My response to >50% of the comments: If you’re trying to provide evidential support for the core theory over a modified version of the core theory that doesn’t have the same constraints with respect to locality, you should appeal to evidence that we would expect on one hypothesis *but not the other.* The microphysical evidence cited counts as no evidence against a modified CT, since we’d expect the microphysical to behave in the same way regardless of which theory turns out to be true. How it’s supposed to work: “On Hypothesis 1, we’d expect to see x, while on Hypothesis 2, we’d expect ~x.” But in this case, both H1 and H2 predict x! It makes no sense to cite x as uniquely supporting H1 over H2. I included the clip at 21:37 for a reason. Check out the full Mind Chat video for more detail: th-cam.com/users/livewlyKdirhOa4?si=06cc0axNrehDqOrG
This is trivially true for every hypothesis rigged to fit the data we already observed. The way I (charitably) construe many comments here is that they prefer CT to modified CT for non-evidential reasons
More substantively, every time a new domain of inquiry is shown to fit CT, that’s evidence for CT over modified CT. Because what you’re calling modified CT is not so much one theory, but a group of theories that require CT to be satisfied for a subset of already-explained observations, but allow for deviations from CT for any of the remaining unexplained observations. Every time a not yet explained observation is shown to fit with CT, the number of viable theories that form the set of modified CT theories shrinks…
@@mf_hume Yes, in another comment I made an analogy with the idea that Darwinian theory explains evolution of all new adaptations--it's not practically possible to determine the detailed history of every adaptive structure in every organism through history, so no matter how much new evidence comes in about history of specific adaptations fitting the Darwinian pattern of incremental adaptive improvements, one can always come up with a "God of the gaps" style theory tailored to particular adaptations where we don't have good knowledge of their history, saying that *those* adaptations were created all at once by a teleological force (this is basically the approach of many 'intelligent design' advocates with examples like the bacterial flagellum). In our theorizing about nature, in addition to the hypothetico-deductive model which just looks at whether existing evidence fits with various hypotheses, there has to be a role for something like an appeal to "elegance" or Occam's razor in weighing plausibility of different hypotheses. A good philosophical argument here is Michael Goodman's "grue paradox", where we are choosing between the hypothesis that emeralds will remain permanently green vs. the hypothesis that emeralds are "grue", where grue is defined as the property of being observabley green before a certain future date (say 2034), and blue afterwards. Observations so far are consistent with both hypotheses, but presumably that doesn't mean they are equally plausible scientifically. The role of "elegance" also relates to Carroll's point about what a radical change it would be to make local behavior of particles dependent on non-local information about the larger configuration they're a part of -- Emerson Green sort of scoffs at this in the video, but although we have seen examples of significant theory changes in physics (Newtonian gravity vs. general relativity, classical electromagnetism vs. quantum electrodynamics), the newer theories always have the older ones as some kind of smooth limit as opposed to having some sort of sharp dramatic change in applicability, and the basic symmetries of the older theory are always either preserved in the newer one or shown to be a limit of a different symmetry in the newer one (like the Lorentz-symmetry of relativity reducing to the Galilei symmetry of classical mechanics in the limit).
@@hypnosifl Now that you mention it, grue is a great illustration of my second point. Even if you don't want to make any strong claims about the theorical virtue of similicity/elegance/what-have-you, Emerson's "Modified CT" is pretty much analogous to the grue hypothesis without a specific time point. There are a bunch of grue_t hypotheses that specify a specific t as the point after which emeralds are blue. Every time period t' we don't observe a blue emerald is evidence for the green hypothesis over and above the entire class of grue hypotheses, because one of their members grue_t' has been ruled out
Usually I like videos on this channel and I did like this one but neither Emerson nor Goff seem to get Carrol’s argument at all. There are multiple sources of confusion here. 1. It is actually crucial that the theory used by Carrol is the core theory which includes QFT and NOT say Quantum Loop Gravity. Why? Because of the point about domains of applicability. The core theory uses the concept of a cut-off energy which means the highest energy it is applicable within. So we get at some short distance= high energy and say, we do not care what happens inside because it will ONLY appear as a change of parameters of the core theory. This means that the core theory will be literally wrong if it is possible in principle for something at higher energy or shorter length scale to have any effect that changes it beyond a change in parameters. For strong emergence to be true, exactly this banned change MUST happen. The evidence from particle accelerators is only used to fix the parameters of the core theory in the argument. It is actually really really hard to get this point without knowing the math of QFT at least in an elementary level. So the example using energy is not even relevant or related and the example Chalmers gives is not related because in both cases we did not have a predefined domain of applicability tied with the predictions of the theory. 2. The idea that strong emergence can be combined with the core theory “it is just a modification” again misses the whole point. This is clear in the part of what Goff and you take to be a concession from Carroll. He did not concede even a nanometer here 😂 once you take into account the rest of the quote about the radical change required. The main point is that QFT is not the kind of theory that can be modified slightly to account for localized strong emergence. In that it is different than every other theory of physics we had before it. So, the main point of the argument is that if you accept the core theory YOU MUST accept its domain of applicability because it is a part of the theory. It is not possible to have the same parameters that successfully predict every experiment we had (everywhere we tested not only in particle accelerators) while adding new laws even if they apply in specific states (I.e. in brains say). Actually, it is exactly because these new laws are localized that they cannot play well with the core theory because they will make the cutoff energy different which will mean that the parameters must be different GLOBALLY and this MUST affect experiments in particle accelerators. Put another way, it is because the theory defines and is dependent on its domain of applicability in its predictions that if this domain is not correct it will fail completely and cannot be salvaged. That is why, I think, Carroll insists that strong emergence entails major changes to the core theory. 3. Moreover, we can see here a clear difference in attitude. Carroll says that if you accept this specific theory that has all of these predictions that all came true, then you cannot have strong emergence. He states exactly why this is the case (unsuccessfully it seems because every quote you gave against it seems to miss the point completely) and accepts that the core theory may be false. On the other hand, proponents of strong emergence just say something like we will just take your theory as it is and add some stuff that we do not know to it and it will give us souls, magic lands and riches that never end. They did not advance a single strong emergent law that explains anything. They are not even trying. They have no definition of what kind of system enables these emergent laws (will half of a brain do?) or what is the form of these laws (they are not laws really, they are CAUSAL POWERS as if we have any idea what that is). 4. There is a very simp,e way to prove him wrong. Find a strongly emergent law. That is it. So when Goff claims that yes we have this internal evidence that consciousness is strongly emergent (he still needs that because his form of panpsychism does not explain human consciousness directly in terms of the consciousness of fundamental particles) so we should find a modification of the core theory that allows for that, he is right and Carroll’s response is also right. Go come up with a theory and let’s talk. As described earlier, this theory cannot be even similar to the core theory and cannot have the core theory as its limit in every domai. It was tested on. 5. Another point that Carroll does not stress much (which is again unique to the core theory) is that all particles of a given field are identical and result from a Fourier transform. What this means is that their interactions with all other fields MUST be location independent.
I think your (and Goff's) read of Carroll as claiming that experiments in particle accelerators alone are sufficient to rule out strong emergence is a bit of a strawman, his paper about the core theory is just making the more narrow point that *if* we assume the basic framework of quantum field theory, in that case any deviations from the core model that are relevant to human-scale phenomenon would show up in such experiments. You are dismissive of Carroll's claim in the quote at 20:15 that something outside that quantum field theory framework would be a "radical departure", but I don't think you understand the physical issues involved here -- at 16:30 you give the impression that you think the only issue would be energy conservation, but Noether's theorem says a number of different conservation laws follow from basic symmetry principles like the idea that the equations of physics should be unchanged under translations of spatial coordinates, time coordinates, under rotations of spatial axes, etc.; symmetries don't fix every aspect of physics like individual particle masses but they do fix quite a lot including the basic framework of quantum field theory, the extent of how much of physics can be derived from basic symmetry principles can be found in the textbook "Physics from Symmetry" by Jakob Schwichtenberg, online at www.stat.ucla.edu/~ywu/ps.pdf (and since Carroll's quote at 20:15 specifically focuses on locality, also see Richard Feynman's comment quoted at twitter.com/curiouswavefn/status/1798409916761460781 that if energy is conserved at all, it must be conserved in a local way in any theory that doesn't violate the basic Lorentz-symmetry of relativity theory). Although Carroll doesn't talk about this as much, a big part of the argument for reductionism is that at multiple levels of nature we have an ever-increasing range of partial reductions where previously unexplained phenomenon at that level are found to be explainable in terms of lower level parts and laws. For example, someone else in the comments mentioned quantum chemistry, and there is a particular flavor called "ab initio quantum chemistry" which derives various chemical phenomena (including collective behavior like the properties of water) from calculation/simulations that use only quantum physics, no empirical chemical laws. Likewise biologists are continually increasing their ability to understand the life functions of the cell in terms of networks of chemical interactions between various biomolecules (as well as mechanical forces on cells), and to explain more of complex processes like morphogenesis in the embryo and the functioning of simple animal brains in terms of interactions between cells, and so forth. All of these connections give good Occam's razor style reason to treat it as the default hypothesis that there are no ultimate limits on these kinds of reductionist explanations. As an analogy, it surely isn't the case that we know the specific selective processes and detailed history behind the evolution of every single adaptive structure in every single organism. But if biologists have continued success in finding ever increasing number of examples where we learn more about the history of particular adaptations, and find it fits the Darwinian picture of a series of smaller modifications that provided some adaptive advantage (and with frequent cases of repurposing features that had evolved for some other reason, suggesting no long range 'plan'), that seems to again give a good Occam's razor style reason to take it as a default hypothesis that Darwinian processes of random variation and selection over time can explain the evolution of all new adaptations in life's history, unless some strong evidence is found to the contrary. Your comments about Chalmers 18 minutes in may create a misleading impression about his own views, since the only type of strong emergence he is confident of is subjective conscious experience (and he thinks we need new psychophysical laws that give the connection between physical states and subjective experiences), he does not advocate for strong emergence at the level of physical behavior of conscious beings although he does not completely rule it out either. See his paper on strong and weak emergence at consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf , especially the discussion starting on the page whose first words are "derivable, the demon could deduce the high-level facts" (there are no page numbers in the pdf). In his 1996 book "The Conscious Mind" he seemed even less open to the possibility of top-down causation, saying many times that he was assuming the "causal closure of the physical", and on p. 50-51 he talked of a "ladder of explanation" similar to the ladder of partial reductions I described above, saying "If all goes well, biological phenomena may be explainable in terms of cellular phenomena, which are explainable in terms of biochemical phenomena, which are explainable in terms of chemical phenomena, which are explainable in terms of physical phenomena ... This ladder of explanation is little more than a pipe dream at the moment, but significant progress has been made. Given logical supervenience, along with the simplicity and autonomy of the lowest level, this sort of explanatory connection between the sciences ought to be possible in principle." Also note that in both his paper at consc.net/papers/qualia.html and his new book Reality+ he pretty much takes for granted that if one had a sufficiently detailed simulation of a human brain on a non-biological substrate, it would be behaviorally indistinguishable from the original.
I made this comment on the other quantum chemistry comment too but will say it here: Seems pretty strange to appeal to quantum chemistry as a great success of reductionism when 1) it gets inaccurate exactly where we might expect on some type of strong emergent view, such as in strongly correlated systems or other interaction effects (e.g., dissociation curves), and 2) It makes so many modifications to what an exact physical QM calculation would be (Born-Oppenheimer approximation, non-interacting orbitals, pseudopotentials, etc.) that it's not super clear to me what the difference is supposed to be between "I'm doing physics but just making approximations" and "this is how we make good chemical predictions i.e., these are the chemical laws." I want to think about this more, as I admittedly wouldn't think e.g., explicitly fictitious non-interacting orbitals would be part of a chemical law, but on the other hand, I think there are good reasons to think that (the real kind of) chemical orbitals or other chemical facts like optical isomers are not reducible to quantum mechanics. There's also the fact that some of the more accurate pseudopotentials are those that do, in fact, empirically fit parameters and are not strictly ab initio. There is a large debate about whether or the extent to which we should use empirical or non-empirical potentials, or if we should hold to physical constraints on exchange-correlation functionals or not, in the community.
I like this video. I think you harp on “particle accelerators” a little too much, as if that’s the only context in which modern physics has been tested. More importantly, I think it’s a little strange that the philosopher tells the physicist what counts as a “dramatic overthrow” at 21:10. Surely it’s the scientist’s job and expertise to tell us how important locality is, and it’s down to the scientist to adjudicate how extravagant an overthrow of science a theory is.
Emerson frames Sean's reductionism as the following: P1) If we don't find spooky physics at the atomic level, then spooky physics doesn't exist. P2) We don't find spooky physics at the atomic level. C) Spooky physics doesn't exist. *spooky physics is then framed as strong emergence Emerson then claims that P1 is not expansive enough to rule out spooky physics, as it only rules it out at the atomic layer of analysis, and doesn't rule it out of higher layers of analysis. Problem 1: This assumes that we only understand science at the atomic level. Emerson seems to think our only evidence is that which comes out of particle accelerators. This is a ridiculous claim. We have field after field of science and NEVER has it been observed that the higher levels of science contradict the lower. Psychology doesn't contradict neuroscience. Neuroscience doesn't contradict Biology. Biology doesn't contradict chemistry. Chemistry doesn't contradict physics. If physics rules out spooky physics, then spooky physics is ruled out at every layer of science that maintains chains of consistency with physics. This is to say, in all of our fields of science, never once has strong emergence been observed. We have enough science to have found examples of strong emergence by now if it existed. It doesn't exist anywhere in science. We are not epistemically limited to particle accelerators. Spooky physics (i.e. strong emergence) contradict everything we know about science in general. Either show us an example of strong emergence, or accept the reductive conclusion.
You want examples????? Quantum hall effect Superconductivity superfluidity Bose Einstein's condensate fermionic condensate Magnetic monopoles in spin ices Solitons Chemotaxis Dna to chromatin skyrmions And I have 12 more but ill not write them all, search for yourself. These are strong emergence. Theres even radical emergence, with entirely new Entities, Not properties: Quantum Decohererence and Gluon asymptomic freedom. I might delete this message afterwards just don't think sceince supports reductionalism, Not at all. Reductionalism is a good tool but a horrible, paradoxical theory of everything.
The claim that every layer of science maintains chains of consistency with physics and that this rules out "spooky physics" is a bold claim. It is also fallacious. A being consistent with B and B being consistent with C does not imply that A is consistent with C. If A is {p and q}, B is {q and s} and C is {s and not p}, then there is a chain of consistency that still involves an inconsistency.
@@Paradoxarn. Exactly. because quantum is nonlocal and in superposition doesn't mean the classical is also like this. Its called decohererence. Theres a relationship but not strict dictator (like strict deterministism and reductionalism). Without strong emergence you couldn't have your more local, stable quarks, without them no chemicals, hence no abiogenesis, hence no organs , hence no foolish reductionalists arguing everything is an illusion.
@@Paradoxarn. That's like saying "In logic, you can't chain your deductions together to derive second-order, third-order conclusions, etc." You absolutely can.
@@transcendentphilosophy That's not at all what I said. I'm saying that physics being consistent with chemistry and chemistry being consistent with biology doesn't rule out that physics is inconsistent with biology.
Even as someone who finds microreductionism plausible, convincing even, I would need to make a similar pushback. The main issue I have is with the apparent arbitrariness of scale that dualism would imply (similar to how common decent is less arbitrary than baraminology as it doesn't specify a "here, but no further" point).
"Quantum chemistry" (IE solving the Schroedinger eqn) is capable of predicting things as large as protein structures and other nanoscale macromolecules or the chemistry of molecules in surfaces. Even molecular dynamics which assumes a QM model to hold, can predict macroscopic properties. Not that that invalidates strong emergence, but it does suggest at the very least as far as everywhere ppl have applied QM, weak emergence has sufficed. Assuming each agreeable experiment can increase our prior on the theory... strong emergence seems like wishful thinking!
Dont take it personally but you are Wrong. The Schroedinger e. only states which electron clouds lead to more stable elements, and determining what we call element or "isotope". It doesnt predict at all the interaction of higher level interaction. This knowledge is already accessible to us, so even if strong emergence existed in a particular system, we already understand its higher level dynamics aproximatly. It doesnt predict abiogenesis, supercunductivity, bose einstein's condensate, entropy, thermodynamics, solitons, q hall effect, magnetic monopoles in spin glasses, phase transitions etc. And there are some examples that are definetly not strong, but Radical emergence. Decoherence and gluon formation from quark interaction. This of course doesnt violate the conservation of energy, theres no conservation of information, it can be created, destroyed, modified. You cant account for decoherence using weak emergence. You cant get from nonlocality to locality by the sum of the "parts". So even if we had strong emergence in front of our eyes, we may miss it due to our already higher level knowledge we assume fits perfectly with 0 information gap. You disect a human brain (still firing and working) into 50 pieces. The piece ill assume are conscious since weak emergence is theory of everything.. (what a reductionalist thinks). It is the sum of the parts litteraly. Theres no soul particles, no soul neurons therefore, consciousness is the sum of brain matter and activity. Panpsyhism achived..
@@haros2868 electron clouds have nothing to do with the stability of elements or isotopes. Using computers to solve the Schroedinger equation of electrons and nuclei to study macro molecules and their properties is definitely a way of predicting higher level "interactions" that agree with experiments. There are hundreds of journals of computational physics and chemistry that publish literally millions of articles on these topics.
@@tophersonX of course they do simulations of mass interactions using say ai, to avoid wasting human time. But note that they DONT only use the S. Equation. If they sorely put the subatomic level knowledge as code, they wouldn't result on the realistic results. They put as extra parameters the emergent properties. Without extra parameters you can't suddenly "born" or emerge say Consciousnes inside a computer , no Matt the complexity or resources. Theres a difference between simulating with extra knowledge in contrast with "straight up predicting reality inside a logic gate machine). Reality is not computational, determenistic, reducable.
@@haros2868 just search for papers of "ab initio electronic structure" you will find millions of articles that, contrary to your claim, solve the Schroedinger eqn (not necessarily using ai, but ai can help) for systems with up to tens of thousands of atoms. There are a million caveats with such efforts but no one in those fields goes around thinking the basic equations of relativistic and non relativistic quantum mechanics need modifying, because these simulations are typically backed by experimental measurements.
Seems pretty strange to appeal to quantum chemistry as a great success of reductionism when 1) it gets inaccurate exactly where we might expect on some type of strong emergent view, such as in strongly correlated systems or other interaction effects (e.g., dissociation curves), and 2) It makes so many modifications to what an exact physical QM calculation would be (Born-Oppenheimer approximation, non-interacting orbitals, pseudopotentials, etc.) that it's not super clear to me what the difference is supposed to be between "I'm doing physics but just making approximations" and "this is how we make good chemical predictions i.e., these are the chemical laws." I want to think about this more, as I admittedly wouldn't think e.g., explicitly fictitious non-interacting orbitals would be part of a chemical law, but on the other hand, I think there are good reasons to think that (the real kind of) chemical orbitals or other chemical facts like optical isomers are not reducible to quantum mechanics. There's also the fact that some of the more accurate pseudopotentials are those that do, in fact, empirically fit parameters and are not strictly ab initio. There is a large debate about whether or the extent to which we should use empirical or non-empirical potentials, or if we should hold to physical constraints on exchange-correlation functionals or not, in the community.
Your refutation of micro reductionism violates the core theory, that is you'll have to change the core theory to allow for a difference in behavior of fundamental particles in humans and particle accelerators. Carol is fine with that as long as you can provide a mathematical theory, as long as you can't provide that it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss your theory.
He is committed to naturalism. He is a brilliant physicist. We want somethings to be true. But we cannot get everything we want. Honestly I want somethings to be true like an all knowing , all powerful and compassionate god. When we read about the scientific achievements of this century we understand that the existence of such a god is highly improbable. These are some cruel facts. his arguments against reincarnation appears convincing to me. He has extreme views about somethings. We cannot know somethings. The more we think about these existential questions the more we feel depressed. Let us be kind to everyone till we are here on this planet.
What counts as "complex" or "higher-order" from the perspective of subatomic particles? What makes a human brain more complex than a rock, or more complex than an ecosystem, or more complex than a star or an ocean from the perspective of an atom? I'm struggling to understand WHY only weak emergence is a thing until very specific combo of arrangements of subatomic particles occurs and then something new and special pops out of the ether.
It is not just you. Humanity as a whole is very bad at physics. We struggle to understand many things, and our discoveries have been slow and come with a cost of sweat and tears. If strong emergence is real, we should expect to struggle to understand it, just as people struggled to understand General Relativity before it was explained by Einstein, and just as many people still struggle to understand it to this day.
@@Ansatz66 My point is. Why wouldn’t you modify/limit/restrict the much worse understood theory (being neuroscience) rather than modifying the most well-understood theory throughout human history?
Great video (and I agree with many criticisms you make) but I think it misses a couple of crucial points. You made a big emphasis (and Goff does this as well, a lot) on particle accelerator experiments. But as Carroll has told Goff directly many times, it is not that we assume that particle accelerators encode all that could happen in the world, but that the results of particle accelerators (and MANY other things) *offer enormous support* (as powerful support as can be) to a theory/theoretical framework that a) has explicit energy cutoffs, that is, domains of applicability, and b) has locality as one of its core properties. It is the theory that the experiments support, not the experiments "themselves". Also, Carroll very frequently has stated this as a dilemma (aimed specifically at panpsychism, but it encapsulates the same argument): either the emergence proposed does not change the core theory, in which case why should we care, or it does change the core theory, in which case the modification to the core theory must be proposed and defended. His point about "dramatic changes" in the theory is, I think, strawmanned in the video, because he clearly means that whatever modifications must be made, they are not simply changing one parameter from being, say, 2.3 to 2.4 or something like that. Locality and the energy cutoffs are inextricably tied to the theory as a whole. It would allegedly be a change as big as going from Newtonian gravity to general relativity. But even if you think that is an exaggeration, it is still an extremely substantial change to rewrite the core theory to make it nonlocal or to change the energy cutoffs. Laughing off these points as "changes are okay but not dramatic changes", "how dramatic is a dramatic change" seems like a semantic game. Carroll also makes this point in a somewhat satirical manner, when he says stuff like "what do you trust more some random intuition or the entirety of physics". But beyond the satire I think he makes an important point. From a Bayesian approach, we should have extraordinarily high credence on a theory that has been tested to the extent that the core theory has. This theory has locality and energy cutoffs ingrained in it, so we also should have extremely high credence in those (they are literally entailments of the theory). So until someone puts forward a theory with nonlocality or different energy cutoffs with any level of verification close to the core theory, or properly modify the core theory (which would be the same), "as good Bayesians" we should prefer the core theory. Also as a minor technicality, using the term "emergence" as kind of synonymous with reductionism is extremely common in social sciences and philosophy (e.g., Latin American philosophy, scientific philosophy, etc.). I think it is only anglophone analytic metaphysicians that use "emergence" to mean strong emergence, so if anything the "non-standard use of the term" is on the anglophone analytic metaphysics side
That is all very interesting, but it doesn't refute Panpsychism, Dualism or Strong emergentism. Certainly the proponents of such positions should defend their views, but the evidence for the core theory neither rules them out, nor makes them less likely to be true. As for how dramatic a change to the core theory that is required to explain consciousness must be, the difference between newtonian gravity and general relativity in the context of everyday physics is extremely subtle. Calling those differences dramatic seems like a semantic game.
“It would allegedly be a change as big as going from Newtonian gravity to GR.” No. It is much worse. QFT becomes an incomprehensible mess without locality. GR is a very beautiful and very sensible theory. The point you raise about how the emphasis should be put on theories that the experiments support, rather than just the experiments, is spot-on. I implicitly raise a similar point in my reply to the video. It’s good that you made it explicit.
@@Paradoxarn. Newtonian gravity and GR are extraordinarily different theories, although they produce similar results in some restricted contexts. My point is analogous: if you want to remove locality or energy cutoffs from the core theory, obviously "in everyday physics" or particle accelerators the consequences would be small, but the *changes to the theory* must be enormous. That is Carroll's point and the justification for preferring the core theory. As for the first point, the video is titled "strong emergence vs the core theory", so I focus on the strong emergence part (although it includes strong emergentist flavors of panpsychism). Strong emergence seems to imply that the core theory is wrong, as least regarding to locality or the energy cutoffs. Therefore, if we have incredibly strong evidence in favor of the core theory, that also is incredibly strong evidence *against* theories that contradict the core theory. As stated above, given that strong emergentism entails nonlocality (Goff seems to agree with this, not sure if Emerson does), and the core theory entails locality, then by definition strong emergentism contradicts the core theory, and all the evidence in favor of the core theory is equally strong evidence against strong emergentism
@@Paradoxarn. What is your falsification criteria for dualism then? Oh you don't have one? Then it's not a legitimate idea that NEEDS to be refuted. It's just something people made up without evidence.
@@rodrigoferrer1803 Why care about the magnitude of the change? The change will not affect predictions related to particle collider experiments and other non-relevants experiments/observations. Why care about locality? The locality is only found in particle collider experiments etc. Why care about energy cutoffs? The energy cutoffs are only found in particle collider experiments etc. Also, why would all the evidence in favor of the core theory be evidence against strong emergentism, given that strong emergentism does not contradict the results of particle collider experiments etc?
SC: "reality is reality. reality is not some mathematical thing we invented. reality is sui generis." SC said this in a recent appearance at robinson erhardt's podcast. this to me is clearly a quietist or at least non-physicalist position. he pushes back against simplistic entity realism, ie. it is far from obvious that anything is 'made of' or that reality is 'identical to' the singular, continuous universal wavefunction -- of which quantum fields are a convenient way of talking about. this is a conclusion that james ladyman et al. also endorse in 'every thing must go: naturalized metaphysics'. talking about new special brain *physics,* presumes this implausible decomposable 'brain is made of/identical to configuration of little things' entity realism. new physics will be entirely the same that we have now -- cue the it's just *structure* -- but what *breathes fire into the equations -- what is the structure's intrinsic nature?* woes... reality is sui generis. it's not 'made of' anything, but it is patterned and it just is as it is. science is about intersubjectively accessible patterns in data. some patterns (pattern = any relation among data) carry information about other patterns, some (tentatively) do not -- these are the extra-representational patterns of fundamental physics that aren't explained by/reducible to other patterns. mathematical objects appear as arguments in formulae. they don't have 'essential properties or natures' -- mysterious concepts dreamt up by philosophers. reality isn't a 'mereological sum' of whatever mathematical objects our most predictive and counterfactual-supporting theories feature. the main problems with 'souls' and strong emergence and whatever conjectured spooky existents, is that they're unintelligible precisely because they are non-mechanistic non-explanations, and people use these words in a myriad of differing, nonconsistent ways. it's just word games, vibes, differences that don't make a difference.
It seems to me that strong emergence goes against everything we've ever learned in science. Thus far, reductionism has not only had massive success, but works at every level. We can explain sociology in terms of psychology. We can explain psychology in terms of biology. We can explain biology in terms of biochemistry. We can explain biochemistry in terms of atomic theory. It's true that not all of these explanations are yet complete, but nowhere have we actually run into any case so far where weak emergence has failed, nor have we found any cases where strong emergence has succeeded. Meanwhile, we can take what happens in particle accelerators and, using our theories of weak emergence, predict a vast array of phenomena with so much precision that we can build the modern internet, develop new drugs, and create materials with properties so incredible our ancestors would have thought them magic. Why would we expect this pattern to be broken at some level?
when you say “explain in terms of” , what your doing is describing it and Not Explaining it! It’s an error to confuse the both. To take an example the laws of physics are not a description of physical reality it’s an explanation of How physical phenomena comes to being. Description would be like constitution of things and Explanation would be How that constitution came to be. It’s an empiricist mistake. Similarly explanation and prediction are very different things.
Ill break your childish TOE ladder (theory of everything). Sociology is perhaps the weakest emergece of all the levels. You cant account pain, emotions, CONSCIOUSNESS, subjectively based on neuroscience, only found unexplainable correlates. Abiogenesis isn't explained by inanimate chemical rules. Classical physics aren't explained truly by quantum physics (since decohererence breaks superposition, hence entirely new local rules). Mathematics doesn't inherently explain qm. At this point someone like me with enough qm knowledge can even "break down" gravity itself! Interaction of quarks with higgs field (what gives mass to particles). Is gravity an Illusion??? Of course not
It is clear that Carroll has over-reached and been philosophically careless with his excessively bold claims, but there is still something important at the core of what Carroll is trying to express. We shouldn't presume that studying the microscopic can exhaustively reveal everything we might want to know about the macroscopic, but on the other hand our failure to find any evidence at all for certain dubious macroscopic ideas by studying the microscopic should be a red flag. _A priori_ it could have been that souls might leave some evidence at the microscopic level, yet in every way we are capable of searching for evidence of souls, we fail to find that evidence. That does not mean there is no evidence for souls in places we are not yet capable of searching, but it's not good sign for souls being real. Where did people even get the idea of souls without evidence? It seems the answer can only be that people dreamed up the idea as a fantasy.
At that point, you might as well believe in Leibnitz's Monadology, where all causality is just "apparent", all entities in the world are actually independently pre-programmed by God.
It is useless to consider the origin and nature of human "consciousness" without first defining it specifically and precisely. If one is going to refer to consciousness, one must have a good conceptual model of it. This is also true of free will. I see that there are statements but I do not see the corresponding explanations. Does the strong emergence create consciousness? How is that emergence supposed to create something? If the idea is that the soul exists, this is not the result of strong emergence. Or is it? Is free will the result of strong emergence or is it a characteristic of an entity of a different nature?
Are you still a panpsychic, Emerson? I am personally struggling to decide between all these theories. I do not really find any of the arguments against reductive physicalism compelling, so I am not sure if we should postulate property dualism, or neutral monism. Substance dualism is pretty much out of the question for me. Panpsychism seems plausible, but is it really a necessary move? I am not sure...
???? Carol should be labeled panpsihist, since he says no new properties or entities can emerge (strong emergence) and everything is the sum of the parts (reductionalism). If we accept Consciousnes exists, and human brains have it, then also the parts must have some proto comsciousnesses (neurons) and in turn atoms. Reductionalism leads to panphysism not strong Emergence. I don't know the other guy but carol is clearly a reductionalist, so comsciousnesses either is nonexistent (eliminatism) or it is real but reducable (panphysism). Thats why strong emergence is the exit from this paradoxical dance
@@Nexus-jg7ev thats exactly what im saying bro. Strong emergence or non reductive materialism is not dualism (ghost). It is physical but not determenistic or reducable
Reductionism is the conceptual basis on which science works. Like a clock is made of gears, and gears are made of atoms, the entire predictive power of science is based on the idea of finding the fundamental building blocks then extrapolating from there. A departure from this line of thinking to say that causation can occur spontaneously at levels higher than the smallest component is basically saying that magic exists. And it runs into corresponding theoretical challenges like, does it actually supplement the core model? How can we say that a contradiction doesn’t occur between the mechanist movements of the microscopic components and the causation that emerges simultaneously, spontaneously and independently from the macroscopic structure. Strong emergence envisions a radically different conception of causation than the one we intuitively expect and the one that is standardly described in science. I would even go further and say that this conception of causation is completely incoherent to even think about. How can we possibly imagine scientific laws without reductionism? What’s the origin of the law? What gives it power? Is it even possible to describe irreducible laws mathematically? How do we know that the laws will be consistent? How could we know why irreducible laws are the way they are if there is no smaller component shape that we can describe?
I broadly agree with the statement that science rests on reductionism, but we ought to be intellectually humble enough to seek models that explain all of the phenomena in the world. Let's assume materialism and therefore epiphenomenalism is true. Which known physical law gives rise to perception and the illusion of mental causation? Why ought we have this illusion, unless effects on the mental have some evolutionary purpose? These are valid questions that can't be so easily handwaved away because we don't care for the implications of the answers.
@@LateMarch3 these questions are very easily answered with a reductionist model. Epiphenominalism with property duelism makes perfect sense. I see no reason to believe that consciousness evolved, it’s just something that happened metaphysically along with but separate from evolution. Psychophysical harmony is no mystery under property duelism. What natural laws give rise to qualia? Property duelism is a coherent answer to that because it prioritises matter. But suggesting some sort of back and forth in causation makes everything over determined and impossible to parse the cause and effects of things in a consistent and rigorous manner.
@@idanzigm Sorry, I am just not convinced that property dualism answers them at all, as it merely seems to push the problem of psychophysical harmony into a semantically different category. I understand the appeal of its simplicity, of course, but the qualitative poverty of property dualism with regard to this question is a view shared by most philosophers of mind and even many naturalists--I would caution against handwaving their arguments as "very easily" explained. Why should the experience of pain be a "metaphysical" property of heat striking a neuron? Why should perception (and even a potential illusion of mental causation) accompany any of the workings of a material brain? Property dualism here would contradict basic evolutionary theory, which says that neurons cause the feeling of pain because the feeling of pain aids our fitness--not that the neurons just "metaphysically happen" (in your words) to also have the property of a correlating mental state. It seems too mystical to me. Note that these questions persist even if we reject mental causation and embrace epiphenomenalism. I envy your certainty, but once you're talking about metaphysical happenings that I am supposed to take on faith, it doesn't seem as neatly reductionist to me.
@@LateMarch3 I may be wrong, but I don’t think that evolution argues that we evolved the feeling of pain to survive. That feels like a theory that we used to have that there was a conscious work bench and there was a local area of the brain that was conscious. Now we know that consciousness permeates the entire brain and my impression was that there is no separate part of the brain that “causes consciousness” that phrasing assumes strong emergence and begs the question. Also evolutionary theory is a reductionist theory, so there is no way it supports strong emergence. The fact that neural states superimpose on mental states is mystical, but granting that mystical-ness extra powers makes the claim less credible. And if you’re going go to do that you have to say what it is about being in a complex organism that enables it to break physics as we know it? What is it about that? What is it about being in a brain that’s different from being in a particle collider? Name the relevant difference. Because all of the things we can measure for it wouldn’t make a difference. I.e. more particles more complex field equations ect. We don’t need to agree on anything other than. “You are proposing a new category of law” And I say that because like I said above 👆🏼 it don’t think non-reductionist laws can be represented with math, shown to be non-contradictory with reductionist laws and theories, or have a basis for being consistent and unchanging. All things that are similar with magic. This is my only claim and the only thing that I will argue about. It is radical, it is a different type of natural law, and a different conception of naturalism. You can’t hand wave that away. I guess the other thing I will argue about it there are no compelling enough reasons so entertain the possibility of these sorts of laws. Evolution is not a reason it’s a reductionist theory, off the table. Phenomenal powers (which in a monist sort of sense i think is fine if a bit confused imo, just cuz as a property duelist I’m very similar to a monist), also doesn’t support such a dramatic stance as to entertain strong emergence, I fail to see anything that could.
@@idanzigm epiphenomenalism makes perfect sense.... How many stupidity pills you got?? First, epiphenomenalism is NOT property dualism, thats strong emergence, epiph is Substance dualism! It violates the conservation of energy. Then ,how the hell something that exists cant cause anything??? Did its causal efficacy lost to the oblivion??? And finally, how comsciousnesses can interact with information like memories, emotions stimuli etc?? Epiphenomenoalism is the stupidest, we would be disembodied minds in the void. Because when someone is aware of something it means interaction! From both sides. If one is a useless ghost then how the hell can it interact and hemce have the qualia of vision???
So you're not an indeterminist, fundamentally speaking, right? Also, you're a non-physicalist wrt consciousness only to the extent that you hold that everything that is, as of now, putatively physical ('physical' in the broad sense, not necessarily in the philosophy of mind sense) is not sufficient to underlie consciousness, but that doesn't mean that you also simultaneously hold that whatever actually happens to underlie consciousness is necessarily akin to something that is, as of now, already putatively non-physical ('non-physical' in the broad sense, not necessarily in the philosophy of mind sense), right?
What Carroll should really say is that the *objectively verifiable elements of experience* (the "physical") are fully understood at the everyday level. However, objectively verifiable elements of experience are, by definition, a subset of our total experienced reality. Carroll, then, is suggesting that all of reality stems from this subset of experience, including all other (qualic) experience. This is clearly a matter of faith on his part, assuming that objectivity points to a reality "out there" *beyond* experience, rather than simply describing common elements *of* experience.
Whenever I hear the word dualism I wonder what their answer to the princess Elisabeth’s question is good enough for them to still posit dualism as an actual model of anything 💀
Here is the answer: Princess Elisabeth relied on a Cartesian model of physics, which says that ALL physical effects involve pushing. We know this isn't true because of gravity, magnetism, electromagnetism etc., so her argument is undermined.
19:55 wow that’s a massive concession, actually. It seems to me that Carroll claiming that everything relevant to the brain is explained by the known laws of physics is false on its face if only because the known laws of physics don’t predict first-person experience or perception. Even if he holds that the causal power of mental states is illusory, he’s then become a strong emergentist with regard to illusions! Which known law of physics produces the illusion of will?
You should put more effort into understanding views you don't agree with. The claim is not that everything relevant to the brain is *explained* by the known laws of physics, the claim is that the laws of physics with which one could *in principle* (and which is in practice impossible) make all predictions related to brain activities are all known.
@@randomblueguy My apologies, I think I didn't word this clearly enough. "Is explained" was intended to mean "could in principle be explained" by the known laws of physics, as you state. That was precisely the claim to which I was responding. To expound, my point is that even if we accept that mental causation is illusory and only physical things have causal power, in principle the laws of physics stipulated here would not explain that illusion because the notation being used to offer that "in principle" answer (the Core Theory equation) is insufficient. This is true by its own definition: the equations mathematically predict everything about the movement of particles. They predict nothing with respect to perception, illusion, feeling. That's not to say they couldn't, only that they don't. If one wants to pin perception-illusion to one or more of these laws, one needs to add something to the Core Theory model.
@@LateMarch3 This isn't the claim either. Let's ignore consciousness for a moment. Microscopic theories do in principle explain the solidity of a table even though the word "table" never appears in a physical theory, and no specific predictions about "tables" are ever made in a microscopic theory. The point is that, the laws of physics are enough to predict the locations (let's assume classical physics for a moment) of all the particles of the system at each moment of time. This encompasses all the information about a physical system one would ever need to know. Speaking of biological systems, of tables, and of consciousness is only a useful construct since we never have access to all the information about physical systems, and instead resort to shortcuts. EDIT: To be super clear, let me state what the claim isn't too. It could be the case that consciousness affects the behavior of particles in some fashion unaccounted for by the current laws of physics. This would mean that our current laws of physics do not correctly predict the locations of each particle of a system at each moment of time. The claim is nothing more and nothing less than the negation of this scenario.
@@randomblueguy Maybe we don't disagree as much as you think, but happy to dig in more. Let us set mental causation or lack thereof aside for the moment. Let's assume that the Core Theory is right and every single particle is predictable at any given moment. The problem of perception and our illusion of free will still wouldn't be accounted for by the laws outlined here. Consciousness itself is clearly different than the "useful constructs" the conscious mind uses to understand groupings of microscopic particles like tables and cups, as the latter are the contents of experience and the former is experience itself. Again, I am willing to entertain the idea that perception is governed by these laws, but then we would have to posit a means by which it is governed. If we want to say perception itself is a false linguistic construct, we are advocating for eliminativism, for which I don't think Carroll advocates.
@@LateMarch3 "I am willing to entertain the idea that perception is governed by these laws, but then we would have to posit a means by which it is governed." Most reductionists would say that perception is a process that takes place within the vastly complicated network of cells within the brain, by way of the many intricate signals that they send between each other. It is much akin to how computers process data by sending electrical signals through circuits, but instead of being designed for perfectly reliable calculations, brains are biologically evolved to be adapted for navigating the world and participating in social interactions. This ability to navigate the world is what we call "perception," and the signals that neurons send to each other are governed by the physical laws that Carroll was talking about.
particles behaving differently doesn't give you a singular conscious being. instead, the particles would have to disappear and a huge conscious being particle would have to take their place. that's not philip goff's belief, is it? does he think he's a collection of particles?
Emerson, I think you're conceding way too much to the physicalists. Strongly emergent phenomena can have causal effects not just at larger scales, but down at the micro scales as well: e.g. it's exceedingly unlikely that two fundamental particles would spontaneously accelerate to near speed of light along a perfectly elliptical orbit near Geneva (LHC) and collide with each other head on. This is rather caused by the human mind(s) and is only explained by the fact that those minds wanted to test particular theories. No fundamental physical law would be able to explain any of this.
First, let us examine the statement: "Strong emergence only speaks of the behavior of large accumulations of particles, therefore experiments done with a 'few' particles can never refute it." On the face of it, this statement is of course correct. However, so is the statement: "Here on Earth, and before 1870, protons did not exist. Experiments done now can never refute this. Note that looking at distant stars will not do you any good either, since I'm restricting my claim to what goes on here on Earth." Both statements should strike one, prima facie, as being just silly. From the perspective of a subatomic particle, there is nothing special about the year 1870, or about complex systems. There's more to it than just physical intuition however. There's a fairly convincing argument that one can find best fleshed put in the first volume of Weinberg which very loosely speaking says that given that certain assumptions (lorentz invariance, analyticity, unitarity, and locality) hold ON the regime of low-energy physics, any self-consistent theory of physics must reduce to an effective field theory for low-energies. We know the hypothesis of the folk theorem holds. Again, all that's necessary is that these features of the theory hold for the regimes which we have already tested, which any theory consistent with our data must encompass. Given this, there is a very real sense in which what strong emergentists are trying to do is just doing away with physics. That is, saying that there's no self-consistent sensible theory that describes the behavior of particles. For if otherwise, it would automatically describe the behavior of particles not only in particle accelerators, but also in human brains. It is possible that the theorem is actually false. I don't know of a formal proof of it, though the standard argument is found in the first volume of Weinberg (roughly around the first half of the book).
You know, revolution in physics supports strong emergence. Revolution is also conceptual, for example finding out that something previously thought nonexistent, like quantum superposition. Theres gap in sceince that reductionalists just "assume" it is merely the sum of the parts. Even if strong emergence was in front of our face we first begin with macro knowledge and then understand micro, usually. We already had knowledge about viscosity. To simulate in a computer water, you not only need to put the atomic level rules but also additional parameters for the viscosity. Inside a determinstic simulation there wont suddenly emerge a Consciousnes, inside a computer, because by definition, its logic gates, causaly closed. Many examples of strong emergence might have been labelled as "laws" with scientists names. I dont see how determenistic, discrit, billard balls could possibly create a Consciousnes, even with googol balls in Graham number of years. And lets dont forget quantum decohererence, the classical mechanics strongly emergence , after decohererence the superposition cloud becomes a local define particle then. Without decoherence, mere statistics cant wash out the probabalistic, wave like behaviour if quantum fields. And note that the discovery of strong and radical emergence will not be a lose for sceince. Indeterminenism is though to be problematic and "messing up our science" but it explained how the sun uses quantum tunneling for fusion. Without quantum tunneling and other indeterminenistic events the sun couldn't fuse, therefore not capable of being a main sequence star, therefore not capable of making life possible as we know it, therefore no reductionalists could exist and argue stupid stuff. So counterintuitive doesn't means a problem, it just means some foolish "scientists" are in a hurry to claim "we solved everything, we have TOE, we are masters of existence", arrogant is the kindest word I can formulate right now for this...
@@haros2868 There's a lot to unpack here. "You know, revolution in physics supports strong emergence. Revolution is also conceptual, for example finding out that something previously thought nonexistent, like quantum superposition." I am not fully sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that we should expect there to be a revolution in the way we do physics such that strong emergence would be allowed/necessary? Why should we expect this? Also note that revolutions never overturn data. If the folk theorem of Weinberg actually holds, there seems to be no way of weaseling out of this. You could try to actually formulate an effective field theory that is highly non-local such that it could *potentially allow for* strong emergence to occur. I don't think this is possible, and I'd love to see someone try. "Theres gap in sceince that reductionalists just "assume" it is merely the sum of the parts. Even if strong emergence was in front of our face we first begin with macro knowledge and then understand micro, usually." It is true that there are gaps in our knowledge. Of course there are, and nobody claimed otherwise. There is no clear fully fledged out fully understood way to get organic chemistry out of particle physics. But this is not the point. It never has been. The point is that, in principle, whatever goes on in the regime of organic chemistry better not violate the predictions of our best microscopic theories. It is also true that we often stumble upon the macroscopic theory before the microscopic one. This was the case with thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. I don't see how this is in conflict with what I claim. "To simulate in a computer water, you not only need to put the atomic level rules but also additional parameters for the viscosity." I haven't looked into this but I am fairly skeptical of the claim. It could be the case that you put in the additional parameters just so that the computations become much more feasible (after all, analytically solving the Schrodinger equation even for a helium atom is impossible), but I don't quite believe that one in principle *needs* any additional parameters. If you wish to convince me otherwise, I'd need some references. "Inside a determinstic simulation there wont suddenly emerge a Consciousnes, inside a computer, because by definition, its logic gates, causaly closed." I don't see how that follows, or what exactly you mean by causally closed. "I dont see how determenistic, discrit, billard balls could possibly create a Consciousnes, even with googol balls in Graham number of years. " This seems to be an argument from incredulity. "And lets dont forget quantum decohererence, the classical mechanics strongly emergence , after decohererence the superposition cloud becomes a local define particle then. Without decoherence, mere statistics cant wash out the probabalistic, wave like behaviour if quantum fields." Classical mechanics is NOT strongly emergent out of quantum mechanics. It is in fact not difficult to precisely describe the way in which classical mechanics arises. This depends on the formalism of QM one wishes to use. The easiest way to see it is using the path integral formalism. In the path integral formalism, what you do is say that each particle takes on each and every path from points A to B, each with different weights that are proportional to e^iS/hbar, where S is just the action and hbar is the reduced Planck constant. S >> hbar characterizes the regime of classical physics. When this is the case, e^iS/hbar oscillates very fast as you perturb the path of the particle, and so for the only real contribution to the sum come from paths that are very close to the stationary path of S. This is the principle of stationary action of classical physics. "And note that the discovery of strong and radical emergence will not be a lose for sceince." If the theorem I cite is correct, it does. "Indeterminenism is though to be problematic and "messing up our science" but it explained how the sun uses quantum tunneling for fusion. Without quantum tunneling and other indeterminenistic events the sun couldn't fuse, therefore not capable of being a main sequence star, therefore not capable of making life possible as we know it, therefore no reductionalists could exist and argue stupid stuff. So counterintuitive doesn't means a problem, it just means some foolish "scientists" are in a hurry to claim "we solved everything, we have TOE, we are masters of existence", arrogant is the kindest word I can formulate right now for this..." Oh yes, the foolish physicists who cannot do physics. How terrible! The difference is, there is no strong argument against indeterminism like there is against strong emergence. Also, this is a complete strawman because nobody has claimed we have a theory of everything. You should put more effort into understanding what is being said. These are the kindest words I can direct to you.
@@randomblueguyYou didn't even explain why classical physics are weakly emergent from quantum. I asked you straight up about decohererence. From nonlocality to locality and waveparticle duality. If you believe theres no problem here then congratulations, you either need a nobel price for the collapse problem, or you are a psychopath. You didn't formulate any real argument only assume reductionalism is universal. Basically what any reductionalist would do sand say. And you can believe Consciousnes is reducable, it is not more than the sum, it is in the parts, its panphyhic.... Also by causaly closed i mean what deterministism is by definition! Consciousnes needs causal openness to begin exist as something non eternal. Under causal closure theres literally absolutely no room for new causal entities to join the "situation". This is what i meant, exept if you believe computers can be Conscious... Then i wasted time with the wrong person......
Strong emergence is perfectly obvious in the case of consciousness. Every time I wake up in the morning, strong emergence is proven true. Maybe even more dramatic is awaking from full anesthesia where the transition from unconscious to conscious is even more sudden. Caroll just can't see that brain activity involves RELATIONS that are completely abstract and not physical, but computational and/or semantic in nature (i.e. certain brain states correspond to objects or concepts based on evolutionary processes. These correspondences are NOT physical in themselves and are the source of MEANING, i.e. semantic content).
I can't find anything that remotely resembles a scientific theory of strong emergence. It all seems to be handwaving at this point. So, I would say that strong emergence proponents have a LOT of work to do. In the meantime, Steven Wolfram’s concept of Computational Irreducibility seems like a much more plausible and scientific explanation for why complex systems like the mind/brain can't be reduced to simpler laws. It's straightforward, compatible with reductionism, applies to countless kinds of systems other than mind/brains, and doesn't require the assumption of ill-defined "other natural laws and causal principles."
My response to >50% of the comments:
If you’re trying to provide evidential support for the core theory over a modified version of the core theory that doesn’t have the same constraints with respect to locality, you should appeal to evidence that we would expect on one hypothesis *but not the other.* The microphysical evidence cited counts as no evidence against a modified CT, since we’d expect the microphysical to behave in the same way regardless of which theory turns out to be true. How it’s supposed to work: “On Hypothesis 1, we’d expect to see x, while on Hypothesis 2, we’d expect ~x.” But in this case, both H1 and H2 predict x! It makes no sense to cite x as uniquely supporting H1 over H2.
I included the clip at 21:37 for a reason. Check out the full Mind Chat video for more detail: th-cam.com/users/livewlyKdirhOa4?si=06cc0axNrehDqOrG
This is trivially true for every hypothesis rigged to fit the data we already observed. The way I (charitably) construe many comments here is that they prefer CT to modified CT for non-evidential reasons
More substantively, every time a new domain of inquiry is shown to fit CT, that’s evidence for CT over modified CT. Because what you’re calling modified CT is not so much one theory, but a group of theories that require CT to be satisfied for a subset of already-explained observations, but allow for deviations from CT for any of the remaining unexplained observations. Every time a not yet explained observation is shown to fit with CT, the number of viable theories that form the set of modified CT theories shrinks…
@@mf_hume Yes, in another comment I made an analogy with the idea that Darwinian theory explains evolution of all new adaptations--it's not practically possible to determine the detailed history of every adaptive structure in every organism through history, so no matter how much new evidence comes in about history of specific adaptations fitting the Darwinian pattern of incremental adaptive improvements, one can always come up with a "God of the gaps" style theory tailored to particular adaptations where we don't have good knowledge of their history, saying that *those* adaptations were created all at once by a teleological force (this is basically the approach of many 'intelligent design' advocates with examples like the bacterial flagellum). In our theorizing about nature, in addition to the hypothetico-deductive model which just looks at whether existing evidence fits with various hypotheses, there has to be a role for something like an appeal to "elegance" or Occam's razor in weighing plausibility of different hypotheses. A good philosophical argument here is Michael Goodman's "grue paradox", where we are choosing between the hypothesis that emeralds will remain permanently green vs. the hypothesis that emeralds are "grue", where grue is defined as the property of being observabley green before a certain future date (say 2034), and blue afterwards. Observations so far are consistent with both hypotheses, but presumably that doesn't mean they are equally plausible scientifically.
The role of "elegance" also relates to Carroll's point about what a radical change it would be to make local behavior of particles dependent on non-local information about the larger configuration they're a part of -- Emerson Green sort of scoffs at this in the video, but although we have seen examples of significant theory changes in physics (Newtonian gravity vs. general relativity, classical electromagnetism vs. quantum electrodynamics), the newer theories always have the older ones as some kind of smooth limit as opposed to having some sort of sharp dramatic change in applicability, and the basic symmetries of the older theory are always either preserved in the newer one or shown to be a limit of a different symmetry in the newer one (like the Lorentz-symmetry of relativity reducing to the Galilei symmetry of classical mechanics in the limit).
@@hypnosifl Now that you mention it, grue is a great illustration of my second point. Even if you don't want to make any strong claims about the theorical virtue of similicity/elegance/what-have-you, Emerson's "Modified CT" is pretty much analogous to the grue hypothesis without a specific time point. There are a bunch of grue_t hypotheses that specify a specific t as the point after which emeralds are blue. Every time period t' we don't observe a blue emerald is evidence for the green hypothesis over and above the entire class of grue hypotheses, because one of their members grue_t' has been ruled out
Usually I like videos on this channel and I did like this one but neither Emerson nor Goff seem to get Carrol’s argument at all. There are multiple sources of confusion here. 1. It is actually crucial that the theory used by Carrol is the core theory which includes QFT and NOT say Quantum Loop Gravity. Why? Because of the point about domains of applicability. The core theory uses the concept of a cut-off energy which means the highest energy it is applicable within. So we get at some short distance= high energy and say, we do not care what happens inside because it will ONLY appear as a change of parameters of the core theory. This means that the core theory will be literally wrong if it is possible in principle for something at higher energy or shorter length scale to have any effect that changes it beyond a change in parameters. For strong emergence to be true, exactly this banned change MUST happen. The evidence from particle accelerators is only used to fix the parameters of the core theory in the argument. It is actually really really hard to get this point without knowing the math of QFT at least in an elementary level. So the example using energy is not even relevant or related and the example Chalmers gives is not related because in both cases we did not have a predefined domain of applicability tied with the predictions of the theory. 2. The idea that strong emergence can be combined with the core theory “it is just a modification” again misses the whole point. This is clear in the part of what Goff and you take to be a concession from Carroll. He did not concede even a nanometer here 😂 once you take into account the rest of the quote about the radical change required. The main point is that QFT is not the kind of theory that can be modified slightly to account for localized strong emergence. In that it is different than every other theory of physics we had before it. So, the main point of the argument is that if you accept the core theory YOU MUST accept its domain of applicability because it is a part of the theory. It is not possible to have the same parameters that successfully predict every experiment we had (everywhere we tested not only in particle accelerators) while adding new laws even if they apply in specific states (I.e. in brains say). Actually, it is exactly because these new laws are localized that they cannot play well with the core theory because they will make the cutoff energy different which will mean that the parameters must be different GLOBALLY and this MUST affect experiments in particle accelerators. Put another way, it is because the theory defines and is dependent on its domain of applicability in its predictions that if this domain is not correct it will fail completely and cannot be salvaged. That is why, I think, Carroll insists that strong emergence entails major changes to the core theory. 3. Moreover, we can see here a clear difference in attitude. Carroll says that if you accept this specific theory that has all of these predictions that all came true, then you cannot have strong emergence. He states exactly why this is the case (unsuccessfully it seems because every quote you gave against it seems to miss the point completely) and accepts that the core theory may be false. On the other hand, proponents of strong emergence just say something like we will just take your theory as it is and add some stuff that we do not know to it and it will give us souls, magic lands and riches that never end. They did not advance a single strong emergent law that explains anything. They are not even trying. They have no definition of what kind of system enables these emergent laws (will half of a brain do?) or what is the form of these laws (they are not laws really, they are CAUSAL POWERS as if we have any idea what that is). 4. There is a very simp,e way to prove him wrong. Find a strongly emergent law. That is it. So when Goff claims that yes we have this internal evidence that consciousness is strongly emergent (he still needs that because his form of panpsychism does not explain human consciousness directly in terms of the consciousness of fundamental particles) so we should find a modification of the core theory that allows for that, he is right and Carroll’s response is also right. Go come up with a theory and let’s talk. As described earlier, this theory cannot be even similar to the core theory and cannot have the core theory as its
limit in every domai. It was tested on. 5. Another point that Carroll does not stress much (which is again unique to the core theory) is that all particles of a given field are identical and result from a Fourier transform. What this means is that their interactions with all other fields MUST be location independent.
I think your (and Goff's) read of Carroll as claiming that experiments in particle accelerators alone are sufficient to rule out strong emergence is a bit of a strawman, his paper about the core theory is just making the more narrow point that *if* we assume the basic framework of quantum field theory, in that case any deviations from the core model that are relevant to human-scale phenomenon would show up in such experiments. You are dismissive of Carroll's claim in the quote at 20:15 that something outside that quantum field theory framework would be a "radical departure", but I don't think you understand the physical issues involved here -- at 16:30 you give the impression that you think the only issue would be energy conservation, but Noether's theorem says a number of different conservation laws follow from basic symmetry principles like the idea that the equations of physics should be unchanged under translations of spatial coordinates, time coordinates, under rotations of spatial axes, etc.; symmetries don't fix every aspect of physics like individual particle masses but they do fix quite a lot including the basic framework of quantum field theory, the extent of how much of physics can be derived from basic symmetry principles can be found in the textbook "Physics from Symmetry" by Jakob Schwichtenberg, online at www.stat.ucla.edu/~ywu/ps.pdf (and since Carroll's quote at 20:15 specifically focuses on locality, also see Richard Feynman's comment quoted at twitter.com/curiouswavefn/status/1798409916761460781 that if energy is conserved at all, it must be conserved in a local way in any theory that doesn't violate the basic Lorentz-symmetry of relativity theory).
Although Carroll doesn't talk about this as much, a big part of the argument for reductionism is that at multiple levels of nature we have an ever-increasing range of partial reductions where previously unexplained phenomenon at that level are found to be explainable in terms of lower level parts and laws. For example, someone else in the comments mentioned quantum chemistry, and there is a particular flavor called "ab initio quantum chemistry" which derives various chemical phenomena (including collective behavior like the properties of water) from calculation/simulations that use only quantum physics, no empirical chemical laws. Likewise biologists are continually increasing their ability to understand the life functions of the cell in terms of networks of chemical interactions between various biomolecules (as well as mechanical forces on cells), and to explain more of complex processes like morphogenesis in the embryo and the functioning of simple animal brains in terms of interactions between cells, and so forth. All of these connections give good Occam's razor style reason to treat it as the default hypothesis that there are no ultimate limits on these kinds of reductionist explanations.
As an analogy, it surely isn't the case that we know the specific selective processes and detailed history behind the evolution of every single adaptive structure in every single organism. But if biologists have continued success in finding ever increasing number of examples where we learn more about the history of particular adaptations, and find it fits the Darwinian picture of a series of smaller modifications that provided some adaptive advantage (and with frequent cases of repurposing features that had evolved for some other reason, suggesting no long range 'plan'), that seems to again give a good Occam's razor style reason to take it as a default hypothesis that Darwinian processes of random variation and selection over time can explain the evolution of all new adaptations in life's history, unless some strong evidence is found to the contrary.
Your comments about Chalmers 18 minutes in may create a misleading impression about his own views, since the only type of strong emergence he is confident of is subjective conscious experience (and he thinks we need new psychophysical laws that give the connection between physical states and subjective experiences), he does not advocate for strong emergence at the level of physical behavior of conscious beings although he does not completely rule it out either. See his paper on strong and weak emergence at consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf , especially the discussion starting on the page whose first words are "derivable, the demon could deduce the high-level facts" (there are no page numbers in the pdf). In his 1996 book "The Conscious Mind" he seemed even less open to the possibility of top-down causation, saying many times that he was assuming the "causal closure of the physical", and on p. 50-51 he talked of a "ladder of explanation" similar to the ladder of partial reductions I described above, saying "If all goes well, biological phenomena may be explainable in terms of cellular phenomena, which are explainable in terms of biochemical phenomena, which are explainable in terms of chemical phenomena, which are explainable in terms of physical phenomena ... This ladder of explanation is little more than a pipe dream at the moment, but significant progress has been made. Given logical supervenience, along with the simplicity and autonomy of the lowest level, this sort of explanatory connection between the sciences ought to be possible in principle." Also note that in both his paper at consc.net/papers/qualia.html and his new book Reality+ he pretty much takes for granted that if one had a sufficiently detailed simulation of a human brain on a non-biological substrate, it would be behaviorally indistinguishable from the original.
I made this comment on the other quantum chemistry comment too but will say it here:
Seems pretty strange to appeal to quantum chemistry as a great success of reductionism when 1) it gets inaccurate exactly where we might expect on some type of strong emergent view, such as in strongly correlated systems or other interaction effects (e.g., dissociation curves), and 2) It makes so many modifications to what an exact physical QM calculation would be (Born-Oppenheimer approximation, non-interacting orbitals, pseudopotentials, etc.) that it's not super clear to me what the difference is supposed to be between "I'm doing physics but just making approximations" and "this is how we make good chemical predictions i.e., these are the chemical laws." I want to think about this more, as I admittedly wouldn't think e.g., explicitly fictitious non-interacting orbitals would be part of a chemical law, but on the other hand, I think there are good reasons to think that (the real kind of) chemical orbitals or other chemical facts like optical isomers are not reducible to quantum mechanics. There's also the fact that some of the more accurate pseudopotentials are those that do, in fact, empirically fit parameters and are not strictly ab initio. There is a large debate about whether or the extent to which we should use empirical or non-empirical potentials, or if we should hold to physical constraints on exchange-correlation functionals or not, in the community.
I wish more people were aware of this channel
I like this video. I think you harp on “particle accelerators” a little too much, as if that’s the only context in which modern physics has been tested. More importantly, I think it’s a little strange that the philosopher tells the physicist what counts as a “dramatic overthrow” at 21:10. Surely it’s the scientist’s job and expertise to tell us how important locality is, and it’s down to the scientist to adjudicate how extravagant an overthrow of science a theory is.
Emerson frames Sean's reductionism as the following:
P1) If we don't find spooky physics at the atomic level, then spooky physics doesn't exist.
P2) We don't find spooky physics at the atomic level.
C) Spooky physics doesn't exist.
*spooky physics is then framed as strong emergence
Emerson then claims that P1 is not expansive enough to rule out spooky physics, as it only rules it out at the atomic layer of analysis, and doesn't rule it out of higher layers of analysis.
Problem 1: This assumes that we only understand science at the atomic level. Emerson seems to think our only evidence is that which comes out of particle accelerators. This is a ridiculous claim. We have field after field of science and NEVER has it been observed that the higher levels of science contradict the lower. Psychology doesn't contradict neuroscience. Neuroscience doesn't contradict Biology. Biology doesn't contradict chemistry. Chemistry doesn't contradict physics.
If physics rules out spooky physics, then spooky physics is ruled out at every layer of science that maintains chains of consistency with physics.
This is to say, in all of our fields of science, never once has strong emergence been observed. We have enough science to have found examples of strong emergence by now if it existed. It doesn't exist anywhere in science. We are not epistemically limited to particle accelerators. Spooky physics (i.e. strong emergence) contradict everything we know about science in general. Either show us an example of strong emergence, or accept the reductive conclusion.
You want examples?????
Quantum hall effect
Superconductivity
superfluidity
Bose Einstein's condensate
fermionic condensate
Magnetic monopoles in spin ices
Solitons
Chemotaxis
Dna to chromatin
skyrmions
And I have 12 more but ill not write them all, search for yourself.
These are strong emergence. Theres even radical emergence, with entirely new Entities, Not properties: Quantum Decohererence and Gluon asymptomic freedom. I might delete this message afterwards just don't think sceince supports reductionalism, Not at all. Reductionalism is a good tool but a horrible, paradoxical theory of everything.
The claim that every layer of science maintains chains of consistency with physics and that this rules out "spooky physics" is a bold claim. It is also fallacious. A being consistent with B and B being consistent with C does not imply that A is consistent with C. If A is {p and q}, B is {q and s} and C is {s and not p}, then there is a chain of consistency that still involves an inconsistency.
@@Paradoxarn. Exactly. because quantum is nonlocal and in superposition doesn't mean the classical is also like this. Its called decohererence. Theres a relationship but not strict dictator (like strict deterministism and reductionalism). Without strong emergence you couldn't have your more local, stable quarks, without them no chemicals, hence no abiogenesis, hence no organs , hence no foolish reductionalists arguing everything is an illusion.
@@Paradoxarn. That's like saying "In logic, you can't chain your deductions together to derive second-order, third-order conclusions, etc." You absolutely can.
@@transcendentphilosophy That's not at all what I said. I'm saying that physics being consistent with chemistry and chemistry being consistent with biology doesn't rule out that physics is inconsistent with biology.
Even as someone who finds microreductionism plausible, convincing even, I would need to make a similar pushback.
The main issue I have is with the apparent arbitrariness of scale that dualism would imply (similar to how common decent is less arbitrary than baraminology as it doesn't specify a "here, but no further" point).
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"Quantum chemistry" (IE solving the Schroedinger eqn) is capable of predicting things as large as protein structures and other nanoscale macromolecules or the chemistry of molecules in surfaces. Even molecular dynamics which assumes a QM model to hold, can predict macroscopic properties. Not that that invalidates strong emergence, but it does suggest at the very least as far as everywhere ppl have applied QM, weak emergence has sufficed. Assuming each agreeable experiment can increase our prior on the theory... strong emergence seems like wishful thinking!
Dont take it personally but you are Wrong. The Schroedinger e. only states which electron clouds lead to more stable elements, and determining what we call element or "isotope". It doesnt predict at all the interaction of higher level interaction. This knowledge is already accessible to us, so even if strong emergence existed in a particular system, we already understand its higher level dynamics aproximatly. It doesnt predict abiogenesis, supercunductivity, bose einstein's condensate, entropy, thermodynamics, solitons, q hall effect, magnetic monopoles in spin glasses, phase transitions etc. And there are some examples that are definetly not strong, but Radical emergence. Decoherence and gluon formation from quark interaction. This of course doesnt violate the conservation of energy, theres no conservation of information, it can be created, destroyed, modified. You cant account for decoherence using weak emergence. You cant get from nonlocality to locality by the sum of the "parts". So even if we had strong emergence in front of our eyes, we may miss it due to our already higher level knowledge we assume fits perfectly with 0 information gap. You disect a human brain (still firing and working) into 50 pieces. The piece ill assume are conscious since weak emergence is theory of everything.. (what a reductionalist thinks). It is the sum of the parts litteraly. Theres no soul particles, no soul neurons therefore, consciousness is the sum of brain matter and activity. Panpsyhism achived..
@@haros2868 electron clouds have nothing to do with the stability of elements or isotopes. Using computers to solve the Schroedinger equation of electrons and nuclei to study macro molecules and their properties is definitely a way of predicting higher level "interactions" that agree with experiments. There are hundreds of journals of computational physics and chemistry that publish literally millions of articles on these topics.
@@tophersonX of course they do simulations of mass interactions using say ai, to avoid wasting human time. But note that they DONT only use the S. Equation. If they sorely put the subatomic level knowledge as code, they wouldn't result on the realistic results. They put as extra parameters the emergent properties. Without extra parameters you can't suddenly "born" or emerge say Consciousnes inside a computer , no Matt the complexity or resources. Theres a difference between simulating with extra knowledge in contrast with "straight up predicting reality inside a logic gate machine). Reality is not computational, determenistic, reducable.
@@haros2868 just search for papers of "ab initio electronic structure" you will find millions of articles that, contrary to your claim, solve the Schroedinger eqn (not necessarily using ai, but ai can help) for systems with up to tens of thousands of atoms. There are a million caveats with such efforts but no one in those fields goes around thinking the basic equations of relativistic and non relativistic quantum mechanics need modifying, because these simulations are typically backed by experimental measurements.
Seems pretty strange to appeal to quantum chemistry as a great success of reductionism when 1) it gets inaccurate exactly where we might expect on some type of strong emergent view, such as in strongly correlated systems or other interaction effects (e.g., dissociation curves), and 2) It makes so many modifications to what an exact physical QM calculation would be (Born-Oppenheimer approximation, non-interacting orbitals, pseudopotentials, etc.) that it's not super clear to me what the difference is supposed to be between "I'm doing physics but just making approximations" and "this is how we make good chemical predictions i.e., these are the chemical laws." I want to think about this more, as I admittedly wouldn't think e.g., explicitly fictitious non-interacting orbitals would be part of a chemical law, but on the other hand, I think there are good reasons to think that (the real kind of) chemical orbitals or other chemical facts like optical isomers are not reducible to quantum mechanics. There's also the fact that some of the more accurate pseudopotentials are those that do, in fact, empirically fit parameters and are not strictly ab initio. There is a large debate about whether or the extent to which we should use empirical or non-empirical potentials, or if we should hold to physical constraints on exchange-correlation functionals or not, in the community.
Your refutation of micro reductionism violates the core theory, that is you'll have to change the core theory to allow for a difference in behavior of fundamental particles in humans and particle accelerators. Carol is fine with that as long as you can provide a mathematical theory, as long as you can't provide that it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss your theory.
He is committed to naturalism. He is a brilliant physicist. We want somethings to be true. But we cannot get everything we want. Honestly I want somethings to be true like an all knowing , all powerful and compassionate god. When we read about the scientific achievements of this century we understand that the existence of such a god is highly improbable. These are some cruel facts. his arguments against reincarnation appears convincing to me. He has extreme views about somethings. We cannot know somethings. The more we think about these existential questions the more we feel depressed. Let us be kind to everyone till we are here on this planet.
What counts as "complex" or "higher-order" from the perspective of subatomic particles? What makes a human brain more complex than a rock, or more complex than an ecosystem, or more complex than a star or an ocean from the perspective of an atom? I'm struggling to understand WHY only weak emergence is a thing until very specific combo of arrangements of subatomic particles occurs and then something new and special pops out of the ether.
It is not just you. Humanity as a whole is very bad at physics. We struggle to understand many things, and our discoveries have been slow and come with a cost of sweat and tears. If strong emergence is real, we should expect to struggle to understand it, just as people struggled to understand General Relativity before it was explained by Einstein, and just as many people still struggle to understand it to this day.
@@Ansatz66 Clearly, we’re much better at physics than at neuroscience. So why not apply this argument to neuroscience instead?
@@randomblueguy : We should expect to struggle to understand neuroscience too.
@@Ansatz66 My point is. Why wouldn’t you modify/limit/restrict the much worse understood theory (being neuroscience) rather than modifying the most well-understood theory throughout human history?
Do rocks have neurons? Okay then genius lol. What sophistry!
Great video (and I agree with many criticisms you make) but I think it misses a couple of crucial points.
You made a big emphasis (and Goff does this as well, a lot) on particle accelerator experiments. But as Carroll has told Goff directly many times, it is not that we assume that particle accelerators encode all that could happen in the world, but that the results of particle accelerators (and MANY other things) *offer enormous support* (as powerful support as can be) to a theory/theoretical framework that a) has explicit energy cutoffs, that is, domains of applicability, and b) has locality as one of its core properties. It is the theory that the experiments support, not the experiments "themselves".
Also, Carroll very frequently has stated this as a dilemma (aimed specifically at panpsychism, but it encapsulates the same argument): either the emergence proposed does not change the core theory, in which case why should we care, or it does change the core theory, in which case the modification to the core theory must be proposed and defended.
His point about "dramatic changes" in the theory is, I think, strawmanned in the video, because he clearly means that whatever modifications must be made, they are not simply changing one parameter from being, say, 2.3 to 2.4 or something like that. Locality and the energy cutoffs are inextricably tied to the theory as a whole. It would allegedly be a change as big as going from Newtonian gravity to general relativity. But even if you think that is an exaggeration, it is still an extremely substantial change to rewrite the core theory to make it nonlocal or to change the energy cutoffs. Laughing off these points as "changes are okay but not dramatic changes", "how dramatic is a dramatic change" seems like a semantic game.
Carroll also makes this point in a somewhat satirical manner, when he says stuff like "what do you trust more some random intuition or the entirety of physics". But beyond the satire I think he makes an important point. From a Bayesian approach, we should have extraordinarily high credence on a theory that has been tested to the extent that the core theory has. This theory has locality and energy cutoffs ingrained in it, so we also should have extremely high credence in those (they are literally entailments of the theory). So until someone puts forward a theory with nonlocality or different energy cutoffs with any level of verification close to the core theory, or properly modify the core theory (which would be the same), "as good Bayesians" we should prefer the core theory.
Also as a minor technicality, using the term "emergence" as kind of synonymous with reductionism is extremely common in social sciences and philosophy (e.g., Latin American philosophy, scientific philosophy, etc.). I think it is only anglophone analytic metaphysicians that use "emergence" to mean strong emergence, so if anything the "non-standard use of the term" is on the anglophone analytic metaphysics side
That is all very interesting, but it doesn't refute Panpsychism, Dualism or Strong emergentism. Certainly the proponents of such positions should defend their views, but the evidence for the core theory neither rules them out, nor makes them less likely to be true.
As for how dramatic a change to the core theory that is required to explain consciousness must be, the difference between newtonian gravity and general relativity in the context of everyday physics is extremely subtle. Calling those differences dramatic seems like a semantic game.
“It would allegedly be a change as big as going from Newtonian gravity to GR.”
No. It is much worse. QFT becomes an incomprehensible mess without locality. GR is a very beautiful and very sensible theory. The point you raise about how the emphasis should be put on theories that the experiments support, rather than just the experiments, is spot-on. I implicitly raise a similar point in my reply to the video. It’s good that you made it explicit.
@@Paradoxarn. Newtonian gravity and GR are extraordinarily different theories, although they produce similar results in some restricted contexts. My point is analogous: if you want to remove locality or energy cutoffs from the core theory, obviously "in everyday physics" or particle accelerators the consequences would be small, but the *changes to the theory* must be enormous. That is Carroll's point and the justification for preferring the core theory.
As for the first point, the video is titled "strong emergence vs the core theory", so I focus on the strong emergence part (although it includes strong emergentist flavors of panpsychism).
Strong emergence seems to imply that the core theory is wrong, as least regarding to locality or the energy cutoffs. Therefore, if we have incredibly strong evidence in favor of the core theory, that also is incredibly strong evidence *against* theories that contradict the core theory.
As stated above, given that strong emergentism entails nonlocality (Goff seems to agree with this, not sure if Emerson does), and the core theory entails locality, then by definition strong emergentism contradicts the core theory, and all the evidence in favor of the core theory is equally strong evidence against strong emergentism
@@Paradoxarn. What is your falsification criteria for dualism then? Oh you don't have one? Then it's not a legitimate idea that NEEDS to be refuted. It's just something people made up without evidence.
@@rodrigoferrer1803 Why care about the magnitude of the change? The change will not affect predictions related to particle collider experiments and other non-relevants experiments/observations. Why care about locality? The locality is only found in particle collider experiments etc. Why care about energy cutoffs? The energy cutoffs are only found in particle collider experiments etc. Also, why would all the evidence in favor of the core theory be evidence against strong emergentism, given that strong emergentism does not contradict the results of particle collider experiments etc?
very well explained.
SC: "reality is reality. reality is not some mathematical thing we invented. reality is sui generis."
SC said this in a recent appearance at robinson erhardt's podcast. this to me is clearly a quietist or at least non-physicalist position. he pushes back against simplistic entity realism, ie. it is far from obvious that anything is 'made of' or that reality is 'identical to' the singular, continuous universal wavefunction -- of which quantum fields are a convenient way of talking about. this is a conclusion that james ladyman et al. also endorse in 'every thing must go: naturalized metaphysics'. talking about new special brain *physics,* presumes this implausible decomposable 'brain is made of/identical to configuration of little things' entity realism. new physics will be entirely the same that we have now -- cue the it's just *structure* -- but what *breathes fire into the equations -- what is the structure's intrinsic nature?* woes... reality is sui generis. it's not 'made of' anything, but it is patterned and it just is as it is. science is about intersubjectively accessible patterns in data.
some patterns (pattern = any relation among data) carry information about other patterns, some (tentatively) do not -- these are the extra-representational patterns of fundamental physics that aren't explained by/reducible to other patterns. mathematical objects appear as arguments in formulae. they don't have 'essential properties or natures' -- mysterious concepts dreamt up by philosophers. reality isn't a 'mereological sum' of whatever mathematical objects our most predictive and counterfactual-supporting theories feature.
the main problems with 'souls' and strong emergence and whatever conjectured spooky existents, is that they're unintelligible precisely because they are non-mechanistic non-explanations, and people use these words in a myriad of differing, nonconsistent ways. it's just word games, vibes, differences that don't make a difference.
It seems to me that strong emergence goes against everything we've ever learned in science. Thus far, reductionism has not only had massive success, but works at every level. We can explain sociology in terms of psychology. We can explain psychology in terms of biology. We can explain biology in terms of biochemistry. We can explain biochemistry in terms of atomic theory. It's true that not all of these explanations are yet complete, but nowhere have we actually run into any case so far where weak emergence has failed, nor have we found any cases where strong emergence has succeeded. Meanwhile, we can take what happens in particle accelerators and, using our theories of weak emergence, predict a vast array of phenomena with so much precision that we can build the modern internet, develop new drugs, and create materials with properties so incredible our ancestors would have thought them magic. Why would we expect this pattern to be broken at some level?
when you say “explain in terms of” , what your doing is describing it and Not Explaining it! It’s an error to confuse the both. To take an example the laws of physics are not a description of physical reality it’s an explanation of How physical phenomena comes to being. Description would be like constitution of things and Explanation would be How that constitution came to be.
It’s an empiricist mistake. Similarly explanation and prediction are very different things.
One can’t even begin predict mathematical theorems, some of which are used in those experiments itself, let alone all the other stuff you were saying.
Ill break your childish TOE ladder (theory of everything). Sociology is perhaps the weakest emergece of all the levels. You cant account pain, emotions, CONSCIOUSNESS, subjectively based on neuroscience, only found unexplainable correlates. Abiogenesis isn't explained by inanimate chemical rules. Classical physics aren't explained truly by quantum physics (since decohererence breaks superposition, hence entirely new local rules). Mathematics doesn't inherently explain qm.
At this point someone like me with enough qm knowledge can even "break down" gravity itself! Interaction of quarks with higgs field (what gives mass to particles). Is gravity an Illusion??? Of course not
It is clear that Carroll has over-reached and been philosophically careless with his excessively bold claims, but there is still something important at the core of what Carroll is trying to express. We shouldn't presume that studying the microscopic can exhaustively reveal everything we might want to know about the macroscopic, but on the other hand our failure to find any evidence at all for certain dubious macroscopic ideas by studying the microscopic should be a red flag. _A priori_ it could have been that souls might leave some evidence at the microscopic level, yet in every way we are capable of searching for evidence of souls, we fail to find that evidence. That does not mean there is no evidence for souls in places we are not yet capable of searching, but it's not good sign for souls being real. Where did people even get the idea of souls without evidence? It seems the answer can only be that people dreamed up the idea as a fantasy.
Maybe god created the world with apparent causal closure for the same reason he buried dinosaur bones in the ground to create apparent age
At that point, you might as well believe in Leibnitz's Monadology, where all causality is just "apparent", all entities in the world are actually independently pre-programmed by God.
It is useless to consider the origin and nature of human "consciousness" without first defining it specifically and precisely.
If one is going to refer to consciousness, one must have a good conceptual model of it.
This is also true of free will.
I see that there are statements but I do not see the corresponding explanations.
Does the strong emergence create consciousness? How is that emergence supposed to create something?
If the idea is that the soul exists, this is not the result of strong emergence. Or is it?
Is free will the result of strong emergence or is it a characteristic of an entity of a different nature?
Are you still a panpsychic, Emerson? I am personally struggling to decide between all these theories. I do not really find any of the arguments against reductive physicalism compelling, so I am not sure if we should postulate property dualism, or neutral monism. Substance dualism is pretty much out of the question for me. Panpsychism seems plausible, but is it really a necessary move? I am not sure...
???? Carol should be labeled panpsihist, since he says no new properties or entities can emerge (strong emergence) and everything is the sum of the parts (reductionalism). If we accept Consciousnes exists, and human brains have it, then also the parts must have some proto comsciousnesses (neurons) and in turn atoms. Reductionalism leads to panphysism not strong Emergence. I don't know the other guy but carol is clearly a reductionalist, so comsciousnesses either is nonexistent (eliminatism) or it is real but reducable (panphysism).
Thats why strong emergence is the exit from this paradoxical dance
@@haros2868 What if consciousness is physical and not reducible to other physical things?
@@Nexus-jg7ev thats exactly what im saying bro. Strong emergence or non reductive materialism is not dualism (ghost). It is physical but not determenistic or reducable
Reductionism is the conceptual basis on which science works. Like a clock is made of gears, and gears are made of atoms, the entire predictive power of science is based on the idea of finding the fundamental building blocks then extrapolating from there. A departure from this line of thinking to say that causation can occur spontaneously at levels higher than the smallest component is basically saying that magic exists. And it runs into corresponding theoretical challenges like, does it actually supplement the core model? How can we say that a contradiction doesn’t occur between the mechanist movements of the microscopic components and the causation that emerges simultaneously, spontaneously and independently from the macroscopic structure.
Strong emergence envisions a radically different conception of causation than the one we intuitively expect and the one that is standardly described in science. I would even go further and say that this conception of causation is completely incoherent to even think about. How can we possibly imagine scientific laws without reductionism? What’s the origin of the law? What gives it power? Is it even possible to describe irreducible laws mathematically? How do we know that the laws will be consistent? How could we know why irreducible laws are the way they are if there is no smaller component shape that we can describe?
I broadly agree with the statement that science rests on reductionism, but we ought to be intellectually humble enough to seek models that explain all of the phenomena in the world. Let's assume materialism and therefore epiphenomenalism is true. Which known physical law gives rise to perception and the illusion of mental causation? Why ought we have this illusion, unless effects on the mental have some evolutionary purpose? These are valid questions that can't be so easily handwaved away because we don't care for the implications of the answers.
@@LateMarch3 these questions are very easily answered with a reductionist model. Epiphenominalism with property duelism makes perfect sense. I see no reason to believe that consciousness evolved, it’s just something that happened metaphysically along with but separate from evolution. Psychophysical harmony is no mystery under property duelism. What natural laws give rise to qualia? Property duelism is a coherent answer to that because it prioritises matter. But suggesting some sort of back and forth in causation makes everything over determined and impossible to parse the cause and effects of things in a consistent and rigorous manner.
@@idanzigm Sorry, I am just not convinced that property dualism answers them at all, as it merely seems to push the problem of psychophysical harmony into a semantically different category. I understand the appeal of its simplicity, of course, but the qualitative poverty of property dualism with regard to this question is a view shared by most philosophers of mind and even many naturalists--I would caution against handwaving their arguments as "very easily" explained. Why should the experience of pain be a "metaphysical" property of heat striking a neuron? Why should perception (and even a potential illusion of mental causation) accompany any of the workings of a material brain? Property dualism here would contradict basic evolutionary theory, which says that neurons cause the feeling of pain because the feeling of pain aids our fitness--not that the neurons just "metaphysically happen" (in your words) to also have the property of a correlating mental state. It seems too mystical to me. Note that these questions persist even if we reject mental causation and embrace epiphenomenalism. I envy your certainty, but once you're talking about metaphysical happenings that I am supposed to take on faith, it doesn't seem as neatly reductionist to me.
@@LateMarch3 I may be wrong, but I don’t think that evolution argues that we evolved the feeling of pain to survive. That feels like a theory that we used to have that there was a conscious work bench and there was a local area of the brain that was conscious. Now we know that consciousness permeates the entire brain and my impression was that there is no separate part of the brain that “causes consciousness” that phrasing assumes strong emergence and begs the question. Also evolutionary theory is a reductionist theory, so there is no way it supports strong emergence.
The fact that neural states superimpose on mental states is mystical, but granting that mystical-ness extra powers makes the claim less credible. And if you’re going go to do that you have to say what it is about being in a complex organism that enables it to break physics as we know it? What is it about that? What is it about being in a brain that’s different from being in a particle collider? Name the relevant difference. Because all of the things we can measure for it wouldn’t make a difference. I.e. more particles more complex field equations ect.
We don’t need to agree on anything other than. “You are proposing a new category of law” And I say that because like I said above 👆🏼 it don’t think non-reductionist laws can be represented with math, shown to be non-contradictory with reductionist laws and theories, or have a basis for being consistent and unchanging. All things that are similar with magic. This is my only claim and the only thing that I will argue about. It is radical, it is a different type of natural law, and a different conception of naturalism. You can’t hand wave that away.
I guess the other thing I will argue about it there are no compelling enough reasons so entertain the possibility of these sorts of laws. Evolution is not a reason it’s a reductionist theory, off the table. Phenomenal powers (which in a monist sort of sense i think is fine if a bit confused imo, just cuz as a property duelist I’m very similar to a monist), also doesn’t support such a dramatic stance as to entertain strong emergence, I fail to see anything that could.
@@idanzigm epiphenomenalism makes perfect sense.... How many stupidity pills you got?? First, epiphenomenalism is NOT property dualism, thats strong emergence, epiph is Substance dualism! It violates the conservation of energy. Then ,how the hell something that exists cant cause anything??? Did its causal efficacy lost to the oblivion??? And finally, how comsciousnesses can interact with information like memories, emotions stimuli etc?? Epiphenomenoalism is the stupidest, we would be disembodied minds in the void. Because when someone is aware of something it means interaction! From both sides. If one is a useless ghost then how the hell can it interact and hemce have the qualia of vision???
Carroll is right.
So you're not an indeterminist, fundamentally speaking, right?
Also, you're a non-physicalist wrt consciousness only to the extent that you hold that everything that is, as of now, putatively physical ('physical' in the broad sense, not necessarily in the philosophy of mind sense) is not sufficient to underlie consciousness, but that doesn't mean that you also simultaneously hold that whatever actually happens to underlie consciousness is necessarily akin to something that is, as of now, already putatively non-physical ('non-physical' in the broad sense, not necessarily in the philosophy of mind sense), right?
What Carroll should really say is that the *objectively verifiable elements of experience* (the "physical") are fully understood at the everyday level. However, objectively verifiable elements of experience are, by definition, a subset of our total experienced reality. Carroll, then, is suggesting that all of reality stems from this subset of experience, including all other (qualic) experience.
This is clearly a matter of faith on his part, assuming that objectivity points to a reality "out there" *beyond* experience, rather than simply describing common elements *of* experience.
Whenever I hear the word dualism I wonder what their answer to the princess Elisabeth’s question is good enough for them to still posit dualism as an actual model of anything 💀
Here is the answer: Princess Elisabeth relied on a Cartesian model of physics, which says that ALL physical effects involve pushing. We know this isn't true because of gravity, magnetism, electromagnetism etc., so her argument is undermined.
@@Nitroade24 Just because her concept of "pushing" is out of date, doesn’t mean that interaction problem is undermined.
@@quantenmoi You can just say that different substances can interact.
19:55 wow that’s a massive concession, actually. It seems to me that Carroll claiming that everything relevant to the brain is explained by the known laws of physics is false on its face if only because the known laws of physics don’t predict first-person experience or perception. Even if he holds that the causal power of mental states is illusory, he’s then become a strong emergentist with regard to illusions! Which known law of physics produces the illusion of will?
You should put more effort into understanding views you don't agree with. The claim is not that everything relevant to the brain is *explained* by the known laws of physics, the claim is that the laws of physics with which one could *in principle* (and which is in practice impossible) make all predictions related to brain activities are all known.
@@randomblueguy My apologies, I think I didn't word this clearly enough. "Is explained" was intended to mean "could in principle be explained" by the known laws of physics, as you state. That was precisely the claim to which I was responding. To expound, my point is that even if we accept that mental causation is illusory and only physical things have causal power, in principle the laws of physics stipulated here would not explain that illusion because the notation being used to offer that "in principle" answer (the Core Theory equation) is insufficient. This is true by its own definition: the equations mathematically predict everything about the movement of particles. They predict nothing with respect to perception, illusion, feeling. That's not to say they couldn't, only that they don't. If one wants to pin perception-illusion to one or more of these laws, one needs to add something to the Core Theory model.
@@LateMarch3 This isn't the claim either. Let's ignore consciousness for a moment. Microscopic theories do in principle explain the solidity of a table even though the word "table" never appears in a physical theory, and no specific predictions about "tables" are ever made in a microscopic theory. The point is that, the laws of physics are enough to predict the locations (let's assume classical physics for a moment) of all the particles of the system at each moment of time. This encompasses all the information about a physical system one would ever need to know. Speaking of biological systems, of tables, and of consciousness is only a useful construct since we never have access to all the information about physical systems, and instead resort to shortcuts.
EDIT: To be super clear, let me state what the claim isn't too.
It could be the case that consciousness affects the behavior of particles in some fashion unaccounted for by the current laws of physics. This would mean that our current laws of physics do not correctly predict the locations of each particle of a system at each moment of time. The claim is nothing more and nothing less than the negation of this scenario.
@@randomblueguy Maybe we don't disagree as much as you think, but happy to dig in more. Let us set mental causation or lack thereof aside for the moment. Let's assume that the Core Theory is right and every single particle is predictable at any given moment. The problem of perception and our illusion of free will still wouldn't be accounted for by the laws outlined here. Consciousness itself is clearly different than the "useful constructs" the conscious mind uses to understand groupings of microscopic particles like tables and cups, as the latter are the contents of experience and the former is experience itself. Again, I am willing to entertain the idea that perception is governed by these laws, but then we would have to posit a means by which it is governed. If we want to say perception itself is a false linguistic construct, we are advocating for eliminativism, for which I don't think Carroll advocates.
@@LateMarch3 "I am willing to entertain the idea that perception is governed by these laws, but then we would have to posit a means by which it is governed."
Most reductionists would say that perception is a process that takes place within the vastly complicated network of cells within the brain, by way of the many intricate signals that they send between each other. It is much akin to how computers process data by sending electrical signals through circuits, but instead of being designed for perfectly reliable calculations, brains are biologically evolved to be adapted for navigating the world and participating in social interactions. This ability to navigate the world is what we call "perception," and the signals that neurons send to each other are governed by the physical laws that Carroll was talking about.
particles behaving differently doesn't give you a singular conscious being. instead, the particles would have to disappear and a huge conscious being particle would have to take their place. that's not philip goff's belief, is it? does he think he's a collection of particles?
Emerson, I think you're conceding way too much to the physicalists. Strongly emergent phenomena can have causal effects not just at larger scales, but down at the micro scales as well: e.g. it's exceedingly unlikely that two fundamental particles would spontaneously accelerate to near speed of light along a perfectly elliptical orbit near Geneva (LHC) and collide with each other head on. This is rather caused by the human mind(s) and is only explained by the fact that those minds wanted to test particular theories. No fundamental physical law would be able to explain any of this.
Sean is an Empiricist so it’s understandable why he holds such a mistaken position.
First, let us examine the statement:
"Strong emergence only speaks of the behavior of large accumulations of particles, therefore experiments done with a 'few' particles can never refute it."
On the face of it, this statement is of course correct. However, so is the statement:
"Here on Earth, and before 1870, protons did not exist. Experiments done now can never refute this. Note that looking at distant stars will not do you any good either, since I'm restricting my claim to what goes on here on Earth."
Both statements should strike one, prima facie, as being just silly. From the perspective of a subatomic particle, there is nothing special about the year 1870, or about complex systems. There's more to it than just physical intuition however. There's a fairly convincing argument that one can find best fleshed put in the first volume of Weinberg which very loosely speaking says that given that certain assumptions (lorentz invariance, analyticity, unitarity, and locality) hold ON the regime of low-energy physics, any self-consistent theory of physics must reduce to an effective field theory for low-energies.
We know the hypothesis of the folk theorem holds. Again, all that's necessary is that these features of the theory hold for the regimes which we have already tested, which any theory consistent with our data must encompass. Given this, there is a very real sense in which what strong emergentists are trying to do is just doing away with physics. That is, saying that there's no self-consistent sensible theory that describes the behavior of particles. For if otherwise, it would automatically describe the behavior of particles not only in particle accelerators, but also in human brains. It is possible that the theorem is actually false. I don't know of a formal proof of it, though the standard argument is found in the first volume of Weinberg (roughly around the first half of the book).
Whoa buddy you want me to read a physics book? I came to a priori philosophy because I lack the skills required to do that stuff...
You know, revolution in physics supports strong emergence. Revolution is also conceptual, for example finding out that something previously thought nonexistent, like quantum superposition. Theres gap in sceince that reductionalists just "assume" it is merely the sum of the parts. Even if strong emergence was in front of our face we first begin with macro knowledge and then understand micro, usually. We already had knowledge about viscosity. To simulate in a computer water, you not only need to put the atomic level rules but also additional parameters for the viscosity. Inside a determinstic simulation there wont suddenly emerge a Consciousnes, inside a computer, because by definition, its logic gates, causaly closed. Many examples of strong emergence might have been labelled as "laws" with scientists names. I dont see how determenistic, discrit, billard balls could possibly create a Consciousnes, even with googol balls in Graham number of years. And lets dont forget quantum decohererence, the classical mechanics strongly emergence , after decohererence the superposition cloud becomes a local define particle then. Without decoherence, mere statistics cant wash out the probabalistic, wave like behaviour if quantum fields.
And note that the discovery of strong and radical emergence will not be a lose for sceince. Indeterminenism is though to be problematic and "messing up our science" but it explained how the sun uses quantum tunneling for fusion. Without quantum tunneling and other indeterminenistic events the sun couldn't fuse, therefore not capable of being a main sequence star, therefore not capable of making life possible as we know it, therefore no reductionalists could exist and argue stupid stuff. So counterintuitive doesn't means a problem, it just means some foolish "scientists" are in a hurry to claim "we solved everything, we have TOE, we are masters of existence", arrogant is the kindest word I can formulate right now for this...
@@haros2868 There's a lot to unpack here.
"You know, revolution in physics supports strong emergence. Revolution is also conceptual, for example finding out that something previously thought nonexistent, like quantum superposition."
I am not fully sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that we should expect there to be a revolution in the way we do physics such that strong emergence would be allowed/necessary? Why should we expect this? Also note that revolutions never overturn data. If the folk theorem of Weinberg actually holds, there seems to be no way of weaseling out of this. You could try to actually formulate an effective field theory that is highly non-local such that it could *potentially allow for* strong emergence to occur. I don't think this is possible, and I'd love to see someone try.
"Theres gap in sceince that reductionalists just "assume" it is merely the sum of the parts. Even if strong emergence was in front of our face we first begin with macro knowledge and then understand micro, usually."
It is true that there are gaps in our knowledge. Of course there are, and nobody claimed otherwise. There is no clear fully fledged out fully understood way to get organic chemistry out of particle physics. But this is not the point. It never has been. The point is that, in principle, whatever goes on in the regime of organic chemistry better not violate the predictions of our best microscopic theories. It is also true that we often stumble upon the macroscopic theory before the microscopic one. This was the case with thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. I don't see how this is in conflict with what I claim.
"To simulate in a computer water, you not only need to put the atomic level rules but also additional parameters for the viscosity."
I haven't looked into this but I am fairly skeptical of the claim. It could be the case that you put in the additional parameters just so that the computations become much more feasible (after all, analytically solving the Schrodinger equation even for a helium atom is impossible), but I don't quite believe that one in principle *needs* any additional parameters. If you wish to convince me otherwise, I'd need some references.
"Inside a determinstic simulation there wont suddenly emerge a Consciousnes, inside a computer, because by definition, its logic gates, causaly closed."
I don't see how that follows, or what exactly you mean by causally closed.
"I dont see how determenistic, discrit, billard balls could possibly create a Consciousnes, even with googol balls in Graham number of years. "
This seems to be an argument from incredulity.
"And lets dont forget quantum decohererence, the classical mechanics strongly emergence , after decohererence the superposition cloud becomes a local define particle then. Without decoherence, mere statistics cant wash out the probabalistic, wave like behaviour if quantum fields."
Classical mechanics is NOT strongly emergent out of quantum mechanics. It is in fact not difficult to precisely describe the way in which classical mechanics arises. This depends on the formalism of QM one wishes to use. The easiest way to see it is using the path integral formalism. In the path integral formalism, what you do is say that each particle takes on each and every path from points A to B, each with different weights that are proportional to e^iS/hbar, where S is just the action and hbar is the reduced Planck constant. S >> hbar characterizes the regime of classical physics. When this is the case, e^iS/hbar oscillates very fast as you perturb the path of the particle, and so for the only real contribution to the sum come from paths that are very close to the stationary path of S. This is the principle of stationary action of classical physics.
"And note that the discovery of strong and radical emergence will not be a lose for sceince."
If the theorem I cite is correct, it does.
"Indeterminenism is though to be problematic and "messing up our science" but it explained how the sun uses quantum tunneling for fusion. Without quantum tunneling and other indeterminenistic events the sun couldn't fuse, therefore not capable of being a main sequence star, therefore not capable of making life possible as we know it, therefore no reductionalists could exist and argue stupid stuff. So counterintuitive doesn't means a problem, it just means some foolish "scientists" are in a hurry to claim "we solved everything, we have TOE, we are masters of existence", arrogant is the kindest word I can formulate right now for this..."
Oh yes, the foolish physicists who cannot do physics. How terrible! The difference is, there is no strong argument against indeterminism like there is against strong emergence. Also, this is a complete strawman because nobody has claimed we have a theory of everything. You should put more effort into understanding what is being said. These are the kindest words I can direct to you.
@@mf_hume Hey there! Long time no see!
@@randomblueguyYou didn't even explain why classical physics are weakly emergent from quantum. I asked you straight up about decohererence. From nonlocality to locality and waveparticle duality. If you believe theres no problem here then congratulations, you either need a nobel price for the collapse problem, or you are a psychopath. You didn't formulate any real argument only assume reductionalism is universal. Basically what any reductionalist would do sand say. And you can believe Consciousnes is reducable, it is not more than the sum, it is in the parts, its panphyhic....
Also by causaly closed i mean what deterministism is by definition! Consciousnes needs causal openness to begin exist as something non eternal. Under causal closure theres literally absolutely no room for new causal entities to join the "situation". This is what i meant, exept if you believe computers can be Conscious... Then i wasted time with the wrong person......
Strong emergence is perfectly obvious in the case of consciousness. Every time I wake up in the morning, strong emergence is proven true. Maybe even more dramatic is awaking from full anesthesia where the transition from unconscious to conscious is even more sudden. Caroll just can't see that brain activity involves RELATIONS that are completely abstract and not physical, but computational and/or semantic in nature (i.e. certain brain states correspond to objects or concepts based on evolutionary processes. These correspondences are NOT physical in themselves and are the source of MEANING, i.e. semantic content).
I can't find anything that remotely resembles a scientific theory of strong emergence. It all seems to be handwaving at this point. So, I would say that strong emergence proponents have a LOT of work to do.
In the meantime, Steven Wolfram’s concept of Computational Irreducibility seems like a much more plausible and scientific explanation for why complex systems like the mind/brain can't be reduced to simpler laws. It's straightforward, compatible with reductionism, applies to countless kinds of systems other than mind/brains, and doesn't require the assumption of ill-defined "other natural laws and causal principles."
Getting more and more crypto-Mormon by the day 😉.
Matter does not produce consciousness. Simple as that.