How Can Emergence Explain Reality? | Episode 310 | Closer To Truth

[Music] [Music] how does the world really work science has made spectacular progress assuming that particles and forces describe all that exists this principle is called reductionism which means that every physical thing can be explained down deep in terms of physics but take ordinary stuff study all its parts what do you get not what you expect what's going on simple ignorance or something more it seems a mystery and it's called emergence somehow the underlying laws of nature as we know them cannot account for the world [Music] so can emergence explain reality i'm robert lawrence kuhn and closer to truth is my journey to find out [Music] i start at stanford university with robert laughlin a nobel laureate in physics i hear bob rejects the traditional approach that the way to understand the world is to break it down into little pieces bob's world is more than parts we meet in his home bob i really want to understand what's fundamental and the history of science tells us that we have to look at smaller and smaller things you have talked about a transformation of this traditional world view that instead of looking at smaller and smaller stuff we now have to look at how nature organizes itself what does that mean let's imagine you're on an airplane at 40 000 feet eating peanuts now you know that that plane won't disintegrate that's why you're willing to stake your life on it it's a law now where did this law come from well you might say it comes from the atoms but it doesn't the reason you know this is because when you take the pieces of metal apart to see where the rigidity comes from it vanishes away the way the meaning of a pointless painting does when you get very very close to it in other words rigidity is something that atoms do together it's the togetherness of them that makes rigidity now the term that has been used is the concept of emergence how do you define emergence namely a law that means relationships among measured things that's always true that comes about because of organization well the most common one are the phases of water ice water water vapor how does the concept of phases give us a window into what emergence really is of course the phase transitions of water are very familiar to everybody because you have ice in your refrigerator and you have water coming out of your tap they're not particularly unique phase transitions happen all over the place in nature now the transition is a transition between what it's between two forms of the matter that have different rules of behavior at the longest scale now the shortest scales they don't have different rules of behavior in fact when you do x-ray measurements on a little piece of water a piece of ice you can't tell them apart yeah okay the rigidity of the ice only becomes clearer and clearer and clearer as you step back from it lots of things in the natural world have this property that you learn less about them by taking them apart yeah if you want to know whether your airplane is going to come apart then you look at these big scale things these emergent things because that's what matters on the other hand if you want to control rust that has to do with things on a very small scale chemistry and so you ask a different set of questions for that the point is we don't have a monolithic world we have a world that's populated with things you measure cause and effect relationships between things that are always true and some of them are socialist in nature they're collective in nature and others are more fundamental [Music] it depends bob says on what you want to know about some things you learn less by taking them apart the whole is more than the sum of all the parts do all scientists think this way not peter atkins a world-renowned chemist at oxford university peter is a tough-minded reductionist and proud of it well maybe not quite that either best i should hear peter tell it peter if we look at what we find in the world elements water at the extreme level consciousness all of these things are are made of more fundamental things and yet if you look at the properties of those fundamental things there seems no possible way to combine those to yield these emergent kinds of characteristics that's defeatism isn't it when you say why there seems to be no way that's the whole point of we we scientists although we might be reductionists and sort of stripping away mata down to its fundamentals we're actually assemblists we really do try to go in the opposite direction to understand how properties can emerge from the simpler entities well if today you had every characteristic of hydrogen gas in one set of books and oxygen gas and another set of books would you be able to even begin to describe the properties of ice yeah you bet i would and water that the most amazing stuff i can reverse engineer water and i can i think reverse well let's take a property of water wetness first of all i know that from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen that they will form molecules h2o okay i know the shape of the water molecule sort of angular shape that sort of thing well these little patches that really is like um scouts that go out blazing a trail really they can sort of wriggle around and find another a positive patch can find a negative patch and so on move towards it and so on so i think that water can spread across the appropriate surface so i think i can predict quite a lot of the properties of water i see no real problem with for example the structure of dna i mean which follows almost logically from the from the structure of the nucleic acids itself and once you've got to that point you can begin to understand that it's an encoding device for inheritance then i think you could make a good stab at in due course we can't predict protein structures yet it's fiendishly comprehensive complicated but the fiend is not going to defeat us we're going to get there i mean that's the whole point about science is this driving optimism that it has you don't go into science if you think you won't find the answers i struggle with this idea that there are different levels uh in the organization of reality where the kinds of explanations that we use at some atomic level at atomic level molecular and when you get the biological systems and as you said consciousness seem to be different but if we can begin to explain those uh uh jumps then it may be much more of a continuum that appears to us today yeah well i'm sure it is a continuum i think it does have different types of explanation but they show an evolutionary sequence really and we wouldn't dream of bringing sociology to bear on the structure of the atom but but i think in the opposite direction we could bring the structure of the atom to bear on on sociology but it only goes one direction i think it's true to say it goes only in one direction but i think the point to remember is that science is still very young and we're still learning and we're assembling we're cautious revolutionaries basically that we're we're assembling our forces by stealth you could almost say that we're learning we're doing our scales you know five finger exercises and so on at some point we've got to bring our five finger exercises together to get a tune and then we've got to get a tune and then we've got to orchestrate it to get symphony and and so on science is an optimistic pursuit and as soon as you start saying well never explain that you're no longer a scientist in my view i think you become a philosopher to peter scientists are assemblists when you understand the pieces really well you understand the whole there's nothing ultimately mysterious about whole things emergence peter says can be an excuse for lack of knowledge scientists should be optimists confident in the explanatory power of science [Music] i love the sharpness the antagonism of the opposing views either emergence is key or emergence is excuse [Music] how would a biologist think about emergence [Music] francisco ayala is a renowned evolutionary biologist at the university of california irvine where he is also professor of philosophy francisco is entranced by biological organisms suppose we learn all possible physics would we then know all that living creatures do francisco can you reduce biology to physics or must there be something emergent something special when you have living systems let me use an analogy think of a house made of bricks the laws by which the bricks are made are not the same loss by which the house is made you cannot have a house without bricks moreover you remove all the bricks there is no house left but the house is reality a different reality from the bricks so going off the comparison between biology and physics between living organisms and their components we are made up of atoms and molecules living organisms of a their loss of physics and chemistry but the laws of biology are completely different they transcend they emerge if you wish you have to study the life processes at their own level it's always good and helpful to go to understand the underlying levels but of course most of the underlying level levels in life process are still life processes only at the very bottom they are the laws of physics and chemistry which are relevant but what we want to learn about organisms is not the laws of physics or chemistry but there are some people who are reductionist radical reductionists who would believe that at some point in the future i mean a million years that you can from the fundamental laws of physics known perfectly you can derive upwards so that you can explain biology and then psychology and consciousness well there's an act of faith and almost anything that i know about science goes against it tell an architect that by keep studying more and more about brics the laws of how to design a house are going to become clear sometimes people who claim that physics can explain biology or that atoms and molecules can explain organisms are confusing two different issues the ontological question and the epistemological question ontology has to do with makeup constitution the epistemology has to do with knowledge how we know about things so in the house you have the bricks and you have the house you remove the bricks nothing is left there's an ontological question in a human being or in any other organism you have the atoms and the molecules you remove them nothing is left but now if i want to know about the house i go and study the science by architects not brick layers studying the bricks and knowing lots about bricks by themselves i mean it's nice to know that the properties of the atoms the laws of physics and chemistry but what i want to know about organisms are completely different things that's the epistemological question the question about what do i know and how do i know and for that i have to study the organisms in themselves studying everything about bricks will never explain very much about houses each level of organization has its own laws and meaningful understanding comes only by studying each and every level on its own terms another way to view the world is to ask about complexity how do complex things form from simple elements i go to boston to ask one of the world's most innovative thinkers stephen wolfram is a physicist who created radically new software for technical computing he explored the origins of complex systems in his controversial book a new kind of science stephen seeks to discover the secrets of nature by uncovering some very simple very special rules well i think it's it's in a sense kind of humiliating for us as humans that if we are presented let's say with two objects and we're told one of them is from nature one of them is something that we as humans have created that it's a pretty good guess that the one that looks simpler will be the one that we as humans have created and yet with our whole sort of history of civilization and so on somehow we haven't managed to capture the secret that nature seems to have that lets it apparently quite effortlessly create all the kind of complexity that we see so one thing i've been very interested in is to try and sort of home in on what that secret that nature has is it's kind of a very basic mystery in in science i thought 25 years ago when i started really thinking seriously about this kind of thing that with all of the fantasy physics and mathematics and so on that i knew that this kind of basic mystery of science will be easy to crack what i kind of realized is that we have to sort of start thinking about what are all the possible rules that nature might might conceivably use to do what it does they might not happen to be the rules that we as humans have set up in our mathematics and in the development of our science so in modern times we have kind of a good foundation to think about all possible rules we have computers and computer programs and we can kind of imagine looking at sort of all the possible programs each one corresponding to a different rule for how things get made and we can ask the question in the space of all possible computer programs what's out there and how does it compare with what we see in nature my first assumption was that when the programs i was looking at were simple then their behavior would somehow be correspondingly simple if one wanted to make something complicated that it would necessarily be the case that one had to sort of put something complicated in that one couldn't get complexity out with nothing put in so i was fairly amazed when when i actually did the experiment and found that uh some of the programs they looked at were very simple did very simple things but you just start enumerating possible programs by the time you're let's say the 30th program that happens to be one that i particularly like you can number these programs this is rule 30 you suddenly see a situation where you can start off from a very simple rule that you can specify in just a few bits of information um you say let's start the thing off from let's say one black cell and the kind of ways that the pictures are made and suddenly you see that out of this very simple rule very simple starting condition you get this pattern of great complexity it's the single most remarkable thing that i've ever seen so in a sense the the answer to the question of where does the complexity of nature come from is nature is sampling the possible rules in the computational universe and it's then just a matter of basic science that out of these possible rules in the computational universe a fair fraction have this feature that they produce complexity even from very simple underlying rules [Music] steven has shown how simple rules can generate complex patterns in surprising and elegant ways he claims that for understanding reality rules may work better than mathematics [Music] but can emergence give clues as to the basic structure and perhaps deep meaning of the universe many scientists dismiss such a notion as for me i cannot help but wonder to philip clayton a philosopher and theologian specializing in science and religion emergence is a new way of watching the world philip somehow sees emergence as a third way between pure science and fundamentalist religion can this make sense if so this is wild new territory we meet at harvard divinity school emergence is the realization i would say that the natural world is composed of multiple levels that as systems get more complex they don't just continuously evolve into something new but at some point in complexity you get a new type of phenomenon a new type of dynamic and that needs to be explained by scientists in a different way than the that of the lower level so what does that mean what follows from that it means that the biological world is much more interesting than we thought it was we're not little in principle you can't do it i mean if you knew everything in every possible way if you were god so to speak uh and you knew every particle and force possible you would still not be able to predict that even god would have to do some looking that's true we really are responsive organisms to our environment and so even the omniscient scientist god qua scientist is going to have to look at the interactions between these beings and in a few cases you have a virtual reduction of one to the other say physical chemistry to physics those are the tightest relationships that exist anywhere but it's an ideology i suggest to take that one instant and then to try to say that well that is how the cells of a chimpanzee and the behavior of a chimpanzee are related you've talked about strong emergence and weak emergence what's the difference weak emergence is uh the time of emergence we generally find in physics that's the case where the broader system say in solid state physics some particular massive body constrains the behavior of the parts but strong emergence adds another dimension let's say in the case of an organism it would be silly to say that the behaviors of the organism are just a passive constraint and all the work is done at the chemical level an organism is an entity that's engaged in this interaction with its environment in the struggle for survival and that makes it an active agent strong emergence then says that this active agent is a causal force which is causing its parts to behave in a particular way evolution consists of a series of these recursive systems and in each case a complex system engages in dynamics that moves the parts around and in the case of living systems the most natural way to speak is to say that the organism is the active agent it's downward causation the fact that an emergent organism exercises causal influence on its parts that one is the troubling one yeah to say downward causation means that the sum of the parts is influencing the parts themselves in some recursive manner that's exactly right at each level we have new information from the empirical world we seek connections but we don't begin with the dogmatic assertion that we'll be able to tell the story top to bottom in one unbroken narrative [Music] there is something about whole entities that is more than the sum of their parts emergence is a radical view of how the world works unique laws operating at each level of reality which are not reducible to the laws of lower levels of reality [Music] this would be remarkable forcing science to think anew emergence claim disputed by some is that reductionism does not always work [Music] biology in particular cannot be explained entirely by physics emergence may take two forms weak emergence when unexpected properties appear in whole entities that could not obtain by simply combining the properties of their parts strong emergence whole entities have causal powers that affect their parts causal powers that exceed the sum of the powers of the parts downward causation is real downward causation that would shock emergence shakes our world view but is it closer to truth for complete interviews and for further information please visit closer to truth.com [Music] um [Music] you

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 65,585

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, closer to truth full episodes, ultimate reality of the universe, ideas of existence, fundamental questions about reality, emergence, Robert Laughlin, Peter Atkins, Francisco Ayala, Philip Clayton

Id: gMrTjo7drU8

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021