On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> > Isn’t pressure just another way of measuring the sum of the force the > enclosed volume of gas molecules exert on the enclosing surface; > Yes. > > whereas for example many emergent qualities of say water for example > cannot be described or even predicted in terms of the physical properties > of hydrogen or oxygen. > A liquid is a substance that can change its shape but not its volume, I suppose you'd need at least 2 water molecules to call it a liquid, otherwise the best you could do is rotate the one molecule and you can do that with any molecule. In theory you could predict from calculation that lots of H2O molecules would form a liquid and even predict what its freezing and boiling point was, but in practice you could not because it would take far far too many calculations for even a super-computer to make; but you could do it if you had a quantum computer, those sort of machines would be especially good at performing quantum mechanical calculations and simulations. And that is why I think a quantum computer is one of two things that could produce a singularity, the other being Nanotechnology. > > In the latter case the emergent phenomena is something qualitatively new > and different than it’s reduced fundamental parts. [...] Not all emergence > is equal > Without a Quantum Computer it's impractical to predict that water is wet just by observing the properties of Hydrogen and Oxygen, and it's vastly impractical to predict the pressure in a hurricane by observing the individual gas molecules that compose it, but both are possible in theory; I don't think they belong to different philosophical categories. John K Clark -- 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.
