theories,
which can be used to make predictions about future state. Sometimes the
universe permits such theories and some times it does not. Sometimes it’s
irreducibly complex and there is no ‘compression’, no pattern.

~~~
ChainOfFools
The entire enterprise of human knowledge is an ongoing obligate and
procrustean optimization of compression heuristics that force the infinities
of space and time into a model that fits into our finite lumps of neuronal
tissue.

------
mannykannot
Even as someone who is more of a physicist than a biologist, that quip of
Rurherford's, quoted in the article (“science consists of physics and stamp-
collecting”) has always bugged me. Even though I assume that all of biology
can be reduced to fundamental physics, very little of importance can learned
or understood about biological systems by doing so - and biological systems
are significant physical phenomena.

------
dstola
Maybe I am speaking outside my comfort zone a little, but isn't this the same
as trying to find physical axioms that build up a whole and it has been
disproven by Godel with respect to Whiteheads and Russels Principia
Mathematica and completely blows reductionists out of the water if we go as
far as equating math == physics in all but name

~~~
raincom
"math = physics" is true on paper, because most, if not all, physical laws are
equations. The issue lies elsewhere: ontology. One can subscribe to realist
ontology in physics, yet become a Platonist wrt math. One can say that
"particles exist and play the role of causal antecedents" and that "sets don't
exist in this world and don't play the role of causal antecedents"; that's why
many mathematicians subscribe to Platonism (sets, numbers, etc don't exist in
this world, but exist in the Platonic world). Same goes for the so-called
'Platonic' love that many seek in the modern world!!

~~~
karmakaze
> "math = physics" is true on paper, because most, if not all, physical laws
> are equations

If we only understand the the physical laws which can be represented as
equations that only equates the known ones, so physics >= math.

We can also create math that has no known relation to physical laws, so math >
physics.

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KKKKkkkk1
You know how OpenAI trains language models with more and more billions of
parameters, expecting that at some point a Skynet will emerge and yield their
projected 100x return on capital, and all they get are increasingly fancy
lorem ipsum generators? So that's what emergence is _not_.

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montalbano
My favourite essay on Emergence is by one of the founders of its
investigation, John Holland:

[http://www.philosophica.ugent.be/fulltexts/59-2.pdf](http://www.philosophica.ugent.be/fulltexts/59-2.pdf)

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dandare
What is the simplest system we know that produces unexpected results? Conway's
Game of Life comes to mind. Would there be a surprise if we just gently shake
1 billion 2x4 lego blocks?

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placebo
Emergence is a concept or model, concepts/models are made possible by thought,
thoughts are themselves an emergent phenomena

Round and round and round it goes where it stops nobody knows...

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staycoolboy
Obligatory thesis that cracks this open:

"Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software"

An utterly phenomenal book:

[https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-
Sof...](https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-
Software/dp/0684868768)

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dvt
Thanks for the recommendation, just got it on Amazon! I generally buy every
(interesting) book I see mentioned on HN, and here's hoping it's a good one ;)

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staycoolboy
Oh, I do hope you like it!!!

(It earned a place on my shelf next to "Godel Escher Bach", by Hofstadter, and
"Society of Mind", by Minsky.)

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lukebuehler
I really appreciate the intuitive explanation that in Emergentism the whole
can have the same ontological importance as the parts. Could it also be more
important?

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ChainOfFools
You've just described the concept of the gestalt

