Timeline for What are the alleged reasons for emergence?
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| May 1, 2021 at 10:09 | comment | added | CriglCragl | @PhilipKlöcking: I don't see reductionism or emergentism as ontologies, but as modes of explanation. It is not that quarks are 'more real' than atoms, but that they allow a model to work in more cases, to have invariant components that can for instance work at high speeds and fields, back to the big bang, as well as fit our everyday states. Strong emergence is properties that can't be explained by constituents. But scientists generally only consider weak emergence. | |
| May 1, 2021 at 10:03 | comment | added | CriglCragl | Did you catch the linked discussion that preceded this? philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/81417/… | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 21:29 | comment | added | user4894 | Your point's good too. I can't help thinking that nature doesn't have sand grains or sand dunes. It has quarks and atoms and such. Humans, due to our own limited powers of perception, see things at this intermediate level of rocks and apples and mountains, so we give these things names. Then we get confused and ask, How did these quarks turn into mountains? There's no mountain-ness in a quark. The question is an illusion. Nature doesn't name things quarks or mountains, we do. I can't help thinking emergence is a flawed concept due to how we use language. | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 8:16 | comment | added | Philip Klöcking♦ | @user4894 That is a good point, thus I did upvote. The problem is that this does not fit well with reductionist ontology. If there are properties of systems that cannot exhaustively be explained by their components, they seem to have existence of their own in a non-trivial sense. | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 6:53 | comment | added | user4894 | ps -- In other words it's a problem of semantics, not of some (IMO) murky aspect of nature called emergence. There's only emergence because we use language that doesn't make the proper distinctions among things, collections of things, and even collections of things in particular contexts. For example a pile of sand on a construction site is not a dune. The same pile in the desert is a dune. The sand didn't change, the semantic context did. Nature didn't turn a pile into a dune, language did. | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 6:48 | comment | added | user4894 | As Devil's advocate, couldn't one argue that since viscosity is a property of large assemblages of water molecules and not of individuals, that when we say "the viscosity of water" we are equivocating the word water;. We DON'T mean water molecules, but rather large assemblages of same. A grain of sand does not possess "sand dune-ness," but a sand dune is not an emergent property of sand. (Unless you want to argue that it is). Rather, sand is called by one name, and a pile of desert sand is called by another. If we said that "water dunes" have viscosity, the mysterious emergence would vanish. | |
| Apr 30, 2021 at 4:03 | history | answered | niels nielsen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |