Re: Consciousness: what's the problem?

Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Fri, 19 Sep 2008:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence#Strong_vs._weak_emergence

Perhaps we, and Alpha, can agree on this quote from that Wikipedia section:

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not
imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the
universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted
with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of
complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied
biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the
whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its
parts. (Anderson 1972)

I'm not sure if Alpha will agree or not. It includes a line he quoted, the
one about "applied biology" and "applied chemistry".

But it also explains the conflict. The lower level (physics) is
_in_principle_ capable of explaining the higher levels, but it fails to
explain them _in_practice_ (because of "scale and complexity").

That explains why, even if you understand chemistry really well, it turns
out that you don't know much about biology. Yet, at the same time, it also
explains how nothing is happening in the universe except for physics.

-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don@xxxxxxxxxx
Raspberry walks into a bar, bartender says "Sorry, we don't serve food here."
-- On Fruitopia bottle, "raspberry psychic lemonade" flavor
.

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