...compared to what I've been reading from Robert Laughlin. In the article I posted in the other thread, he said this:
quote I think primitive organizational phenomena such as weather have something of lasting importance to tell us about more complex ones, including ourselves: Their primitiveness enables us to demonstrate with certainty that they are ruled by microscopic laws but also, paradoxically, that some of their more sophisticated aspects are insensitive to details of these laws. In other words, we are able to prove in these simple cases that the organization can acquire meaning and life of its own and begin to transcend the parts from which it is made.
What physical science thus has to tell us is that the whole being more than the sum of its parts is not merely a concept but a physical phenomenon. Nature is regulated not only by a microscopic rule base but by powerful and general principles of organization. Some of these principles are known, but the vast majority are not. New ones are being discovered all the time. At higher levels of sophistication the cause-and-effect relationships are harder to document, but there is no evidence that the hierarchical descent of law found in the primitive world is superseded by anything else. Thus if a simple physical phenomenon can become effectively independent of the more fundamental laws from which it descends, so can we. I am carbon, but I need not have been. I have a meaning transcending the atoms from which I am made.
I am increasingly persuaded that all physical law we know about has collective origins, not just some of it. In other words, the distinction between fundamental laws and the laws descending from them is a myth -- as is therefore the idea of mastery of the universe through mathematics solely. Physical law cannot generally be anticipated by pure thought, but must be discovered experimentally, because control of nature is achieved only when nature allows this through a principle of organization.
Are you saying that Laughlin is wrong? Do you think that everything will eventually be reduced to a set of first principles, and do you think those first principles will be able to explain everything? What about the EPR paradox?
Is the collective phenomenon greater than the sum of its parts? I guess I'm not willing to say exactly that, but I think that through symmetry breaking, emergent things exhibit properties that are at least *different* from their parts, in ways that cannot be deduced by examining the parts. That is, even if we ever find ourselves in the situation where the first principles have supposedly been found, due to symmetry breaking, they would be useless in explaining emergent phenomena.
A simple example from the physical world that I can think of is to suppose someone that lives in a quantum only world and understands only quantum mechanics. He would thoroughly understand the ins and outs of the nature of subatomic particles, QCD and QED. But if we collect enough of those particles to construct a tennis ball, and then drop it off a building here on earth (in a vacuum), it will fall at 9.8 m/s^2 every time, regardless of whether we are observing the fall or not. Our quantum person, upon seeing this result would be stumped, as it would defy the probabilistic nature of everything he knows.
Am I all wet here?
Now, on ontological emergence.
quote How do you describe the taste of milk to somebody who has never tasted it? How do you explain 'blue' to a man blind from birth? The possibility of an answer depends on all science being reducible to common constituent elements.
And that may well be true. Whether those 'common constituent elements' represent first principles is another matter. The question would be, if you are able to do this, what weight does that hold for explaining and predicting higher behavior? In my mind, emergence would suggest that the 'common constituent elements' to explain some higher behavior (economic interaction between humans for example) are not the same, and are not so detailed as those necessary to describe the taste of milk to someone who's never tasted it.
Back to physical law for an example of where I would like to go with all this. One can draw a feynman diagram to describe a quantum electrodynamical interaction. In fact, you can draw trillions of them to describe all the interactions going on inside a dog. But the question is, does this tell us anything about the properties of a dog? Is there any way, even if you had the biggest super-computer ever conceived, that you could do the calculations and say, "hey, I think this thing we've calculated is about to bark at the mailman!"
In my opinion, the answer is no, because once you build through that molecular level, QED has little impact on the dog.
All of which has me thinking about emergence on a bigger scale. My question is this: Is it possible for emergence explain how a group of 'self-interested' individuals can coalesce into a society that exhibits moral principles and respects the rights of the individuals? Is knowledge of the metaphysical make-up of the individual unnecessary to explain human interaction once we gather enough humans?
I don't know, maybe that is a whole 'nother subject, but it is somewhere I want/need to go eventually.
