Stuart Kauffman - Is Emergence Fundamental?

Stu in trying to understand the nature of reality how it's all structured scientifically the concept of emergence is really important many people today point to emergence as a way of understanding levels of reality how biology works or systems work as opposed to fundamental physics but when you really prove it I really try to see what it is people can't explain what how that emergence really works it's just a word you've worked in complexity theory and you've worked in the biosphere and have really a very profound understanding of emergence which I need to understand let me tell you that I think that the word emergence is used in an in an ill-formed way and I think that the way that it's used is inadequate and I think that there's a much more stunning example of emergence that's happening all the time in human life and in the life of the biosphere so let's take let me take two examples ok so many years ago I invented random boolean Nets they're just a bunch of light bulbs hooked up to one another with rules turning one another on and off and I asked things like what are the patterns that emerge and it turns out that these can behave in three ways ordered critical or chaotic and it turns out that there's evidence that cells are critical and it's neat and it's lovely and people would like to call that emergent but it's not it's hard to calculate but we know ahead of time the state space it's just my boolean Nets okay and we can certainly simulate it and people have even proved theorems about it so if you could prove theorems about this and it's been done in 1985 the this phase transition from order to chaos I don't want to call that a merge I don't either okay and people also say on the topic of consciousness that if you have enough neurons consciousness will emerge I think it's gobbly goo could be right but I still think gobbledygook let me give you an example that I think is true and profound and for me it's life-changing so I need briefly to tell you about a Darwinian pre adaptation so if you said to Darwin what's the function of Stu's heart he would say pump blood but I'm a doc and I might say but look my heart makes heart sounds why is pumping blood to function in my heart and Darwin would say because pumping blood was of selective advantage to your ancestors that's why you have a heart and I add that at the level of complexity above atoms the universe will never make all possible complex things like molecules and hearts so getting to exist is a big deal the universe is non-repeating it's non ergodic okay so it matters physically history is entered now notice from this that the function of the heart is a subset of its causal consequences pumping blood not making heart sounds then says Darwin you know what a property of an organ in me are you of no use selectively in the current environment might turn out to be of selective use in another environment and they're called Darwinian pre adaptations or exaptation x' and my favorite example which i'm going to tell is there's some letter some fish have a sac partially filled with air and water the ratio of which tooms neutral buoyancy in the water column paleontologists believe that they evolved from lung fish that were flopping from puddle to bottle water got into some lungs and now it's poised to become soon better so let's suppose they're right I almost asked three questions first didn't function come to exist in the biosphere sure a neutral buoyancy in the water column second did it change the evolution of the biosphere sure new species with a fish with swim bladders new proteins and the one that I'm going to come back to that I find stunning once a swim bladder exists it's what I want to call a new adjacent possible empty ecological niche because some worm or some bacterium could evolve in swim bladders agree sure I'm gonna come back to that let me go to my third question which I always go to do you think you could say ahead of time all possible Darwinian pre adaptations well we all agree now and I think there's deep reasons for it but just briefly how would you list all possible selective conditions how would you know you'd listed them all how would you stay ahead of time the features that might become pre adaptations well we can't and that requires more discussion of in fact we can't now this means something huge before I get back to my my surprise point it means that not only do we not know what will happen like when you flip a coin 10,000 times and you don't know if it'll come up heads four thousand four hundred and twenty three times we don't even know what can happen in the evolving biosphere and in the economy and in life and that means something huge for us as humans it means that reason is an insufficient guide for living your life it means we need reason emotion intuition sensation metaphor it means what just happened to the Enlightenment where reason is our our hero okay it's insufficient life is much richer than we thought now now I want you to see what stunned me let's come back to the swim bladder being an adjacent possible empty niche again could a worm or a bacterium come to live in it yeah okay now did natural selection probably act on a population of fish to make a functioning swim bladder sure probably it did here's my surprise question did natural selection act to create the swim bladder as a new niche now both it acted to make a functioning swim bladder not a new niche but we've just agreed that the new niche is a new direction of evolution of the biosphere right right this means something that stuns me it means that without any selection so the bias here is creating its own future possibilities of becoming I'm gonna say it again the biosphere honest-to-god without any selection is creating its own future possibilities of becoming that's not in Darwin no and that's emergence radical emergence it's a radical emergence I'm glad you use the word radical emergence because a we couldn't pre state it be we don't know how it happened and be it changed the course of evolution not just briefly the same thing happens in the economy I won't go into cases but nobody foresaw Facebook when the computer was invented so go from computer to personal computer Microsoft to staving and storing files to the web to selling things on the web to to Facebook how'd that happened he's all got enabled by and were new economic niches that were created by what happened beforehand becoming into the adjacent possible it's radical emergence Robert as radical emergence it cannot be deduced in principle it can't be deduced therefore it's not like the case of Stu Kaufman's random boolean that's where you knew the state space at a time you've used these two descriptions one is epistemological emergence the other is ontological emerges epistemological emergence is like the boolean networks yes and ontological emergence is the world it's coming to live in this in this room right because that's unpredictable it's impossible to predict ahead of time this modular is maybe a descriptive way you could have described if you had all the details but there's no way it with the with the swim bladder over the Facebook for that matter that you would have predicted it ahead of time those are true emergent radical ontological sense of being kinds of emerged right

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 30,956

Rating: 4.8990183 out of 5

Keywords: Stuart Kauffman (Author), Emergence (Field Of Study), Physics (Field Of Study), Closer To Truth (TV Program), Science (TV Genre), Complexity (Quotation Subject)

Id: GVL2Y5z2jLU

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/hdean173]

That dude looks like David Icke