What is emergence? • Hacker News Board

Re: What is emergence?

#41

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sat, May 30, 2020, 11:25 AM UTC

tpetrina wrote: post #39

This whole article reeks of "science is BS, we need free will for humans to be real and morally responsible". For all of its smart wording, this amounts to the same old issue Aristotle had with describing the mathematical universe in which somehow humans are different enough to warrant "higher stuff". Is there any useful criticism of science besides pseudo-attacks always coming from antropocentric, and usually religi…

The development of quantum mechanics suggests not. When we come up with a new field, even the brightest minds will struggle to ignore anthropocentrism, coming up with wild theories like:

> These equations seem to govern the behaviour of all our toy experiments, with multiple superimposed world states interfering with each other when they happen to transform into the same state as each other… except when a human looks at the result, whereupon all but one of the world states just vanishes!

The first person I know of¹ to propose that the world states don't just vanish – it's just that "brain that sees event X" and "brain that sees event Y" don't converge to the same state, so you don't see quantum interference when people get involved – was Hugh Everett III. This is a simpler explanation, stops quantum mechanics contradicting special relativity, solves the EPR paradox, side-steps Bell's theorem, stops God playing dice with the universe… in short, it solves every problem² except where the Born rule comes from.³

When he proposed it to Niels Bohr, he was laughed out of the room.⁴

In principle, we could probably eliminate anthropocentrism in physics models from popular consciousness entirely… but then we wouldn't be prepared for new fields, where we'd introduce it right back again.

---

¹: Okay, technically Erwin Schrödinger mentioned the idea five years earlier, but he didn't do much with it. Apart from, you know, coming up with the equation in the first place…

²: Edit to add: I didn't know about Grete Hermann's flaw in John von Neumann's proof that all non-local hidden variable theories were impossible. Such theories still violate special relativity, but they're not impossible; many-worlds doesn't solve this problem because it isn't actually a problem. (Many-worlds is still the simplest theory I know of, but I'm less certain that it's the simplest possible theory consistent with the evidence… making this comment less relevant than I initially thought it was.)

³: Some people think many-worlds explains the Born rule. I haven't heard all the arguments, but all the ones I've heard have been wrong.

⁴: Artistic license. But Léon Rosenfeld certainly considered him "undescribably stupid" and unable to "understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics".

Re: What is emergence?

#42

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sat, May 30, 2020, 11:34 AM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #38

knzhou wrote: post #18

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the word "emergence". In pop science, it was spoken in reverent tones. Never mind that they never gave a definition of it that didn't sound trivial -- the word was dripping with meaning and the promise of hidden wisdom. I went to college and studied physics. I learned how the behavior of many atoms leads to thermodynamics and the properties of materials. I learned how elementary…

You might enjoy https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Futility-Of-Emergence

I prefer reading these on LessWrong, because people often point out when Eliezer's said something unjustified. (Often he provides the justification in the comments, but on a couple of occasions there hasn't been a justification – he's just been flat-out wrong.)

This one's pretty good, though. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futili...

Re: What is emergence?

#43

Post by dontchooseanick » Sat, May 30, 2020, 11:54 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #14

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #7

Sometimes I think there is other information that gives the physics its meaning. For example, if you took a Shingled Magnetic Recording hard drive filled with VP9 encoded movie files on a NTFS partition, even if you perfectly understood the physics, and figured out all the individual magnetic fields, you would still have a rough time making sense of the of what was on it without this higher level information informat…

There are certainly levels that we can't comprehend because we are physically incapable of it, just as an ant is incapable of understanding a book. Perhaps with neural augmentation we will discover new vistas previously unavailable to us.

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/638/

Your "ant" comment hits home :)

Re: What is emergence?

#44

Post by mannykannot » Sat, May 30, 2020, 12:16 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #7

Sometimes I think there is other information that gives the physics its meaning. For example, if you took a Shingled Magnetic Recording hard drive filled with VP9 encoded movie files on a NTFS partition, even if you perfectly understood the physics, and figured out all the individual magnetic fields, you would still have a rough time making sense of the of what was on it without this higher level information informat…

That's because the specific information on the disk was initially generated by, and is the consequence of, a great many previous events. Even if we assume the disk holds only the complete works of Shakespeare, we would need to understand vastly more than just the drive's physics, in order to understand it completely. That does not imply that the explanation for the drive, as we find it with its specific contents, is not reducible to physics, but performing such a reduction is not the path to understanding it.

Re: What is emergence?

#45

Post by mannykannot » Sat, May 30, 2020, 12:58 PM UTC

tpetrina wrote: post #39

This whole article reeks of "science is BS, we need free will for humans to be real and morally responsible". For all of its smart wording, this amounts to the same old issue Aristotle had with describing the mathematical universe in which somehow humans are different enough to warrant "higher stuff". Is there any useful criticism of science besides pseudo-attacks always coming from antropocentric, and usually religi…

> This whole article reeks of "science is BS, we need free will for humans to be real and morally responsible".

For what it is worth, I did not read it that way at all, and the fact that the author is a neuroscientist suggests (though does not prove) that it was not intended as such.

To me, the article seems consistent with the view that the universe is reducible to a fundamental physics, leaving the author puzzling over why many of us feel we have more agency than this view would seem to imply. It is a reasonable issue for anyone, not just neuroscientsts, to ponder.

Re: What is emergence?

#46

Post by kodoque1 » Sat, May 30, 2020, 1:01 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #20

This reminded me of the hard science fiction novel Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward.[1] Its core idea is that complex, intelligent life could be possible on the surface of a neutron star. He went to a lot of effort to try to come up with a plausible description of what "life" would be like in such an environment. That fired my imagination also, and I wondered how we could do such a thing in a scientific manner. Give…

That's all quite interesting, do you have some ressource on how I could understand it more deeply given that I have a highschool physics level understanding of physics more or less?

I'm particularly intrigued by why the range would impact the sound based based sensing? Is it because of spacetime curvature or something?

Re: What is emergence?

#47

Post by walleeee » Sat, May 30, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #33

knzhou wrote: post #18

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the word "emergence". In pop science, it was spoken in reverent tones. Never mind that they never gave a definition of it that didn't sound trivial -- the word was dripping with meaning and the promise of hidden wisdom. I went to college and studied physics. I learned how the behavior of many atoms leads to thermodynamics and the properties of materials. I learned how elementary…

I agree it's wooey in many cases, and is used as a near synonym of miracle or magic. But I think a good summary is that emergence happens when relations between things on a finer level of analysis become the things themselves on a coarser, higher level AND that these new things also have rich and complex interactions among them , making the levels roughly equally interesting, complicated and useful. Overall the botto…

> But I think a good summary is that emergence happens when relations between things on a finer level of analysis become the things themselves on a coarser, higher level AND that these new things also have rich and complex interactions among them, making the levels roughly equally interesting, complicated and useful. Overall the bottom level is "enough" in theory but rising up the levels allows us to gain orders of magnitude more "practicality".

Hofstadter discusses this in his book I Am a Strange Loop: there's a line that's something like "sometimes the bottom level - despite being entirely responsible for the effect in question - is nonetheless totally irrelevant to it"

Re: What is emergence?

#48

Post by mannykannot » Sat, May 30, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

Even as someone who is more of a physicist than a biologist, that quip of Rurherford's, quoted in the article (“science consists of physics and stamp-collecting”) has always bugged me. Even though I assume that all of biology can be reduced to fundamental physics, very little of importance can learned or understood about biological systems by doing so - and biological systems are significant physical phenomena.

Re: What is emergence?

#49

Post by glenstein » Sat, May 30, 2020, 1:36 PM UTC

moonchild wrote: post #15

ta1234567890 wrote: post #8

The issue is that emergence is just some arbitrarily picked meaning of something observed from a certain "distance" or from a certain perspective. Emergence is not an intrinsic property of anything, it is just a (subjective) point of view. It is just another way of saying that things look different from different "zoom levels", hence we assign different models and/or meanings to them at each different level. But that…

Why is that an issue? You choose, somewhat arbitrarily, a particular level of reductionism to apply. (It seems from what you are saying that you would agree that) atoms are real, but bricks are not; bricks are what we call a clump of iron, oxygen, silicon, aluminum, etc. which is mostly stuck together in a particular shape and size. Bricks are based on a human perception of togetherness and objecthood that is complet…

It's an issue because there's completely mutually exclusive conceptions of emergence that take you in potentially ridiculous directions, such as proposing new fundamental physics, violations of what we normally think of as causality, etc, and it has a funny way of showing up in arenas that are notorious for woo and mysticism, such as quantum mechanics, or consciousness, or explanations of how morality 'really' works, it seems to bring with it an entirely new idea of what it means to even explain something.

Depending on which variant of emergentism people are talking about at different times, they could be talking about something that's fully consistent with the reductionistic program, something that's not making new claims but is just about levels of description, something that's vague but not obviously wrong, or some profound revelation proposing we overturn everything we thought we knew about physics or some natural phenomena or anything in between. The stakes are either utterly trivial, or as profound as they could possibly get. And depending on who you talk to about emergence at any given moment, you'll get a confident answer that could potentially fall anywhere on that spectrum, or worse, a strange kind of passiveness where this issue is kind of handwaved away.

Re: What is emergence?

#50

Post by jiggawatts » Sat, May 30, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

kodoque1 wrote: post #46

jiggawatts wrote: post #20

This reminded me of the hard science fiction novel Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward.[1] Its core idea is that complex, intelligent life could be possible on the surface of a neutron star. He went to a lot of effort to try to come up with a plausible description of what "life" would be like in such an environment. That fired my imagination also, and I wondered how we could do such a thing in a scientific manner. Give…

That's all quite interesting, do you have some ressource on how I could understand it more deeply given that I have a highschool physics level understanding of physics more or less? I'm particularly intrigued by why the range would impact the sound based based sensing? Is it because of spacetime curvature or something?

No one knows! That's kind of the point. We know some of the fundamental limits and constraints of what goes on around and inside a neutron star, but the essence of it is still a giant mystery. We'd have to go and look, and that's not likely to happen any time in the next ten thousand years or so.