Interesting. But the computer does “objectively exist”, despite that we all agree it’s made up of atoms? What’s the difference?
For my purposes, it’s sufficient that the glider is identifiable in a way that I can point to it as a cohesive whole, and talk about its actions rather than the actions of its parts. i.e., if we’re looking at a grid space in Conway’s Game of Life (“CGoL”), we can see the glider moving across the grid, I can point to it and talk about how it’s moving, how it will eventually run into some other cluster in its path, or how it will continue indefinitely into the empty expanse of the grid. If we aren’t being pedants, we’ll understand each other when we say these kind of things. And if we can use concepts and language that way, we’re treating the glider as an object, and not as a bunch of parts, in the same way we treat the computer as a computer and not as a pile of quarks. And this distinction matters because in fact the cells don’t ‘move’, there’s no movement other than on and off for the cells; there’s no ‘path’, no ‘collision’, those are things the object does that the parts don’t do. The thing that’s moving is the higher-order object, the glider.
I call that an object, because that’s what we call the higher-order clumps of atoms around us, e.g. computers. And to the extent the cells in CGoL are objectively existing parts, the glider is an objectively existing object. If you want to specify that it’s a virtual object made of virtual parts, I have no objection, but it doesn’t change the analysis.
I don’t see how this follows. I’m not arguing that a brick is alive, but I do think bricks are best understood without reference to quarks.
Let’s take the system of ‘a $1 bill’, and think about the quark-level basis for the property of being worth $1. It’s not that we can’t (in principle) describe a dollar bill in terms of quarks or what have you. But that description doesn’t really tell us what we want to know. We would reduce the physical object to its constituent quarks, but also the concept of ‘value’ and ‘economic exchange’ and ‘money’ and ‘worth’ etc. in terms of quarks. What we end up with is a list of all the quark-quark interactions in causal chains that pass through any of those things.
Such a description may be true and precise, but it’s totally useless and can only exist in principle (the amount of information necessary to describe that many quarks and all their interactions is colossal). By contrast, we have higher-order laws that describe the dollar and its value with less precision but in a way that is efficient and practical.
When there are two descriptions, one of which is more precise but functionally unrealizable, and the other of which is true for practical purposes and easily instantiated, the second is rightfully called emergent. And while I use the word in its epistemological sense, I think the distinction starts to break down here. In principle, we believe it’s possible to describe the dollar in these terms, but even in theory we must conclude that it’s impossible given the inherent limitation on how much information we can pack into our universe. So the epistemologically emergent property ends up being functionally ontologically emergent, because the lower-level cause and effect description is forever unavailable.