All of Jc_Mourrat's Comments + Replies

"Emergence" isn't a label for a single concept that is one hundred percent wrong, it can refer to a variety of positions of differing plausibility. Weak emergence is just the claim that systems have properties that their parts don't have. That's obviously true in many cases: a watch can tell the time, a single cog in the machine cannot. Strong emergence is a claim along the lines that some properties of a system cannot be understood in terms of its parts and interactions -- the negation of the typical reductionist claim that it can be so understood. But there is a hefty catch in the clause about interactions. What would a strongly emergent system look like? You would have to understand it as a whole. Which is to say, even at the level of the parts, you would have to consider all the parts and all their interactions. Which means that to be distinct from emergence, reductionism needs to be more specific about interactions. (And note that without a clean distinction between emergence and reduction, there isn't much point in heated rhetoric about the evils of "magical" emergence). If a watch contains 10 cogs ,you would not expect each cog to interact with all the others. That kind of simplification is the advantage of reductive explanation. But not all systems are so convenient. At the quantum level, it is possible for every particle in a system to be entangled with every other. So we don't live in the most convenient of all possible universes for reductionism, even if we also don't live in the most inconvenient. There is a fundamental layer as required by reductionism, but it does not operate according to local determinism,as also expected. And there is a layer that can operate according to local determinism, the classical world, but it isn't the fundamental layer.