Sunday, August 13, 2017
Problems for emergent properties
Emergent properties are deeply problematic. They either are reducible to physical states or they supervene on physical states. Is there a particular neuronal pattern that everyone is in when they are atheists, such that a neuroscientist could examine brains and determine whether someone is a believer or not? Science doesn't seem to be going that way. Or they are supervene. But either the supervenience is explainable, or it is a brute fact. If it is explainable, then there has to be an explanation for the explanation, etc. etc., and we have a regress. If it is a brute fact, then we have something other than the physical itself determining mental states, and that is inconsistent with the basic tenets of physicalism.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
There are some cases of subservience or emergence being explainable as a consequence of the geometry of the components. So in those cases we have a combination of physical things and mathematical properties causing emergence of new physical things or behaviors. I suppose then we have geometry as a brute fact. That seems pretty harmless.
give me an example of an emergent property other than consciousness? life perhaps? I think it has been proven life could start fro non life. If consciousnesses emergent that doesn't mean that it can be reduced to brain function.
A crystal emerges from a dissolved solution, in a way.
Are they? Why does explainable supervenience lead to infinite regress? Consider the music CD. It's musical properties supervene on the dots and dashes---no possible change in the music without a change in the dots and dashes. But the supervenience is explicable---it's all in the Sony/Philips 'Red Book', I believe. Where is the infinite regress?
I guess the question is, What is the relation between the CD and the music thereon? If the music isn't a property supervening on the physical configuration of the disc, maybe it's an appearance produced by directing a suitable sense organ to it, viz, a CD player/hifi system.
Be that as it may, I offer the CD as a analogue of Victor's response to SP in How does a psychological event occur?. The impression I get from this and other presentations of the AFR is that Victor sees that the vocabulary we use to describe mental states and the vocabulary we use to describe brain structures are exclusive. He says, emphatically, You can call it [neuronal development] learning if you want to, but the process is completely nonrational. Likewise, the musical vocabulary we use to talk about music, viz, instruments, keys, notes, rhythm, etc has no overlap with the physico-geometric language we use to describe the dots and dashes on the CD. Hence Victor would say, I think, that the CD is completely non-musical. But there is an important sense in which this is quite wrong, even if we can't pin down the relationship between the CD and the music in the categories in which philosophy of mind operates.
Post a Comment