For a greedy reductionist, the emergence of some higher level should mean that the bottom level has "found" a new way to influence itself with new emergent laws that consider wider aggregations of matter and time. But that is indistinguishable from non reductionist emergence.
2014-05-01 14:19 GMT+02:00 LizR <[email protected]>: > On 30 April 2014 23:47, Alberto G. Corona <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Emergence means that the higher level is idependent of the substrate >> and produce effects in the substrate. That means that once emerged, it >> does not matter if is the result off a darwinian process, a numeric >> simulation or an intelligent design, it is as it is and start to work >> with their own rules, influencing above and below it. >> >> http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/nature.pdf > > > I find that paper rather unconvincing. So what if we can't predict > football from the Schrodinger equation? This doesn't imply the existence of > downward causation as anything physically fundamental, it just says that > the computations are intractable, or maybe just that they would take an > impractically long time to run. But if he* isn't* saying downward > causation is physically fundamental, he's comparing apples with oranges, > and the result is bananas. > > The stuff about the atoms having to be in "exactly the right place" at the > time of the big bang is reminiscent of Hoyle's junkyard-to-747 argument. It > misses out all the ordering principles that might come to bear, and > basically appeals to our incredulity. Well, duh, that couldn't > *possibly*happen - could it?!? But to see how vitally important that original > arrangement is, let's suppose we do a thought experiment and stir all those > original atoms around randomly. We can churn them around a lot (but to be > fair we should leave the average density and average quantum fluctuations > as they were in "our" version of the primordial gas). Let's do it a > trillion trillion trillion or so times, with everything from one atom being > moved to whole galactic masses being rearranged, and consider what might be > the results. > > Well, gravity and evolution will still take their courses. So we'll still > get planets and in some cases, life. In the cases where we only moved a few > atoms, we'll probably get something indistinguishable from our Earth, and > even the Mona Lisa. This is just the idea of a multiverse, which the author > of the paper has turned upside down to make it into an argument from > incredulity. But all one can really say is that differences in initial > condtions will produce a range of outcomes, presumably ranging from almost > exact copies of Earth through to entirely different galaxies (the > proportions will I suppose involve chaos theory - maybe moving one atom > really *would* butterfly-effect its way through history to stop Earth > existing, or let the Nazis win WW2, or at least give the Mona Lisa a > moustache....) > > But the bottom line is that we'd get something reasonably similar from > similar starting conditions, and all one can say is, again, so what? So our > starting conditions happened to produce our universe, but slightly > different conditions would have produced a slightly different universe. > Whatever next ... "Pope still Catholic" ? > > So appealing to the "exact conditions" being needed to create our "exact > conditions" as though this is something special or important is deeply > suspect, IMHO. I get enough of that "precisely arranged" nonsense when I > discuss backwards causation, and it looks like downwards causation needs > similarly specious appeals to our incredulity. (Still, maybe all the hot > air and hand waving will have an unexpected effect on lower levels of > physics...) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
