PHILOSOPHY - Metaphysics: Emergence
Video Statistics and Information
Channel: Wireless Philosophy
Views: 66,761
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Khan Academy, Philosophy, Wireless Philosophy, Wiphi, video, lecture, course, emergence, reduction, philosophy of science, Paul Humphreys, University of Virginia, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, physics
Id: X_IuG3kJY_g
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 5min 40sec (340 seconds)
Published: Fri Jul 08 2016
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That video is overly complicated and convoluted, I suggest having a read of the "Types and Forms of Emergence" by Jochen Fromm instead.
Essentially what it boils down to is that emergence is about the interaction between parts, instead of just about the parts themselves. What makes a Lego house look like a Lego house aren't the blocks themselves, but the arrangement of the blocks. That's why reductionism fails at describing emergence phenomenon, there simply is no Lego-house'ness in the individual blocks, it's in the arrangement, the very thing that you throw about with reductionism.
Furthermore what makes some emergences phenomenon unpredictable is not just that they are complex, but that they are not a necessary consequence of the properties of the individual parts. Again take the Lego house, if you just look at the individual blocks there is no way to tell that they will form a house. The house is just one of an endless number of possible ways to arrange those blocks and you could build airplanes, cars or numerous other things with those blocks as well. You can't predict that those blocks will form that exact house.
The linked paper goes into further detail on the different kinds of emergence.
TL;DW: In this Wireless Philosophy video, Paul Humphreys (University of Virginia) introduces the concept of emergence. Emergence occurs when features of the world are not reducible to arrangements of fundamental entities.
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I consider myself reasonably able to follow a lot of things on here, but this, I followed not at all.
Seemed like a lot of peripheral info. Audio might have affected me too, though.
Epistemological emergence doesn't need a big complicated thing to be unpredictable. Pretty much anything that can do any sort of computation is unpredictable. Langston's Ant is unpredictable, even though it's trivial to describe and deterministic, with essentially one moving part and two rules on how to move it.
I'm pretty sure the quantum example and the covalent bonding are really examples, but I'm not educated enough in that to know for sure.
I also found this difficult to follow.
I find it useful to define the concept of what a property is first before defining reduction and then building into what emergence can be thought of with an example. What we're talking about here is properties that can't be broken down or explained by their components. It's like the old saying "It's more than the some of its parts"
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties/
off topic : Is there a term for baby step explanations where the speaker is always holding back on new concepts that will redefine what you've already learned in previous examples?