PHILOSOPHY - Metaphysics: Emergence

my name is Paul Humphries I teach philosophy at the University of Virginia and today I want to talk about emergence emergence is a complicated subject and so we shall only look at some of the more basic features let's begin with reduction because emergence is often thought to occur when reduction fails reduction is fairly easy to understand suppose you have a Lego set those little plastic blocks that snap together using those basic building blocks many different types of object can be constructed ranging from a bus to a replica of the white house you could also take the bus and decompose it into its original component blocks reductionist methods are often based on this kind of generative atomism approach you have a set of basic objects and everything else is nothing but those objects arranged in different ways reductionist methods have been remarkably successful in the sciences in logic and in computer science and it is only when they fail that ontological emergence comes into play before we discuss ontological emergence let's consider an easier case that of epistemological emergence epistemological emergence occurs when it is not possible to predict in advance even in principle emergent phenomena suppose that you are in a car that is trying to exit a cow pasture that is the parking lot for a rock festival there is only one exit cars are coming from all directions people are cutting in and you move one step at a time it is impossible to predict even to the nearest half an hour when you will get to the exit this is because of the number and complex see of the interactions between the cars knowledge of that future event cannot be reduced to a prediction from a small set of basic principles in the way that we can predict is solar eclipse the only thing to do in the parking lot is to wait until the event occurs but ontologically the system is still nothing but a collection of cars and their interactions the busines logical emergence usually occurs and generative atomism fails either because of our lack of knowledge of the processes involved or because the prediction is far too complicated to carry out ontological emergence is more difficult to characterize than epistemological emergence because it concerns features of the world that are not reducible to arrangements of fundamental entities examples of ontological emergence are rare and we should not look for them in the everyday world but they do exist in physics and chemistry to help us we can consider four typical features of ontological emergence these are that the emergent entity arises from the original entities the emergent entity is novel it is also autonomous and some element of holism is involved one example of ontological emergence is what is called entanglement of quantum states entanglement has the special feature that when two objects combine the states of the original objects do not fix the states of the joint object and those original states do not continue to exist as components of the joint state you can see how different this case is from the Lego blocks example these two features violate two central aspects of generative atomism and they prevent reduction of the joint state to the individual state a second example is covalent bonding in chemistry if two hydrogen atoms each of which consists of a proton and one orbiting electron are covalently bonded into a hydrogen molecule the electrons lose their individual identities and there is just one joint charge possessed by the molecule it is sometimes suggested that human consciousness is an example of ontological emergence but I think that we do not understand consciousness sufficiently to make a considered judgment about whether it is in fact ontologically emergent to conclude what we have just discussed is an example of naturalistic metaphysics a type of metaphysics that uses scientific knowledge to help arrived at his conclusions I hope it also shows how fascinating emergence can be if a careful accommodation of facts and philosophical thought is employed

Channel: Wireless Philosophy

Views: 66,761

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

Length: 5min 40sec (340 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/wiphiadmin]

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.

Thanks for watching! If you like our videos, please subscribe to our YouTube channel!

-WiPhi

[u/BrokerKingdoms]

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.

[u/dnew]

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.

[u/reversechinlock]

I also found this difficult to follow.

[u/braveyoungman]

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?