Re: Does Searle's "Chinese Room" argument imply that consciousness is non-scientific?


"Wolf Kirchmeir" <ElLoboViejo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:46fd50b3$0$17060$9a6e19ea@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Alpha wrote:
Erm, please read some material on emergence to get an education thereof -
you are woefully misinformed.

Try John Holland's work (yes - the "Genetic Algorithm" guy) and of
course, especially, Biological Emergences : Evolution by Natural
Experiment by Reid.

"Wolf Kirchmeir" <ElLoboViejo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:46fbf0fc$0$17022$9a6e19ea@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Alpha wrote:
PS:

1) It isn't blobs of ink and cellulose atoms that make you want to read
War and Peace, it is the meaning - something that exists that is *other
than* "just* the atoms of ink and cellulose. I.e., Meaning over and
above "just" the atoms has causal power in Universe and thereby
constitutes existence as much as atoms behaviing do.

2) And why choose "atoms behaving" as your preferred level of
description, to which you anchor everything? Why not molecules
behaving? (We know that many molecules *cannot* be reduced to the
attributes/behavior of the constituent atoms due to emergence).

Erm, that was true a couple of decades ago, but nowadays there is
increasing understanding of how the properties of the atoms control the
shape(s) of the molecule, and hence its properties and behaviours,
including interactions with other molecules. The same holds true for
properties of molecules, and the crystals and polymers they form.
However, AFAIK there is not a general theory that relates atom's
properties to molecules' shapes.

[...]

Thanks for the references. I've read some Stuart Kauffman, who IMO is a
properly cautious proponent of emergence.

I'll clarify my remarks. I should have made it clear that my comment was
an oblique attack on reduction as apparently conceived by you, but I
thought that would be clear from what I said and how I said it. If I
misconceived your conception of reduction, my apologies.

I said it is now understood how some of the properties of atoms control
the shapes of the molecules that they form. As I understand it, that is
one of the ways in which properties at one level are "reduced" to those of
another. "Reduce" is a stupid term IMO, since it implies that the higher
level properties are "nothing but" mysterious emanations of the properties
of lower levels. Anyhow, it's a fact that the distribution of charges
within the hydrogen and oxygen atoms accounts for the shapes of
crystalline water. I'm old enough to remember when that relationship was
still a mystery, ie, hadn't been elucidated, IOW when the shape of the
crystal hadn't been "reduced" to the shapes of the atoms (understood as
charge distributions.)

It's also a fact that here and there it's been found that some of
properties of the constituents of ecosystems elucidate behaviours of the
ecosystem as a whole, eg, the expansion of an ecosystem into its
surroundings are is in part controlled by the rate at which some animals
expand their territory, and/or and the distance that rhizomes can
propagate underground. And so on.

I've been reading about "emergent properties" for, oh, I don't know,
twenty years or more, from the time the term was first coined to label a
"new" concept. But the concept isn't new at all.

"Emergent property" is just a faddy term for what has always been known:
that a system's properties don't follow obviously from the apparent
properties of its constituents. It's become a buzzword, that is, it has
the inestimable advantage that it makes the utterer of the term sound
smarter than he is, in his own ears anyhow.

In some cases, some of the properties at one level are discovered to be
the cause of some of the emergent properties. But so far, as far as I can
tell, there is no general theory of what kinds of properties at one level
give rise to what kinds of properties at another. That is, it's not clear
what kinds interactions among elements of a system produce what kinds of
behaviours of the system as a whole. That aspect of "emergence" is still
at the botanising stage, and IMO likely to remain so for a long time to
come.

BTW, it should be obvious that if such a theory were available, it would
be possible to do R&D (for example) without the tediousness of building
and testing prototypes (for example.) It would be possible to specify the
behaviour of a system in terms of its constituents' behaviours and
interactions, and thus the structures that they must form. It would make
specifying the architecture of an AI machine a piece of cake. Etc.

As for how this bears on the problem of consciousness: I think that
consciousness is an emergent behaviour, partly because it seems to me that
the kinds of conscious behaviours we see in animals appear appear to vary
with their neural complexity. But just how to link conscious behaviours to
the architecture(s) of the neural systems is at this point an unanswered
question.

Good points Wolf! In Holland's books he details lots of attributes of
emergent systems; preconditions, and also processes/attributes of
already-formed emergent phenomena. So I think his observations are
part-n-parcel of of general theory. Alwyn Scott (formation of new
operators) and Reid (Biological Emergences...) both tell of complex adaptive
systems(cas) that share many of the preconditons and characteristics of
emergence and would all be part of that general theory you're looking for.
Holland has a good start on that "model" (the types of interactions that
produce certain types of behavior), and Reid delineates lots of extant and
historical examples of emergence.

You note that emergent phenomena don't follow "obviously" from the
constituent properties; I would word it stronger; that (at least for strong
emergence, as opposed to weak emergence) emergent phenomena cannot be
predicted from or reduced to the properties or interactions of the
constituents.

I agree that most of the linkages between the cas that is the CNS, and
conscious behavior are correlative/correspondance-related, rather than
causative; we can't just throw lots of parts into a vat and expect
consciousness to emerge. Nature spent billions of years experimenting
within a progressive evolutionary schema to reach current states of
complexity and behaviorial manifestation. It is certainly not "obvious" how
all the neurons/neurochemicals contribute to various psychological
attributes/faculties that are phenomenally present *in* consciousness
(thoughts, mind's-eye depictions, etc.)

I think you would be pleasantly surprised by the breadth and depth of Reid's
book BTW; lots of intricate "webs" that arise when preconditions (like phase
differentials (water-gas), formation of membranes (cell walls) and so
forth ) take shape. Of course, the taking-shape is another mystery; how/.why
did certain preconditions arise that portended/enabled *progressive*
evolution (progressive in the sense that negentropic structures, dissipative
structures) preferentially took control of earth.



HTH



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