Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is emergence?

axispraxis.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 73 posts

Re: What is emergence?

#51

Post by kodoque1 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #50
kodoque1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh ok, but what in our current understanding could let us suppose this difference in sensing? And by hemispherical do you mean somekind of fisheye projection? I would really like some beginner ressource on this subject.

Re: What is emergence?

#52

Post by chiefalchemist »

BrandiATMuhkuh wrote: post #22

Emergence is my all time favourite topic. I can highly recommend this video: https://youtu.be/16W7c0mb-rE When I learned during my computing and philosophy class about emergence it was like I found the missing puzzle pieces so everything (I mean that) makes sense. I love how all things in existence emerge simply via self organisation. All that is needed is communication. This can be gravity for stardust to form plane…

> All that is needed is communication.

When applied to behavior I would say that all that is needed is a shared goal, a shared understanding. The individual units don't necessarily have to communicate. They only need to share some common direction or goal. For example, the infamous starlings don't formally conspire. Yet the result functions as a conspiracy, so to speak.

Re: What is emergence?

#53

Post by evdev »

> But subscribers to a scientific worldview often make a more ambitious claim: that the best theories are isomorphic with the fundamental nature of the universe.

This is not an "extra" claim on top of conservation laws/fundamental symmetries.

> Reductionism can be understood as a combination of (1) the claim that the intelligibility of the universe depends on the unity of scientific theories

It's strange and frankly likely just projection to say that it's the reductionists that claim the universe must be a certain way in order for it to be intelligible.

> Despite its limited usefulness as a guide to scientific practice, reductionism is a powerful cultural idea. We might call it the Lego-block conception of reality: only the Lego blocks are real, so ‘fundamental’ science involves identifying what the blocks are and how they interact, while ‘applied’ science involves discovering the right combination or permutation of blocks that accounts for the phenomenon in question.

The question of realism is separate than reductionism of fundamental law, and it's not a good sign to (deliberately?) confuse them. EDIT: Just to be clear to people skimming this stuff, I can hold two theories: a) your dog is real, b) your dog is not real, only quarks are real. We can debate this for as long as we'd like, but what I am not necessarily saying is that your dog's dogness corresponds to some suspension or modification of fundamental physics.

> that parts and wholes have ‘equal’ ontological priority, with the wholes constraining the parts just as much as the parts constrain the wholes.

Again, if ontology means "realism" this is a confusion, if it means the way things work, it's simply wrong or completely unsupported.

Re: What is emergence?

#54

Post by antepodius »

Thorentis wrote: post #34
trixie_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the things you listed depend on explanations outside of the realm of physics that we already understand. Theoretically with a simulator powerful enough and using the principles we already know, all of the items you listed could be solved.

I think there's a difference between understanding a system well enough to make predictions, and recreating a system (a simulation) and then seeing what it does. Many times in history before the physics was properly understood, the best scientists and engineers could do was create some kind of "dry run" and simulate/recreate whatever process they were testing, and use that to predict outcomes of the real one. But act…

It seems to me to be more of a spectrum, where a 'well-understood' system is one we can simulate accurately with extremely pared-down models. (I.e., we can simulate it much more cheaply than running the whole atomic simulation) because we found symmetries/simplifications/shortcuts. Approximating ballistics arcs with parabolae, for example, is sort of a compression algorithm on the full simulation.

Re: What is emergence?

#55

Post by jackcosgrove »

I must say that reductionism is my default position. And that this is at base a value I have chosen. I did not consider the usefulness of reduction or unity until I encountered the ideas of Sabine Hossenfelder. The idea that reduction, unity, and elegance might be holding inquiry back is a new idea that I am increasingly sympathetic to.

Something I also did not consider much was the sociology of science. It seems, at least from my outsider perspective, that the highest status scientist is a theorist who either predicts an experimental result observed decades in the future, or a theorist who synthesizes disparate observations. This value, insofar as it is true, stems from a reductionist perspective. I see reductionism being harmful to inquiry if only because it favors some scientific roles over others, theoretical over applied, theorist over experimentalist, discovery over reproducibility.

Re: What is emergence?

#56

Post by jiggawatts »

kodoque1 wrote: post #51
jiggawatts wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh ok, but what in our current understanding could let us suppose this difference in sensing? And by hemispherical do you mean somekind of fisheye projection? I would really like some beginner ressource on this subject.

A dolphin is surrounded by water, and its sonar sense is truly 3D, in that it can go in any direction. Up, down, left, right, ahead, or behind.

A creature living on a neutron star might use sonar like we do light, because the speed of sound in the star crust is more then half the speed of light. In many ways it would be comparable. But the crust is only below the creature, not above. So its "sound sense" would only work for one hemisphere surround the creature, the other side would be silence, its equivalent of total darkness.

Neutron stars have thin crusts, possibly mere meters thick, and almost certainly with layers of some sort. Again, sound would probably travel at different speeds in the various layers, just like sonar does in oceans, where salinity affects propagation. There would be complex effects with distance to do with this. Locally, the sound could travel outwards in a hemisphere, but at long range it would likely be more 2D.

This is all speculation, but it's based on real science. My point is that we cannot really know, and no amount of staring at equations will help paint a realistic picture.

Re: What is emergence?

#57

Post by dstola »

Maybe I am speaking outside my comfort zone a little, but isn't this the same as trying to find physical axioms that build up a whole and it has been disproven by Godel with respect to Whiteheads and Russels Principia Mathematica and completely blows reductionists out of the water if we go as far as equating math == physics in all but name

Re: What is emergence?

#58

Post by kodoque1 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #56
kodoque1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh ok, but what in our current understanding could let us suppose this difference in sensing? And by hemispherical do you mean somekind of fisheye projection? I would really like some beginner ressource on this subject.

A dolphin is surrounded by water, and its sonar sense is truly 3D, in that it can go in any direction. Up, down, left, right, ahead, or behind. A creature living on a neutron star might use sonar like we do light, because the speed of sound in the star crust is more then half the speed of light. In many ways it would be comparable. But the crust is only below the creature, not above. So its "sound sense" would only w…

Oh so I guess that At long distance it would behave like a map splatted on a sphere? Still hard to wrap my head around, but it is cool stuff!

Re: What is emergence?

#59

Post by raincom »

dstola wrote: post #57

Maybe I am speaking outside my comfort zone a little, but isn't this the same as trying to find physical axioms that build up a whole and it has been disproven by Godel with respect to Whiteheads and Russels Principia Mathematica and completely blows reductionists out of the water if we go as far as equating math == physics in all but name

"math = physics" is true on paper, because most, if not all, physical laws are equations. The issue lies elsewhere: ontology. One can subscribe to realist ontology in physics, yet become a Platonist wrt math. One can say that "particles exist and play the role of causal antecedents" and that "sets don't exist in this world and don't play the role of causal antecedents"; that's why many mathematicians subscribe to Platonism (sets, numbers, etc don't exist in this world, but exist in the Platonic world). Same goes for the so-called 'Platonic' love that many seek in the modern world!!
Post reply on HN