Greg Detre
Friday, 01 December, 2000
what is an �emergent phenomenon�?
purely local interactions which, when viewed on a large scale, appear as a central orchestrated or unexpected phenomenon, as though global rules were being applied
�give rise to�
could be taken as meaning properly cause something to emerge, like a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis
instrumentalist/fictionalist, e.g. flocking. the flock is nothing greater than the individual birds. there is no central control, but it is as if there was.
brain acts as if centrally controlled
To Henry Segerman:
(it's important here that we agree on what i mean by 'strong
emergence'. i'm going to define 'emergence' roughly as "something
unexpected but wholly explicable arising from a complicated set of local
interactions". so strong emergence, which is what i think you have in
mind, is when you have something that is truly greater than the sum of its
parts. unfortunately, i can't think of a good example, mainly because the
natural world doesn't appear to contain any strong emergence. your physicsy
friend talked about life, but i think it's very clear that simple organisms are
merely stuff that happens, and we can look at that stuff happening at different
levels of observation and talk about it conveniently at the quantum level, the
atomic level, the cellular level, the systems level or the social level, but an
ecology of worms is just a huge swamp of stuff happening - there is only *weak*
emergence going on. when we talk of 'consciousness', that is very much more
than just a convenient way of seeing and describing each other's behaviour. see
Dennett, 'The Intentional Stance' - which I haven't read, but i'm told is all
about this :))) consciousness is genuinely/qualitatively different from its
physical/neural substrate, i.e. the brain.
why are certain experiences conscious? i.e. the hard problem of consciousness
if we had a perfect neuroimaging machine, could see every neuron in the brain, and were eventually able to decipher the distributed representation to the extent that I could identify a given experience with the firing of a set of neurons (though not necessarily guess what the subject would be feeling just by looking at the brainscan)
the materialist ID theorist:
1. functionalist � he could look for a neural feature common to all the neurons whose firing we are conscious of which we could then see as being sufficient for consciousness � e.g. looks for a uniting property in terms of what the conscious neurons do or contribute, e.g. where they all connect to, or how many synapses they have etc.
2. perhaps: firing level � above a certain threshold firing rate, we are conscious of a neuron�s firing� why should a firing level make us conscious of them? just because J.
3. nothing unifies them.
would that be the death of ID theory?
can that be an adequate explanation
4. I think we need new physics
it could be panpsychist. the panpsychist stuff coheres in the particular functionalist structure of the brain (like a megaphone focuses and directs a beam of otherwise diffuse sound)
it could be that all processes (of a certain kind?) give rise to consciousness.
but how would new physics help? e.g. new force or subatomic particle, or strange causal laws
I'm trying to get the mental in at the very bottom, because I want to avoid the move upwards from the physically describable to conscious
are there any PHYSICISTS envisaging this?
even Penrose doesn�t characterise the quantum in mentalistic terms
Snowdon: have to start from a non-mental basis and work up
experience emerges in the brain, kind of like flocking
there�s something about experience � it is special in a way that flocks and hives aren�t though � they�re not new or properly unexpected
the hard problem is generated somehow by some assumptions we�re making
Putnam and Birge � content as internal or external (not how content is generated)
mind-matter continuum (like spacetime)
or mind = matter2 (like e = mc2)
need to ask the PHYSICISTS
consciousness vs free will � does quantum theory help with both???
Penrose
Chalmers � The Conscious Mind