Looks like you are active here but relatively new.
This information question is nothing but trouble...round and round stuff much worse than this thread.

Looks like you are active here but relatively new — Mark Nyquist

Very active, and will continue to be. But yes, very new I've recently found out :P I am also, for 'context of me' starting my Philosophy BA as a conjoint with an LLB (bachelor of Law) that i'm part-way through this year.

I shall take note.

Anyone else you'd append for someone to explore?
— AmadeusD
Chapter five here is worth a read. Thanks, Ludwig V. — Banno

Thanks mate. Ryle is about half-way down my hit list currently - Just jumped a few spots.

Here's the problem, because that looks like simple causation to me. In the old potentiometers, there was an electromagnet working against a spring, so that he great the voltage the greater the stretch. Isn't the idea with emergence that we get more than we put in? Pressure from a container full of gas particles, a flood from a series of rain drops, existential angst from neural networks and so on.

Bringing in reducibility is shifting the goal posts, and I understand that you don't agree with it, but can you give me a reason to think that your disagreement is not simply a matter of biased intuitions on your part? — wonderer1

The point is that physics is based on the quantitative analysis of physical particulars - spin, vector, velocity, and so on. The whole genius of Galileo's method was to strip out all of the antiquated Aristotelian notions of teleology and the like, and to reduce physics to the study of just those kinds of simple properties ('simple' as in not compounded from something else) of physical bodies. Allied with the newly-emerging mathematical sciences, this has been the backbone of the enormous strides made by physics since the 17th C.

But that revolution had a crucial starting point: it involved excluding all mental aspects such as consciousness, meaning, intention, or purpose from the study of the physical world.

We humans are part of this universe, physically composed of the same basic elements as everything else. Because our mental experiences are clearly linked to our existence as physical beings, particularly the functioning of our central nervous systems, it might seem reasonable to assume that such physicalist explanations would ultimately provide an explanation for the mental aspects of reality as well, if they were to be a comprehensive theory.

Nevertheless, this possibility is undercut by the fundamental principles that have characterized the physical sciences from their inception. While the physical sciences can describe organisms like us as elements of the objective spatiotemporal order—our structure and actions in space and time—they are incapable of elucidating the subjective experiences of these organisms or how the world appears from their unique points of view. While it is possible to offer a purely physical account of the neurophysiological processes that generate an experience and the associated physical behavior, such a description, no matter how comprehensive, will fail to capture the way it is perceived by its subject. Without this subjective perspective, it cannot truly be considered a comprehensive account. Hence, despite their remarkable success within their own realm, the physical sciences inevitably leave a significant aspect of nature unexplained (per Nagel).

I maintain that this perspective is so deeply ingrained in modern culture that we adopt it without being aware that we are doing so. That's why I referred before to the article 'the blind spot of science' which elaborates this idea.

Trying to slip spirituality or Zen into physics is like trying to win Chess by presenting a full house. — Banno

The discussion is about physicalism, not physics. Physicalism is a philosophical doctrine.

"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" Intuitive answer is you simply don't. Same as how you don't get an ought from an is.

I've decided that ontologies are a lot like impressionist paintings. They look better from far way. :rofl: — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

Here's the problem, because that looks like simple causation to me. — Banno

If it wasn't cases of complex causation that we are discussing, we wouldn't bother discussing supervenience and emergence. So I don't see the relevance of the word "simple" in your statement.

So if we drop the "simple", you are saying the problem is that it looks like causation?

I'm not seeing how the way it looks to you is supposed to be a problem for physicalism.

Night all. It's been fun. :grin:

Trying to slip spirituality or Zen into physics is like trying to win Chess by presenting a full house. — Banno

:smirk:

I suspect you just lost @Wayfarer @Gnomon et al.

The discussion is about physicalism, not physics. Physicalism is a philosophical doctrine. — Wayfarer

Told ya. :roll:

"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" Intuitive answer is you simply don't. Same as how you don't get an ought from an is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are countless examples of emergence in nature. Why should we think that particular arrangements and complexities of matter/ energy cannot produce novel qualities? For a start, think about chemistry. How reliable do you believe your intuitions are on this?

:up: :up:

Well said.

The problem with emergentism is that nothing—and certainly no thing—can be shown to emerge. Nothing of any sort “appears” or “arises”, especially wherever we use such language. We’re left with nothing to work with or even think about.

That’s the problem with consciousness and mind in general. They cannot point to what they are talking about. That these words are noun-phrases and occupy the subject position in a sentence does not entail their existence.

What emerges are new compounds with new properties. Think about what happens when you combine sodium and chlorine, or hydrogen and oxygen, or the complex chains of proteins that are involved in the emergence of life. According to our best scientific understandings the phenomena we see in the Universe today are nearly all of them emergent phenomena. It's not just consciousness: consider for example photosynthesis, transpiration, respiration, digestion, metabolism and self-organization. These are not objects, they are properties and/ or activities, just as consciousness is. There are also emergent objects or entities: galaxies, stars, cells, crystals, hurricanes.

I get it but properties are too abstract. They emerge only from thinking and discourse and various other analysis. What matters in the case of consciousness is the thing that is conscious, what it is we analyze and ascribe with various properties. That is consciousness by any measure.

Trying to slip spirituality or Zen into physics is like trying to win Chess by presenting a full house. — Banno

Yeah my bad. I was trying to argue against the assertion of neuro-science as kind of a pre-requisite for insight but it was a digression.

Do you deny that properties and activities can be observed?

But this isn't really a challenge to physicalism, since plenty of people who would claim that information is ontologically basic would also go with Landauer's principle, "information is physical." — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems like you can make a strong case that it is not, that it is more akin to mathematics. Consider digital information. Two digital objects are identical iff their sequence of bits is identical. Sequences of bits are just (potentially enormous) binary numbers.

What is constant as information moves from one media to another is numerical. Everything that is not constant is physical.

The thing or things we ascribe properties to can be observed. To observe the property “boiling point”, for example, we have to observe something boil. With an activity it’s the same. If we want to observe a standing ovation we need to observe people stand and clap. There is no observable distinction between one or the other, the thing and its properties.

Emergence is a giant red herring in this discussion. Emergence is a description, not an explanation. If a complex phenomenon manifests properties that are not present in its components, and could never have been predicted by studying the components, these properties can be described as emergent. But this doesn't explain anything at all.

If physicalism is true, conscious is undoubtedly emergent from neural activity. But so what? This just characterizes the relationship between consciousness and neural activity. You still have to explain how consciousness can emerge from neural activity. Emergence itself is totally incapable of doing this. In all other emergent phenomena the explanation is known at least in principle, "emergence" is never an explanation.

The problem with that is, that physicalism is supposed to be true of everything that is real. Even idealism acknowledges that physical objects exist, but physicalism is the idea that everything is reducible to the physical. — Wayfarer

Is Donald Duck real? No. Is the Walt Disney cartoon character Donald Duck in pictures, cartoons and in costumes made depicting the duck real? Yes, in the pictures and cartoons there is the cartoon character Donald Duck. With a few pence strokes a cartoonist can create the fictional character.



What is real or true depends from the questions we ask and the context we make our questions.

If laws of thought govern all that is physical, then it is irrational to hold that these very laws of thought emerged (via supervenience or otherwise) out of that which is physical. Instead entailing that the physical itself is contingent on the occurrence of laws of thought—with laws of thought being commonly taken to not be in and of themselves physical unless they were to emerge from the physical. — javra

Well, Donald Duck was first drawn by Dick Huemer and Art Babbit and the immature character was developed by Dick Lundy. From there on many cartoonists etc have contributed to the character, like Carl Barks. Hence the physicalist could reduce everything about to basically molecules and atoms and acts what cartoonists and drawers have done.

Yet I think the real question is how fruitful is the assumption of reductionism itself? I view physicalism as one general answer to reductionism. The physicalist is happy to stop somewhere and waive off else in philosophy as near nonsense. Brush everything else off with accusing others of talking about spirits. Or at least something that isn't so important. Has this consequences?

Basically naive reductionism leaves us to ask about the foundations of everything from physicists, as if they somehow would have the cradle of knowledge about everything. Yet the fact is that even if a complex system is a sum of it parts, just looking at those parts individually don't answer much about the operations of the complex system itself. A metallurgist just looking at scraps of metal cannot answer how a jet aircraft flies, just as a microbiologist looking at cells has a hard time to explain our current societies.

Just to be clear, my argument here is not that there aren't plenty of good candidates for emergence or many powerful arguments for why something like emergence is necessary to adequately explain the world. There clearly are. My earlier post in this thread was all about how the empirical evidence for reductionism is actually quite weak, and how it seems possible that it is an idea that only has currency because it is "neat/tidy" and fits our intuitions.

My point is about whether or not other assumptions upstream of emergence, assumptions that have been key to defining physicalism in something approaching a rigorous manner, seem to simply preclude emergence in any sort of a strong form.

My actual position on this would be that this shows that something is probably deeply flawed with the concepts of superveniance and causal closure. With causal closure in particular, I think a lot of unwarranted assumptions get smuggled in.

As mentioned before, I think process views represent a potential resolution to these difficulties. However, I will allow that it is possible they only look promising because they have yet to be subjected to anything like the same level of analysis and critique, being less popular. In such views, there simply isn't superveniance, but the partially analogous idea of superengrafment. I think I quoted Bickhard earlier on the idea that process "allows for strong emergence," but this isn't exactly accurate. It simply doesn't need emergence. More is fundementally different.

(Note: most process philosophers would say the world is composed of fundementally "physical" processes, but this seems to me to be more a broad commitment to metaphysical realism than anything else. Such views represent a radical departure from mainstream physicalism in that physical 'stuff/thing's are not fundemental.)





It's not "explain how every incidence of emergence works," but rather "explain how any meaningful emergence can possibly exist in the context of superveniance/causal closure?" How do we get something new and irreducible, with real causal powers, and not have that new force impinge on the causal forces at work in whatever the emergent phenomena emerges from? If something is emergent, isn't it, in a very important way, "fundemental?" But if we have all sorts of sui generis fundemental forces, why has demonstrating downward causality been such a flop?

Epiphenomenalism solves this problem by having conciousness be emergent, but causally non-efficacious. There are significant problems with epiphenomenalism. For one, if epiphenomenalism is true, there is no reason for natural selection to give us perceptions that in any way represent the world accurately, and there is no reason why pain should have to "feel bad," etc. I don't think anyone moves to epiphenomenalism because it sounds like an appealing position. They end up there because of the significant problems both with causally efficacious emergence and with the plausibility of a physicalism without emergence.

They are between a rock and a hard place; dealing with the plausibility problems of physicalism and the coherence problems of meaningfully defining it.

I have considered that, if only mind is truly emergent, there is actually a fix here. If you accept the Wigner-Von Neumann interpretation of quantum mechanics, then mind, being strongly emergent and thus fundemental, absolutely has quite observable causal effects on the rest of the world. Collapse/decoherence is the emergent effect/downward causation. But this ends up looking way more like dualism than physicalism (and people have made the argument that "physicalism with strongly emergent, irreducible mind," is actually just what is generally proposed by science-oriented dualists.) There are many reasons this is unappealing. I don't buy it, but it does seem to work.

The blocks argument is supposed to be an analogy. Superveniance and causal closure essentially give you wooden cubes to work with. You then sit down to make something like a steel sphere. You're never going to get there because the materials you started with preclude your ever being successful. Either emergence has to go, at least in any strong form that would seem to resolve the issues it is supposed to resolve, or the things used to build a definition of emergence and the physical would seem to need to be rethought significantly.

As with causality, it doesn't seem to stand up to close inspection.

Sure, but the same could be true of physicalism itself, all but the most neutered definitions of truth, the concept of information, objectivity, etc., including conciousness itself.

IMO, one of the biggest missteps of modern philosophy is to decide that if a concept is hard to frame or explain it must entail that the concept is meaningless, should be eliminated, or is somehow related to a "pseudo-problem."

Truth is a prime example in that it clearly seems to assert itself, even if it is hard to define.

That said, I will grant that the problems with emergence are particularly acute, but that only makes sense when it's a concept built on top of other concepts with similar issues.



Certainly. Paul Davies' article introducing "Information and the Nature of Reality," is titled "From Immaterialism, to Materialism and Back," trading off these sorts of intuitions.

Be away for two days and the backlog of answers pool over :sweat:

It is long. And it provides no insight. Could be wrong, but that seems the case to me. — AmadeusD

But it sounds more like: being long, therefore it has no insight.

I tend towards dismissing your arguments in the same spirit that you trend to dismiss a vast range of philosophical spirituality as ‘religious fantasy’. You strike me as a highly intelligent and articulate atheist with cast-iron convictions. — Wayfarer

The "cast-iron" convictions might be because I root them in more rigid world-based reasoning, evolving them from what seems most likely out of what we scientifically know, without projecting my emotions onto the world as extensions of anxieties.

Whereas I see philosophy (and in some ways, religion) as being precisely the concern with what Victor Frankl called ‘man’s search for meaning’. But you dismiss it as an infantile search for comfort, as being like thumb-sucking. That’s how it comes across to me. — Wayfarer

If man's search for meaning leads to skewing truth about reality, then what meaning is actually extrapolated other than some fictional invented comfort? What depth and importance would such fabricated meaning really have compared to actually knowing truth and form meaning on more truthful grounds?

If we end up converging some kind of discovered universal meaning with the actual truth about what reality is, then I'm all for it, but I cannot believe such universal meaning exists before having proof that it does. And the burden of proof remains on those arguing for meaning to find and prove that meaning and not to argue for a meaning that there's no evidence for.

While they seek for meaning, I'll seek truth without the expectation of meaning.

And the reason I tend towards being dismissive is because I couldn’t say anything inside what you consider valid terms of reference which could hold any sway. What you’re asking for is a scientific explanation of what is outside the purview of scientific explanations. Whereas I feel you’re saying, if something is outside the purview of science, then how could it be worth considering? — Wayfarer

If something falls outside the current limitations of science, it requires a rational and levelheaded philosophical approach that still takes into account the science and facts that do exist. The problem is that many take advantage of the "unknown" to form the most outlandish philosophical theories rather than try to build out from what we do know and be careful of any wild and extreme leaps.

There are also those who form theories out of either a total misunderstanding of a certain science, a misunderstanding of the scientific methods that exist or who's only researched one single point of reference and not all parts of a certain field.

I think on your very, very long post you went off the rails in your very first paragraph.

A physical object is always going to be primary and it's definition will be secondary. If there is any ambiguity about what the parameters of the physical object are they should be resolved by setting parameters on the physical object.

If the definition of the word you are using doesn't match the physical object.then you are using the wrong word. — Mark Nyquist

Not sure which paragraph you are referring to, but I think you can find in my argument that an "object" is not as easily defined as traditional understanding describes it.

If everything in nature is a set of smaller parts, formed by guiding principles (physical laws) into a complexity that generate an emergent holistic existence that we through our language categorize as an "object", then what exactly is "primary"? Reality as a whole is a rather messy ocean of emerging systems that behave and interact based on physical laws, an "object" is only relevant in language for us humans to communicate about reality easier. But an "object" is not clearly defined outside of our experience other than through borders between compounds. Therefore we need to treat and examine reality as a system beyond our perceptual limitations, as a whole system operating on levels of emerging functions rather than how we define objects traditionally.

This is part of the a fundamental difference between reductionist thoughts and emergentist thoughts. Reductionists generally view reality as being made up of objects in the traditional sense, while emergentists view it as a scale-based complexity gradient that has cutoff points where functions become defined.

But if you quote the paragraph and explain further it might clear up my confusion as to what you meant.

The idealists, when held to account, find that they are unable to give a simple account of error, or even of their not being alone. The physicalist uses words like "reduction" or "emergence", waving a hand in the air when asked what such things might actually be. — Banno

I think I've explained it many times in this thread. Emergence is rooted in how a chaotic system (for instance a bunch of elementary particles) operates by some guiding principles (physical laws, constants etc.) and at a certain point the complexity it generates produce an emergent property that we define as an "object" and/or as I described consciousness an "abstract".

Emergence is all over nature, from basic physics and chemistry, to large scale systems like consciousness, ecosystems, sociology, economics, solar systems, galaxies etc.

The problems with idealism is that it focus mind over matter, that the mind has center stage. My objection to that is that idealism really only point out our limitations of human perception and somehow believes that scientists and physicists only operate by those limitations when in fact they operate on the principles of calculating outside them. The abstract nature of what's beyond our human perception isn't closed off to us, especially when the language of this kind of research, like math, works in dimensions of understanding that goes beyond our perceptive limitations. We can in fact study abstract concepts and what we cannot see, hear, touch, smell or taste; and for the well versed in such research, their minds operate on radically different levels of thinking formed out of using such "language". But that's only addressing the kind of soft idealism that people like Wayfarer seem to do. Then we have the idealists who treat mind over matter as a form of source for reality, that our consciousness is some form of special entity that is responsible for creating reality and this is the religious realm I'm objecting against.

The alternative to both is found most explicitly in that grandmother of philosophy, Mary Midgley, but can be seen in other Oxbridge philosophers from the middle of last century. It's simply that we use different types of explanation in different situations, that we need not, indeed ought not, commit to there being a single monolithic explanation of everything.

The world is far too interesting for that. — Banno

I'm not really a fan of this. The whole reason to try and figure our reality, with science and philosophy is to reach a form of truth. If the pursuit for the best method of doing so is met with some kind of "everyone is right in their own way", then everything breaks down into nonsense.

What I've mainly argued in here is that science generally should be preferable to researching reality and that things like our consciousness should be considered part of the natural world, and therefore also a point of study in science. Any argument against that requires an alternative method that is better than science to explain how reality functions as well as position consciousness as something extra special outside of reality. A claim that functions mainly in the realm of religion and spirituality and does not hold much water against what we do know already.

Using scientific knowledge as the foundation for theories and arguments should be an obvious thing to do. There's no other foundation for truth we can stand on without it becoming a realm of pure fiction.

Maybe Christoffer can articulate it in a way that I can't see how to at the moment, but I can point to examples. For instance, suppose I have designed a voltmeter. When an instance of such a voltmeter is powered, it has the emergent property of displaying a number corresponding to the voltage applied to the input terminals. That emergent property supervenes on the particular properties of components within that specific instance of the voltmeter design.

Another instance of the same voltmeter design might have a different emergent property due to having different specific components. For example, voltmeter A may be more accurate than voltmeter B. Because the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B supervenes on B's components, changing the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B would require a change in one or more of the specific components of B that the emergent property supervenes on. — wonderer1

In a sense that is an emergence, but I'm focusing on more fundamental aspects in nature.

Like, a good example as an analogy would be a photograph in a newspaper. The print dots themselves do not have any features other than shades of black and white, zoomed in they just look like white noise, grainy and nothing special. But the guiding principles that exist (the data of the photograph) makes these dots flow in and out of their shades in a pattern. When we zoom out we start to see an emergent form and when the complexity of those dots become many many thousands we don't see the dots anymore, we see a photograph, an emergent form out of that underlying chaos.

The emergence appears out of a chaotic system in which a set of principles or laws govern how the chaos generally behaves. In nature these are the physical laws of our reality. And each level of emergence forms new "objects" that in themselves -together with similar others form a new scale of complexity that can be further zoomed out from. Each system is part of of a larger system and so on. Fundamentally governed by natural laws of physics, and on larger scales they can take forms of complex systems acting together, forming new emerging systems that are even more complex, like our consciousness. There are some evidence of this in neuroscience that focus on more holistic measurements rather than reductionist methods just looking at the parts.

"emergence," being any sort of magic wand for difficulties in forming an ontology — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see it as a respect for a complexity of reality that traditional human hubris in understanding reality lacks.

It requires researching the guiding principles of a system rather than all of its parts. If you find those principles, laws or math, you could possibly be able to replicate an emerging property. It's basically what we do in chemistry, disregarding the individuality of atoms in matter and instead focus on the emergent properties and in what ways we can control their progression.

"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

You look at the blueprint.

I use to come back to the concept of the commercial drone you can buy in a photography store. The design is made to be perfect for balance and air flow. But the designers didn't invent the design at all, they couldn't find the optimal design that included all aspects and it was too expensive to try and brute force it. Instead they set guiding principles that governed how the shape formed around the physical facts of its function as a flying drone. Then they let a computer run simulated trial and errors for millions of runs before it ended up with the most optimal design for the drone. No one designed it, it emerged out of the guiding principles and out of the chaos of randomness that flowed by those principles it formed an emergent shape and function.

What this is all about is an underlying chaos in all things and systems which forms new properties not by will, but by outcome of guided chaos. If we want to understand it we can't look at the chaos, we need to look at the guiding principles and how they direct how the chaos flows.

Even if you really really really believe it, it doesn't falsify physicalism. — wonderer1

Yes, this is my main problem with many counter arguments to physicalism. That some strong belief manage to somehow support truth? No, they're just beliefs. If I argue for physicalist emergentism I'm doing so out from the science and observations that already exists. It points towards a likely concept that explains many parts if not all parts of reality itself. The difference is that I know where the science ends and my speculations begin, but I always have my foundation rooted in what we already know and what scientists theorize about. I never pick a comforting belief I have and use that as my foundation and if there were proof tomorrow that emergentism is definitely false I would abandon the idea instantly, which is how knowledge should be treated. Too much I'm seeing people sticking to their preferred theory, regardless of evidence against it. I'm sticking to emergentlism because it is, today, the most holistically solid concept about how reality and consciousness functions, in respect to what hasn't yet been proven but logically speculated.



The main problem with your argument there is that it introduces elements that does not follow out of the science. We do not have any evidence for any of these things you mention, and I don't understand how you mean that emergence as I've described it leads to such scenarios.

Emergence is chaos by guiding principles. In our reality those are our physical laws which has defined how chaos evolved from the start of entropy up until today. The physical laws that exist are the limitations that both guide and prevent events and there's no provable link to magic and supernatural elements, which means there can't emerge such properties as all levels of emergence still follow the laws of reality. Causation and causality still apply; a cause is required for an outcome. "Magic" has no cause and if so, what would that be?

Emergence doesn't mean "anything goes", we don't see a pool of bacteria spontaneously conduct magic because such emergent property "just happened", we still see it as a causal line of events, but engaging in extreme complexity. The emerging property is still dependent on the composition of the underlying systems and parts and limited by their physical composition. Such limitations may also play into the emergent properties.

Yet I think the real question is how fruitful is the assumption of reductionism itself? I view physicalism as one general answer to reductionism. The physicalist is happy to stop somewhere and waive off else in philosophy as near nonsense. Brush everything else off with accusing others of talking about spirits. Or at least something that isn't so important. Has this consequences?

Basically naive reductionism leaves us to ask about the foundations of everything from physicists, as if they somehow would have the cradle of knowledge about everything. Yet the fact is that even if a complex system is a sum of it parts, just looking at those parts individually don't answer much about the operations of the complex system itself. A metallurgist just looking at scraps of metal cannot answer how a jet aircraft flies, just as a microbiologist looking at cells has a hard time to explain our current societies. — ssu

:up:

As I tangentially alluded to in another post, were reductionism to be a valid means of explaining - and thereby gaining knowledge of - all that is, we then ought to be able to explain all that is via strict analysis of the omnipresent quantum vacuum state in and of itself. As in, I'm currently motivated to write this post because the quantum vacuum did this and that. One then could even neatly replace the "God did it" answer to everything that explains nothing with a "the quantum vacuum did it" answer to everything that explains nothing.

Just want to second your observations with this. And of course there's other means of approaching the issue of reductionism.

There are countless examples of emergence in nature. Why should we think that particular arrangements and complexities of matter/ energy cannot produce novel qualities? For a start, think about chemistry. How reliable do you believe your intuitions are on this? — Janus

:up:

What matters in the case of consciousness is the thing that is conscious, — NOS4A2

Why is that special? There are countless of systems that emerges in nature that are extremely complex and almost impossible to understand how they appeared. We only think consciousness to be this extremely special thing because we are arrogant about our existence. We attribute our consciousness an arbitrary value that in relation to anything else in nature does not really have that value outside of our emotional attachment to our own existence.

I value my hand over the paw of an animal, because its my hand, I like it and I feel its special because its part of me. But it's just one type of meat in an ocean of biological creatures.

Our consciousness might be the most complex emergent property in nature, when only looking at it in comparison to others, but we're also just a last point in a gradient of intelligence among animals. We can see their consciousness as emergent phenomena as well and the further down the gradient we go, the more simplistic consciousness get. At what point is that emergent mind phenomena in animals so rudimentary that you can accept it as just another emergent phenomena? Where is the line drawn? Between us and primates? Us and dolphins? Us and elephants? Between elephants and dolphins? A mouse and an ant?

More plausible is that, as I've described earlier in this thread, that multiple complex systems have between them formed a higher complexity and emergence that might not have fully occurred in other animals. When patients who died and get survived slowly wake up, if the part of the brain that gets oxygen first are responsible for memory generation, they are able to remember the process of waking the other parts up. The recollections these people give is that when all their conscious understanding of reality, their perception but more importantly their understanding of those perceptions click into gear, they go from them unable to make any sense of anything, experiencing the world drastically different than they do as a normally functioning human mind into finally functioning normally. If the area responsible for three-dimensional spatial understanding kicks into gear after the visual cortex, they don't understand and comprehend the visuals that the visual cortex process, they describe it as an almost abstract painting, like a cubist Picasso nonsense of inability to understand spatial relations.

What this shows is that our experience as conscious minds require these subsystems that are complex in themselves to act together, otherwise our consciousness breaks down. The sum of the parts produce consciousness, it... emerges as a system out them all.

It's not that the visual cortex is responsible for what we consider eyesight and what we see. It's that how we experience "seeing" requires other functions to form this understanding of seeing. It's an outcome of all parts and it's probably why we cannot boil consciousness down in reductionist terms.

Right now, this is part of the most likely explanation for what consciousness is, and it is truly remarkable. Yet, I don't treat consciousness as special in relation to the rest of the natural world, it is part of it and I think we need to be humble about its place in nature, rather than attribute it some magical status. We might not be that unique, even though we think so.

Briefly, can you sketch out your reasoning for why consciousness emerges from brains and not, say, hearts? Or livers? And why are only some brain functions conscious? Do you think some information processing is required for consciousness to emerge?

The main problem with your argument there is that it introduces elements that does not follow out of the science. — Christoffer

The occurrence of consciousness doesn't follow out of the science either. Unless one here wants to deny the reality of consciousness on these very same grounds, then this problem you here express is in no way an impediment to the logically valid supposition of a deity-inclusive physicalism, one accordant to laws of nature both currently known and unknown.

It should also be mentioned that - while the scientific method is contingent on the occurrence of a singular, universally existent, physical reality - the scientific method is in no way contingent upon physicalism. As previously noted, one can logically maintain the same singular, universally existent, physical reality within the objective idealism of C. S. Peirce - for one example of an idealism that supports the physical, replete with its natural laws.

Emergence doesn't mean "anything goes", we don't see a pool of bacteria spontaneously conduct magic because such emergent property "just happened", we still see it as a causal line of events, but engaging in extreme complexity. The emerging property is still dependent on the composition of the underlying systems and parts and limited by their physical composition. Such limitations may also play into the emergent properties. — Christoffer

In respect to emergence, one cannot via current knowledge predict novel cases of emergence. The stipulation of emergence is in no way predictive - but, instead, is always an ad hoc (to the purpose (of accounting for)) explanation for that which is observed or else postulated to be real, and this always after the fact of said observations and/or postulates (hence always also being post hoc).

If emergence is accepted, there is then nothing about the intrinsic properties of emergence that preclude realms of emergent reality wherein deities dwell resulting from supervenience on the consciousness of humans and lesser life forms. (As one can claim that science shall one day figure out consciousness, one here can just as validly claim that science shall in the further future still some day figure out the workings and operations of such corporeal-consciousness-emergent incorporeal deities.)

-----

As I initially wanted to illustrate, physicalism endeavors to rationally conclude tacitly maintained convictions - but the proposal of emergence as a physical account of (some aspects of) reality does not of itself successful confine physiclaism to that which is tacitly maintained. With the case in point being a logically valid metaphysical possibility of a deity-inclusive physicalism.

For all the reasons just mentioned, emergence is then a red herring in the attempts to validate physicalism as it's commonly understood.

Briefly, can you sketch out your reasoning for why consciousness emerges from brains and not, say, hearts? Or livers? And why are only some brain functions conscious? Do you think some information processing is required for consciousness to emerge? — RogueAI

I'm just using the brain itself for convenience in explanations. Researchers at the moment see the body as a pretty instrumental part of our identity as a conscious being, so there may be more parts that make up our consciousness, but they may only be partly responsible for things like emotional differences in behavior and not responsible for our experience as a conscious mind. The evidence for that is simply that someone who's paralyzed from the neck down still has hasn't changed their consciousness, even though emotional life might be changed.

I would say that consciousness itself probably resides in the brain, but our identity and personality and emotions rely on all the hormonal balances, chemistry and functions in the rest of the body.

Just like when we hold a hammer and researchers have noticed that our mind expands our understanding of our body to include the hammer as part of it, just by "attachment" to our body. We may speculate that if we are able to put a consciousness into a perfect simulation of their body, they would continue to function normally by just extending their conscious understanding of their body to the digital representation. But we won't know that until we could test such a concept out fully.

A further question would be: would we consider our personality and identity as emergent aspects out of the complexity of our consciousness in terms of memory and actions as well as the chemical interactions from our hormons in our body? Is the sense of identity or agency, personality and way of using our consciousness an emergent phenomena itself, abstraction out of abstraction?

I would say that consciousness itself probably resides in the brain, but our identity and personality and emotions rely on all the hormonal balances, chemistry and functions in the rest of the body. — Christoffer

What is it about the brain that makes it the seat of consciousness?

If a complex phenomenon manifests properties that are not present in its components, and could never have been predicted by studying the components, these properties can be described as emergent. But this doesn't explain anything at all. — hypericin

We do not yet know if it is impossible to predict or merely that the prediction is too complex for us to compute it. If it were, would that then be an explanation? It only becomes a description if we can conclude it fundamentally impossible to be predicted. But then we also have the guiding principles that govern how a complex system evolve into a new emergent entity. And the explanation should reside in the relation between the complexity of a system and what the guiding principles are.

In terms of consciousness, in neuroscience, finding these key guiding principles which directs the chaos is probably even more important than just witnessing chaos forming something new. Since it directs the outcome that emerges.