David Chalmers - Why is Emergence Significant?

Dave the issue of emergence has become a hot area of science and I have been trying to find ways we can approach what what is existence about and we used to think that there's this reduction from biology s be explained in terms of chemistry chemistry and physics and although all the way down and yet emergence is something that it is is a it's become important and being able to understand how these different levels work how does it philosophers see emergence what emergence has become one of the big buzz words I guess in science and philosophy in the last couple of decades something new emerges from something more fundamental Sophia life emerges from processing biological processes and matter consciousness emerges from the brain I think though that you know this term emergence really covers a multitude of sins and you need to really you know distinguish some quite different things that can go on when you talk about emergence there's what we might call weak emergence which is when you've got some complicated processing in matter maybe some complicated dynamics among a bunch of a bunch of cells and you get a complex pattern in that matter that you wouldn't have expected and phenomena emerge like waves on the water somehow from these water molecules all jostling around you get these waves which you can you know do they come into the shore you could surf on them and so on that's emergence but it's not something fundamentally new if you knew about the fundamental structure of all the water molecules you could ultimately predict there are going to be these waves so that's weak emergence and that's what you get in a lot of biology and dynamic systems and so on the more radical kind of thing is what we might call strong emergence when something totally new emerges from underlying processes and that's what you seem to find I think especially over the case of consciousness you put together a bunch of molecules in the neurons in the brain billion of them 100 billion of them connect them up in the right way and suddenly somehow you get this phenomenon of conscious experience it feels like something from the inside a totally surprising thing that you can never predict just from the organized one of the neurons alone is the distinction between weak and strong emergence that in the former in some future scientific era a thousand years or a hundred however many years in the future one in principle can be able to describe it fairly rigorously even though it may be very difficult whereas in strong emergence no matter how far the science goes it will be impossible in principle so Laplace talked about the demon the demon who knew all about the position of every last atom throughout the universe in these cases of weak emergence like the emergence of life from biology if the demon knew all about the position of every last particle and did incredibly complex computations with his computer mind he could figure out everything there is to know about life about metabolism about the processes that emerge the difference with strong emergence so you can give Laplace's daemon every all that information about every last atom every last molecule the places the demons still on that basis could not tell you could not figure out all the facts about consciousness indeed there would be no reason for him to predict the consciousness should emerge at all and yet it does is there anything else in the category of strong emergence other than consciousness I think the only case of strong emergence that we know about is consciousness and we only know about it because to be experience it directly you know looking out of the world we just see processes you know particles and the void and things that weakly emerge from that there may be some other things that emerge strongly from a material basis but if so I think we don't know about them how about things on the social level as individuals form groups and groups into society and society into culture does the the the issue of emergence factor in those considerations or is it just in the particle world I think there is absolutely there was emergence of the social from the individual communities do things that are quite surprising they be they behave in quite collective way as he wouldn't predict on an individual level they form mobs would flash into extraordinary bits of behaviour and none of these individuals might have thought of doing in isolation still I think in principle this is a case of weak emergence that could in principle be predicted from the dynamics of the individuals and the dynamics of their inter relations again if you had your demon who knew all about every last process and those individuals brains and the ways they interrelate they could figure out the dynamics and they could say okay this is why you get that collective behavior so I don't think it's fundamentally you although it's extraordinary complex kind of dynamics that comes on top of this more basic does the analysis of emergency again point to consciousness as something that is really special in our environment that we ought to pay even more attention to is is that what follows from this analysis I think this brings out something unique about consciousness if you look at biology yeah tell me enough about the underlying process the mechanisms I can tell you about the biology I can tell you about the sociology I can tell you about the structure of the economics these are all just high level processes built on low level processes and the great chain of explanation in science but the fact that consciousness is strongly emergent means it really sticks out like I stuck a sore thumb from this chain of explanation we find this explanatory gap to consciousness and this means I think it really needs special treatment in our theories maybe as a fundamental element of the world now if I were a philosopher who did not agree with your arguments and I wanted to be particularly and antagonistic to you I would take what you just said about biology being a weakly emergent property that if we knew enough about the underlying factors we can predict biology and go back about a hundred years and say if we were sitting here a hundred years ago people would have said the same thing about biology that you needed a vital force because you you can have chemical predictions but once you have life and replication reacting to the environment and life's special way it's impossible to predict from mechanical movement of forces and and and particles so we need a vitalistic force but now after we learned about DNA and everything we don't need AB idealistic for us so now we've gone up one level to consciousness but at some point the same thing that happened to vitalism will happen to consciousness it's tempting to think of the case of consciousness is analogous to the case of life and it's eventually gonna consciousness will eventually go the same way as the vital spirit I think that's fundamentally wrong the reason is in the case of life the phenomena that needed explaining we're all ultimately behavioral and functional phenomena how is it that living systems can do these amazing things grow metabolize reproduce these were all questions about functions and mechanisms to perform them now if you're a vitalist 100 years ago it's quite reasonable to think that it wasn't obvious that physical mechanisms could do these jobs so therefore you postulate the vital spirit to perform these objective functions turns out DNA could do it it's the moment that happened vitalism melts away in the case of consciousness though it's quite different we're not trying to explain some objective function that we can do let's concede take all the objective functions in the vicinity of consciousness the behaviors you know I can point to you I can talk about what's going on I can integrate information and so on I can perceive a stimulus say we can explain all of those functions the things I do with underlying neural mechanisms there's this further question why is all that functioning accompanied by subjective experience so all the discoveries you like about neuroscience and the mechanisms we're always going to leave this further question of consciousness philosophers have used an interesting thought experiment take my hundred billion neurons and I'll give them to you freely and start replacing each one one by one with a microchip very sophisticated maybe it's going to be a thousand years before you can do that so run the experiment that I'm me and tell me what it means okay so let's take your brain and there's a hundred billion neurons and let's replace your neurons one by one so we got a hundred billion bits of silicon now interesting question is the silicon brain conscious you might think only neurons can be conscious silicon can't be conscious but now think what's gonna happen when we get halfway through this replacement is your consciousness gradually going to fade out are you gonna be sort of halfway halfway along this series if queasy maybe you kind of drunk I don't know you're fading off into oblivion but you're still walking and talking exactly the same way so I would look as if I'm behaving exactly like I am now but inside I'd be starting to fade by hypothesis we're gonna say the silicon chips are wired up in exactly the same way the new neurons are wired up and they're wired up to your behavior the same way so my hypothesis your behavior will be exactly the same if someone thinks that silicon can't support consciousness they have to say that somewhere along the way either your consciousness suddenly disappears just weeks out all they have to say it fades out gradually and somewhere along the way you're half consciousness you're woozy your experience is all faded but you're behaving just the same that's a bizarre and radical dissociation well I think this gives us good reason to believe that if what really matters to consciousness is not neurons silicon the meat that it's made of what really matters is the organization the dynamics of the underlying structures and that is the strong emergence I think that consciousness strongly emerges from the organization of the brain I mean you could believe that what matters is the organization and not go for strong emergence you could think that maybe it weakly emerges or there's not very much to consciousness but I think if you're looking for a basis from which consciousness emerges in the brain it's the patterns the organization the information not the specific structure neurons versus silicon versus gray goo how critical is this concept of emergence which as you've said has become important in science and philosophy in recent decades is it's not a kind of a fad that will be around for a while and then disappear or is that some fundamental mechanism to understand reality I think emergence is potentially dangerous and misleading term to use simply because it means so much to so many different people every person every different person who talks about emergence probably means something different with the term so I generally stay away from the term myself in my own work I think everything we can say using the term emergence we can see more simply in another language but that being said if we're careful with our use of the term emergence and we distinguish weak emergence from strong emergent from the different things it can do and I think it can at least be a useful organizing principle what are some of these dangers in using the term well just say someone says well consciousness is just an emergent process it's no big deal we know that life is just another emergent process it's just another one of those well I agree in some sense consciousness is an emergent process but it's a strongly emergent process that involves something radically new in the world so we have weak emergence there's nothing radical in you so weak emergence can be used as a way of supporting let's say a broadly reductionist point of view where everything is reduced down to the matter on which it's based so maybe that works in biology but in consciousness we have strong emergence something radically new so strong emergence I think is radically inconsistent with the reductionist view so your your issue then is when the word emergence is used by itself because then it subsumes both weak and strong at the same time and in a sense leeches out from consciousness it's special nature right and so if somebody wanted to say use the adjective all the time either weak emergence or the adjective all the time strong emergence you'd be ok but they'd say just emergence you don't like it right weak emergence and strong emergence have fundamentally different morals weak emergent supports the materialistic view of the world strong emergence leads to the rejection of the materialistic view of the world so just one term emergence just you just mushes over that distinction I think

Channel: Closer To Truth

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Keywords: David Chalmers (Author), Neuroscience (Field Of Study), Consciousness (Quotation Subject), Closer To Truth (TV Program), Emergence (Field Of Study), Complexity (Quotation Subject), Self-organization (Field Of Study)

Id: QjPxBS4sIxQ

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2015