Good will account: overdrawn.

It's no big deal. Just look it up. It's fascinating stuff.

I feel that you didn't need to be so vulgar and abrupt in your comment on what is after all a philosophical topic discussion. — Corvus

I wasn't. And I don't know what "abrupt" when reading posts in forums like this.

I gave the most accurate and realistic account of consciousness. But you somehow sound not only negative but also rude. I can only assume either you are hurt in your feelings for some reason or you are just obtuse and pretentious in your comment. Maybe both. — Corvus

First, I'm neither of the above. But I didn't think your post, which I criticized, should even be the question -- meaning, I expected more from you than posting nonsense like that.

@Clarendon I will try to provide some passages from philosophers related to the Vienna Circle. Herbert Feigl probably. At the moment I don't have an access to their writings.

Mark Bedeau's influential paper — SophistiCat

Thanks for pointing this out. It's a very curious piece of work, that paper. Not what I was expecting.

↪frank Good will account: overdrawn. — Clarendon

He is right, though.

Combining objects of different weights will result in a whole that weighs more than any of its parts. The weight is said to be weakly emergent. — Clarendon

That is not weak emergence. According to you, you started with things that had weight. Weight didn't emerge.

I don't know how you define life. It seems to me it's a bunch of physical processes. Metabolism. Respiration. Circulation. Immune systems. Reproduction. Growth. What aspect of life is not physical? What aspect can't be observed, measured, followed step-by-step? — Patterner

My analogy between life and consciousness mostly has to do with the inability of people on one side of the argument to conceive that a particular phenomenon might be a manifestation of a physical process. There must be something else. For life it was "elan vital," a spark of life coming from outside. The need for that explanatory factor no longer seems to be an issue for most people. What is the spark for consciousness?

And what aspect of consciousness is physical, and can be observed, measured, followed step-by-step? How can we know that everything needed for the existence of consciousness is purely physical if no aspect of consciousness is? — Patterner

How do we know that someone or something other than ourselves is conscious? By observing their behavior. The most obvious way is by listening to what another person says--how they describe their own first-person experience. Obviously that's not enough. Not all conscious entities have language to self-report. What I need to do to make this a better argument is to identify non-verbal patterns of behavior that demonstrate consciousness. I'm not prepared to have that discussion right now.

And when I do that, will that be enough? Is consciousness more than just patterns of behavior? I know you'll say yes. What do I say? I'm not sure. This is why I was trying to avoid a discussion of the "hard problem” until I have a better answer.

This just ignores what I explicitly said I mean by weak emergence. I am using it to mean: something had by the whole, but not by any of the parts. If the whole weighs 10 stone but the parts weigh 1 stone each, then the whole has a property - weighing 10 stone - that none of the parts have.

If someone wants to use weak emergence to mean something else, that is a verbal disagreement. But it is not a criticism of my claim. One might as well say 'I know someone called 'Emergence' and they're strong. Therefore there is strong emergence.

From Humpty Dumpty +‎ -ism, after the fictional character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who, when asked what he means by glory, replies, "I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" Alice protests that this isn't the meaning of glory and Humpty Dumpty replies, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean——neither more nor less." — wiki

You do realize YOU are the one Humpty dumptying? Despite my having said what I mean by weak emergence numerous times you have decided that you can just decide to give it a different meaning and thereby win a point! Anyway, this is not profitable and I won't be responding to you anymore. You can take that as a victory (alongside Mary Antoinette's victorious shampoo savings)

This just ignores what I explicitly said I mean by weak emergence. — Clarendon

@Patterner is right about what weak emergence means. A good example is the emergence of macroscopic ideal gas behavior out of the microscopic behavior of molecules. An example of strong emergence is the development of biological life out of chemical interactions.

Dictionary definition fallacy. Look it up.

Oh, and I won't be responding to you again btw. You are on the 'not worth it' list.

Oh, and I won't be responding to you again btw. You are on the 'not worth it' list. — Clarendon

Alas. And since you’re making up definitions for words that already have well established meanings, I assume you’re using “not worth it,” to mean “points out when I am wrong.”

An example of strong emergence is the development of biological life out of chemical interactions. — T Clark

I doubt that. I can roughly imagine how chemical interactions give rise to life, and much of this (DNA, RNA, neurotransmitters) has already been researched.

However, I cannot imagine at all how qualia could arise from the four fundamental forces.

To me, that's like adding up a lot of even numbers to get an odd number.

I wasn't. And I don't know what "abrupt" when reading posts in forums like this. — L'éléphant

Without any logical argument, just your blurting out "Fail" and "Nonsense" to the others' point sounded abrupt and pretentious too.

First, I'm neither of the above. But I didn't think your post, which I criticized, should even be the question -- meaning, I expected more from you than posting nonsense like that. — L'éléphant

It appears that you feel it is nonsense due to your prejudice on something. Talking in vague science words beating around the bush clouding the point is not always a good way to do philosophy. Looking at the problem from different angle is. You seem to rubbish the latter, and blindly adore the former.

I doubt that. I can roughly imagine how chemical interactions give rise to life, and much of this (DNA, RNA, neurotransmitters) has already been researched. — SolarWind

Whether or not you can “roughly imagine” how something works is not the standard by which strong emergence is determined. When we say a level of organization is strongly emergent, that means it’s rules and principles cannot be determined, constructed, in advance from the rules and principles of a lower level, even in theory. You cannot determine the principles of biology in advance from the principles of chemistry and physics.

If you’re interested, here’s a link to one of the founding documents of the study of emergence.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4047.393

Andersen does not talk about strong emergence, or indeed any emergence - these terms gained traction later.

Thanks for pointing this out. It's a very curious piece of work, that paper. Not what I was expecting. — Srap Tasmaner

What were you expecting? (Just curious)

↪AmadeusD

So, you believe that atoms have consciousness? — Questioner

↪Questioner Please answer at least one question put to you first. — AmadeusD

I just read over your reply to me and didn't see any questions.

The property is in all particles, not just those in the human brain. — Patterner

But it is just make believe

It seems misguided to dismiss the idea that the functioning of the brain could generate consciousness without even the most basic understanding of how a thought is produced. Reducing the action of neurons to a mere “combination of atoms” – an error in understanding that the OP argument rests upon – suggests a serious flaw in the argument.

Can you answer the following basic questions?

How is an action potential along an axon propagated?

What happens at a synapse between two neurons?

A single atom cannot accomplish what the whole brain does. Atoms do not process information, integrate signals, have memory, or exhibit awareness. Neither does a single neuron, either. It is in the interaction of the system components – large scale neuronal networks - from which consciousness emerges.

I accept the “global” theories of consciousness – a connectivist approach – which cites neuronal synchronization in the production of the normal brain rhythms that make integration and differentiation possible:

Integration reflects the unity of conscious experiences, in the sense that each such experience is unique, so it cannot be decomposed into independent components. Differentiation refers to the enormous amount of potential conscious experiences that are simultaneous, that is, the extremely large repertoire of possible conscious experiences of which one is selected.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7597170/

Ahem. I already quoted from and linked Philip Anderson. ;-)

What were you expecting? — SophistiCat

A typical, and unconvincing, philosophy paper!

I'm going to reread it more carefully, and find a version that has the graphs -- it has graphs! Philosophy papers don't present data!

I read through it quickishly, so there are probably some things I missed. He suggests that earlier definitions have trouble related to irreducible downward causation, but the actual point he makes is not some subtle gap based on a thought experiment, but that everyone who uses the standard definition cites the same one or two papers, and even those are getting pretty old. If it's a thing, where is it in the scientific literature? he asks. That was interesting.

And his definition is, roughly, something's emergent if it shows up in a simulation. Wait, what? And then he defends this, to some degree, by saying, look, y'all are going to have to get used to simulations. Why? Because that's what we do -- that is, it's a report from a guy who actually does complexity research, and, well, "we all call it 'emergence', so deal".

There was no fine-tuning of definitions to skirt earlier criticisms and anticipate objections, no thought experiments, and no subtle interpretation of everyday phenomena involving medium-sized dry goods. It wasn't -- I guess this is really the sense in which it was unexpected and atypical -- a piece of conceptual analysis at all!

And I found that terribly refreshing.

One of the things that always bothers me in philosophy discussions that deal with science is a sort of insistence that science has to work with the concepts we want it to. ("We're interested specifically in intentionality. Have you found that yet?") While science might cheerfully start with a question posed in an existing framework, like folk psychology, the expectation is that in the process of research appropriate concepts will, you know, emerge, and not only is it likely they won't align with the pre-research concepts, it's not even a goal, and it just doesn't matter whether they do. (That raises some issues for science communication, of course.)

Since he's not doing conceptual analysis at all, Bedau doesn't really bother covering all the key examples and counterexamples from the literature -- here's how my definition and my framework handles this one, etc. He gives two longish examples where he's actually been involved in the research, to show why his terminology is appropriate. It's really more like a science paper, from my limited experience of those.

Added

For comparison, this conversation made me go back to Fodor's classic paper on the special sciences, which shaped my thinking on reductionism decades ago. (And which I think Anderson's paper sits alongside, in claiming that of course you can always go down, you just can't come back up.) Fodor starts right in with issues involving the logic of "bridge laws" and their interpretation. It's all very abstract.

Andersen does not talk about strong emergence, or indeed any emergence - these terms gained traction later. — SophistiCat

It's true he does not use the terms "emerge," "emergent," or "emergence," but that's what he was writing about. As for the provenance of the terms in this context, this is from E.A. Burtt's "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science," written in 1924.

These developments strongly suggest that reality can only be consistently regarded as a more complex affair, that the primary qualities simply characterize nature so far as she is subject to mathematical handling, while she just as really harbors the secondary and tertiary ones so far as she is a medley of orderly but irreducible qualities. How to construe a rational structure out of these various aspects of nature is the great difficulty of contemporary cosmology; that we have not yet satisfactorily solved it is evident if one considers the logical inadequacies in the theory of emergent evolution, which appears at present the most popular scheme for dealing with this problem. In this theory we either have to suppose fundamental discontinuities in nature such as permit no inference from qualities earlier existing to those later appearing, or else we have to regard the more complex qualities as somehow existing even before they would have been empirically observable, and co-operating in bringing about their material embodiment. — E.A. Burtt - The Metaphysics of Modern Science

As I understand it, Burtt uses the term "evolution" here to mean developmental change in general, not Darwinian evolution. I don't know if he was the first to use the "emergent" in this context or whether it was used by others. As far as I know, Burtt did not have any influence on Anderson.

I already quoted from and linked Philip Anderson. — Srap Tasmaner

I didn't see your earlier reference.

I didn't see your earlier reference. — T Clark

Eh. (I'm still surprised every time someone has read something I've written.)

The physics was over my head, but I still found it fascinating. Certainly deserves two references!

It might be helpful if you could tell us why, or what about, the human mind makes it so special that standard logic doesn't apply? — AmadeusD

Is the suggestion that a certain level of complexity in a system magically generates a novel attribute? — AmadeusD

Then you need to tell me what it is, and how it works. Every single piece of information we have about hte brain is biomechanics.Please.. tell your story. — AmadeusD

You need to explain how this, all of it non-conscious, results in first-person phenomenal experience and you are not doing that. — AmadeusD

I just read over your reply to me and didn't see any questions. — Questioner

The property is in all particles, not just those in the human brain.
— Patterner

But it is just make believe — Questioner

As opposed to "Throw enough physical things together, and they make non-physical things."

It might be helpful if you could tell us why, or what about, the human mind makes it so special that standard logic doesn't apply? — AmadeusD

See my above posts

Is the suggestion that a certain level of complexity in a system magically generates a novel attribute? — AmadeusD

See my above posts

Then you need to tell me what it is, and how it works. Every single piece of information we have about hte brain is biomechanics.Please.. tell your story. — AmadeusD

See my above posts

You need to explain how this, all of it non-conscious, results in first-person phenomenal experience and you are not doing that.
— AmadeusD — AmadeusD

For sure, the subjective experience has not been fully explained by current scientific knowledge, but I am confident that the answer lies in the functioning of the brain.

Any other answer to me seems to be the magical wishful thinking.

"Throw enough physical things together, and they make non-physical things." — Patterner

They are not "thrown together." Please read my previous posts.

Hmm. In my view, you have not answered these questions. I have also responded, pointing this out, to each example you seem to think you have answered with reasoning. The answers avoid entirely what's being asked of you by providing yet more ambiguous, unclear responses that don't seem to really set out what you think the answers to those questions are - just some other information about your emotional response to them - often, these are off-topic from the question at hand also.

If that is your wish, that is fine. I was looking for clear answers. It seems others are having this same problem...

Sorry, I cannot be responsible for your lack of understanding