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Strong Emergence

Rilx
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Posted 05/11/09 - 01:05 PM: Subject: Strong Emergence	#1
Dear Prof. Chalmers, In their classic paper, On Emergence and Explanation, Nils A Baas and Claus Emmeche called strong emergence observational emergence, recognizing observation as a source of new properties in strong emergent phenomena. Though this idea seems both to wipe out mystic appearances of new phenomena and to explain the non-reducibility of high-level phenomena to low-level domain, I haven't seen progress to this direction. Or in any other direction, either. On the contrary, it seems as the concept had kind of melt away. How do you see the situation and meaning of the strong emergence concept today?
"In the life, there are no solutions. There are forces in motion. Those need to be created, and solutions follow." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Night Flight

davidchalmers
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Posted 05/15/09 - 10:24 AM:	#2
I can't tell from this whether or not you've read my paper "Strong and Weak Emergence", published in 2006 and available on my website. I don't think I've changed my mind about the subject since then. Of course different theorists mean different things by "emergence" and even "strong emergence", and I don't know B&E's work well enough to know whether we're talking about the same thing. But in the sense of strong emergence that I work with, I'm inclined to think that consciousness may be the only strongly emergent phenomenon. Weak emergence is much more common and is still important for many purposes, though. But typically one needs to do more than just wave around the term "emergence" as if just invoking emergence is to provide some explanation -- this happened a lot 10-15 years ago but less so today. I think invocations of emergence need to be supplemented with some sort of substantive explanatory structure if they're to be really useful.

Rilx
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Posted 05/21/09 - 01:02 PM:	#3
Thanks for your answer, prof. Chalmers. I had read the "Strong and Weak Emergence". I agree with your last sentence - that's what my question was basically about. I think that B&E presents one possible explanatory structure or at least a direction where explanations could be found, byt the concept observation. It defines a non-causal relation between observer and observed. It maintains observers' representations (models) of possible future, of which some model will later be chosen to be realized physically (downward causation). I see that in physically deterministic systems stimulus-response events derive their meaning from physical laws. In strong emergent systems stimulus-response is replaced by observation-downward causation which derive its meaning from system's relation to its environment. I see characteristic to strong emergent systems that they emerge as enclaves in their environment, still recognizing the environment necessary to their existence. Thus consciousness emerges within the environment; while conscious, we continuously maintain our relation with our environment. This approach to consciousness still needs one structural concept: a metarepresentation which includes both observer and observed - "I in my environment". The metalevel is the emergent level; metasystems operate lower level systems by downward causation and observe effects in the whole observable environment, not only some levels or systems. I see that by this feedback loop new metastructures emerge, and the looping property (no single loop nor structure) gives rise to consciousness, becoming also a part of it. My purpose was to describe structural properties which I see that explanations of strong emergent systems, especially consciousness, need. There might be more and those which I've mentioned might not be well described. But I think that all elements we need to solve the Hard Problem, we already know, and there's nothing essentially new lacking. We don't need more data, we need more thoughts and thinkers.
"In the life, there are no solutions. There are forces in motion. Those need to be created, and solutions follow." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Night Flight

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