You can’t challenge a single statement I’ve made. I’ve left a trail of my reasoning all over this thread, and there’s nothing you dispute, you just say I have “poor conceptual thinking skills.”
Find something, dispute it, or Carleas’s idea stands. That’s how it works. I support the eventual definition of logic being a potential source of Downward Causation, and am frantically looking for problems with that idea.
@Flannel_Jesus did me the courtesy of challenging the ideas and making me evaluate my own reason. I appreciate that.
I don’t have any academic credentials, thank fuck, it means I can think unhindered about most things.
Strong emergence is the claim that higher-level phenomena possess causal powers that are entirely new and cannot be reduced to, or explained by, the interactions of the system’s constituent parts. It asserts that the whole does not just causally affect the parts, but that this causal power arises from genuinely novel properties that appear only at a certain level of complexity. These emergent properties are said to be autonomous from the lower level, meaning they are not determined by it and can even exert downward causal influence on it. This makes strong emergence deeply controversial because it appears to introduce causal influence that is not grounded in the fundamental physics of the system, violating physicalism and the causal closure of the physical. Most scientists and philosophers reject it as incoherent or mystical.
I don’t see any merit at all in strong emergence so far, whether applied to this, or just in general.
In philosophy, downward causation is a causal relationship from higher levels of a system to lower-level parts of that system: for example, mental events acting to cause physical events.
Well yeah, and that’s why. A thought can change the spin of a particle. Can we agree on that first?
Strong emergence seems to imply:
“Not grounded in the fundamental physics”? That claim seems patently false to me, but Downward Causation makes no such claim. Does it?
Literally yes it does. Where in the equations governing fundamental physics can you find the terms for “thought”? If you believe thoughts can change spin (you talk about it like it’s obvious, but it’s not), then yes, you apparently believe non-fundamental things have an effect on fundamental things. That’s strong emergence. That’s downward causation.
I think of something embarrassing. My skin turns red. I think of someone I love, my pupillary response is activated. Those are some of the more obvious..
Why would “thought” be in the equations that govern fundamental physics? Thought is the result of an assembly of components and their interactions, the equations that govern fundamental physics quite obviously provide for the possibility of thought, but why would they describe it?
No, it’s not. There has to be interaction between components, and it has to be grounded in the fundamental physics of the system.
Strong emergentists, by contrast, standardly take emergents to introduce fundamentally novel causal powers—powers that their lower-level physical bases do not have. These are often taken to be powers of the high-level features themselves, and are directed “downwardly” at the structures from which they emerge
No, I won’t find a link, I will treat them fully independently. I am looking for a sound argument that logic gates, when assembled are a possible source of Downward Causation, I don’t care about Strong Emergence, it makes claims which I think are patently false. Where is the hole? Why should I link those two concepts? I’ve thrown one of them in the bin mate.
Jesus, am I writing in English or do I have a virus that is translating everything to Swahili?
I don’t think you are writing in English, no. In English, people who accept downward causation say they believe in strong emergence. That’s how those things work in English.
So, if you agree with the philosophy of Downward Causation, then you must also agree with Strong Emergence? Is that what you are saying? Or are you just saying that’s what the boffins are saying? Because if it’s true, it’s a ridiculous correlation. One makes claims that contradict the other.
This is getting very tiring. From Downward Causation:
The difference becomes clearer if there is any complex interaction of multiple components, leading to a new, emergent phenomenon:[3][4] the emergent phenomenon itself can also conversely influence the behavior of its components. The emergent phenomenon then forms an attractor for neighboring components that are not yet involved in the interaction (f.i. clustering, condensation, crystallization). This is certainly the case with weak emergence. Whether this is also the case with strong emergence is a matter of philosophical debate.[5]
This is from Strong Emergence:
Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities?
Nope. They don’t agree much there, methinks.
Here is the bullshit:
it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities?
So you’re asking me to conflate those two philosophies, FFS, they are almost diametrically opposed. I don’t care what mental gymnastics the boffins are using, it doesn’t make sense to intrinsically link those ideas.