You're easily impressed with hypothesis.

@@grosbeak6130 Please, keep the condescension for your mother.

@@jkjkhoyolula @Steven

Jack, that's quality. We are in,... ...increased acceleration, of just about everything,... Hm, an open mind is essential, .... ..., not to everything, but to all possibles, that will see the human race through this.

Wait, and they are pushing against the doors, until they find, what most kno about to on degree or another, until 'they discover', telepathy, ESP, ... ...in this realm, subconscious communication of thoughts, etc, their is no need for the www, or, even Chat GPT, because, subconsciously, unconsciously, they already exist,.... ..., I think

And how is a swim bladder any different than any other ecological niche?

@@HyzersGR: Yeah, exactly

No

I take it in this case he’s saying emergence is the unpredictable appearance of something that could not have been derived with perfect knowledge of initial conditions. There’s a set of all possible genetic mutations, and we couldn’t ever hope to list them all. And whether one could predict the development of a swim bladder, or especially something like consciousness, with Laplace’s demon is up for debate. I’m personally not convinced it would be possible, even in principle. But who knows. I’m sure the truth is stranger than any of us has yet envisioned

He means that many problems are not solvable algorithmically, but require a heuristic approach. Frankly it is a little odd that anyone finds this surprising!

@@brucepattie7565 but that heuristic approach doesn't guarantee the hypothesis that this doctor has and is so enamored by.

Yes... truth is one...

They are two different things. Think 1+1=2 v. Him plus her equals couple. You are right complex problems require "intuition" and this is a form of reason, but some problems are less complex and can be solved using simple, predicable steps.

Quality, Jonathan Gordon

+A More Perfect Logos Yeah I had the same thought

I guess you have to ask where those new sorts of description themselves come from.

+A More Perfect Logos What you're saying might not be even possible. The only way we can truly know what will happen next is if a computer scans everything that exists in the universe at the same time, at all present levels of complexity, and map models of all future levels of complexity that haven't even occurred yet. This is already a near-impossible task. But there are things which humans and our instruments cannot scan at all (such as things outside our dimension, uncertain things because of the quantum scale, things that lie on harsh places that warp or destroy the instrument which scans them, undiscovered things which we cannot train a computer to scan because we ourselves are blind to them, etc.), and these things add additional complexity which would render our computer model inaccurate.

+La Serpiente I agree that we can never have perfect knowledge of everything. However, we can still have meaningful data on the scales that are relevant to our purposes. We don't need to have god-like knowledge about things, only enough to get stuff done.

what if chaos is the system like a double pendulum

Amen

Not only that, but I don't think the bladder was even emergent in the strong sense: the laws of physics that govern the atoms and molecules in the ecosystem, given the initial conditions, determine the formation of the bladder. So, it's at most weak emergence, not strong emergence.

That's just the doctor's claim, there is yet much more research to be done before such a hypothesis is conclusive. A claim or an idea does not necessarily equal science and evidence.

This is a fascinating concept to consider. Thanks

An implication is not necessarily real. You're conflating implication with real science and real evidence. Simply put implication does not equal scientific evidence. Until there's real science along with real evidence it's just poetry and hypothesis.

@@grosbeak6130 Look up the term "right knowledge".

I don't see any distinction either. Most, if not all niches presently existing come about in this way. And I don't agree that they are so hard to predict either. A well developed imagination is often underrated.

You are definitely missing the point. What would be gained by having that processing power? What would be lost in the single minded and narrow attention pursuit of that processing power? What phenomena and emergence would unfold in the time jt takes to make that computer? Stuart is saying that the universe is always moving ahead of life, mind, and evolution. That’s the point, and our role is to ride the wave instead of trying to wrangle it and control it like it’s some animal tk be dominated

@Rick D woo. simple woo.

How much is your seminar retreat? Will you be signing books?

Thou Art That Fluid theory (Reproduction/Feed/Reasoning) decanted selfmultidimentionalover... The polydynamics of the movement generates pseudo-autonomy as material property, of the autogenous phenomenon; existing.(...) Simultaneous as my unidimensional variability... unidimensional variability = live-beings

I can give you a smaller and less awe inspiring example within the "human sphere" (for the lack of a better phrase), basically certain inventions triggered the creation of niches that were previously unthinkable and changed reality in unpredictable ways. (Internet -> rapid global information dissemination -> many multi-billion dollar niches created). What makes the swim-bladder story an order of magnitude more awesome is because this was a product of evolution which did the same for some organisms, however, I'd argue that everything created by consciousnesses is also a product of evolution -> but, it's evolution in a different plane (which is also just as awe inspiring, imo).

@@TheFreddieFoo you've given here just more elaboration upon elaboration, making the assumption that correlation equals causation. I suppose that that's alright when you're dealing with a hypothesis but don't be fooled that that is real science and equals real evidence. No, it's just theorizing, and conflating things.

you're not alone because it really wasn't that big of a deal. What's happening here is the poor doctor is just too impressed with his own thinking. A good scientist will always show some caution and healthy doubt and question his own hypothesis. To be too confident and self-assured about your hypothesis and thinking is not a good way to go and do science.

@@grosbeak6130 Sir, this sounds like gobbledegook

Emergence in itself might be a scale-free property of the universe. If you get enough neurons together they form a network which can perform survival computations for the organism hosting the network. Now, humans have "excess" computation available to them and they'll use it to create copies of the "consciousness algorithm", just look at all the things humans have created so far, computers? cars? rockets? mathematics? it's just mind blowing to see the kinds of niches opened up through "excess computation".

I'll have to say, I still enjoyed the video even though I don't like how dismissive he was about "consciousness", it's good to have these kinds of "outside-in" perspectives.

Perhaps, the fact that evolution came up with neural networks for computation, is in itself more awesome than the swim-bladder. It's such a concise solution that can be scaled so easily across various organisms (in fact, majority of the organisms)

@@TheFreddieFoo Yes, the human brain when equipped with language, what we call a mind, is capable of putting together A and B, no matter what A and B are. This is a terrifyingly dangerous, stupefyingly creative capability. Our mind can put baby shoes together with squid tentacles or lightning rods with chocolate pudding. A and B might each exist at any level of complexity. We are truly frightening animals. Nothing in this world is safe from our thoughts.

Maybe rigidly defining and diagnosing how a good scientist is or ought to be is not entirely consonant with scientific temperament either

I guess that's debatable.

+AcidRain64 You'll have to make maps of all levels. By going into a new level of complexity, new rules emerge which change the actions of the lower level of complexity.

+La Serpiente How does the higher level rules change the lower level's? Biological systems do not change or break the laws of physics, rather they're completely consistent with them. The laws of physics and the fundamental quantum fields completely determine all of the properties or facts about "higher" levels. I disagree with Kauffman on his "radical emergence" as an ontological emergence. Without knowing the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics, we can't say whether or not in principle every event in the Universe is predictable (given sufficient calculating/computing power and time) because we don't even know if probability is a fundamental feature of the laws of physics or just apparent. If the Everett approach to quantum mechanics is correct, then this would mean that everything is fundamentally deterministic, there is no ontic collapse of the wave function ever. All emergence would be epistemological because every event from the infinite past or future could be in principle predictable by some Laplace's demon type being who knows the wave function of the Universe. Just because in practice humans will probably never be able to predict everything from knowing the complete laws of physics doesn't mean that emergent things are ontic. It is all epistemic emergence because it is just humans that arbitrarily make "higher levels" in the first place. When we want to truly find out what some particular higher level thing is, we search for its cause, which in turn leads us to correlating or mapping them to things we deem as lower level things or sciences, i.e. psychology to neurophysiology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics. The higher levels have no causal efficacy or ontological existence, they are all just patterns that emerge from complex arrangements and interactions of the fundamental ontology of physics.

Nathan Lee I agree, the higher levels do not break the laws of physics. Instead, they introduce new interactions between the fundamental particles which would not occur if the higher levels did not exist. The simplest way I can explain this is to imagine a single carbon atom within a fruit. Now, if that atom were eaten by a human being (higher level of complexity), it would merge with the human body and interact with complex bodily systems. And if that human were to ride an airplane for a business trip to Japan (higher level of complexity), it would interact with other atoms miles away from its original location. And if it were shat out in a toilet bowl in Japan, our atom would now interact with all the complexities of the Japanese drainage system, and interact with other fellow fecal atoms, such as one which came out of a Japanese housewife. In this example, the existence of biology and culture essentially altered the "destiny" of the single fruit atom. If the human race never existed, then the atom would only interact with other fruit atoms, and microbe atoms upon the fruit's decomposition. It would never travel very far, or interact with atoms it has no chance of "meeting", such as another atom from the other side of the world. Now, this means that we cannot effectively chart the destiny of the single fruit atom without taking into consideration 1. Human behavior, 2. Corporation behavior 3. Flight systems, 4. Plumbing systems, etc. Even down to the psychology of why the Japanese housewife took a dump at the exact time that she did. You can imagine how charting all this becomes practically impossible when we use fundamental physics alone. I'm not going into quantum mechanics though, as we would enter into speculative territory.

+La Serpiente Higher levels do not introduce new interactions among the particles (which are not really the fundamental ontology of physics, particles are actually vibrations in fields if you will, hence quantum field theory.). Higher levels do not need to exist at all, rather they only exist as macroscopic patterns of the fundamental kind of ontology (the quantum fields) and the laws of physics that guide their interactions full stop. If higher level things really influenced the particles or fields at all this would be a violation of our known laws of physics. Downward causation is not consistent. We need to stop taking these "levels" so seriously. "Higher levels" are just useful concepts because there are creatures like us that detect macroscopic patterns in things and can conjure up some rules or laws that have some degree of autonomy in them. Ultimately these laws (natural selection for example) can all in principle be derived from just the complete laws of physics and its ontology. I agree that it is "practically impossible" to describe various higher level things to the detail that we want by just using physics but I'm talking about in principle. In your examples you seem to be creating hard lines between objects like people, fruit, drainage systems and the environment or the rest of the world and thinking of them as separate systems, these divides are arbitrary and just made by our human minds for our own practical purposes, they are still just a bunch of fields obeying the laws of physics. I'm talking about thinking of the Universe as a single system, nothing stops me from thinking of the entire collections of particles or fields as one system and thinking of its wave function. I'm not too sure I get what you mean by going into speculative territory with quantum mechanics. The Standard Model is a quantum field theory and it is one of the most strongest theories ever made by human minds. It is said to be too good because we know it is not the complete theory of physics (it doesn't explain things like gravity a certain scales, dark matter, dark energy etc.) but we cannot get an experiment to disagree with it. Its math have been predicting the existence of obscure particles for decades and the Higgs field was experimentally validated by finding its associated boson in 2013 by the LHC. There is a consensus by physicists that the correct theory of the world is a quantum mechanical one. It is only because of the discovery of quantum mechanics that we are communicating on our computers or using our smart phones (assuming you have one)! With that said, it is sadly the conceptualization part that nobody understands or at least agrees upon. Quantum mechanics is just used rather than conceptualized and this is what gives us problems talking about metaphysical issues. Interpretations of quantum mechanics is the very thing we actually do need to go into. If certain kinds of interpretations or conceptualizations are correct, then the wave function of the Universe evolves completely deterministically and we would know that all probability humans perceive is just apparent. If others are correct, then probability may be a fundamental feature of Nature. Both have important implications for understanding what is fundamental and how may emergence work.

Nathan Lee I see that we're actually talking about two different things here. You're talking about how physical reality can be reduced to the fundamental laws of physics (ontology), whereas I'm talking about the usefulness of extreme reductionism for our ability to predict (epistemology). I was assuming we were talking about the latter since that was the theme introduced by the original poster. Of course, ontologically speaking, I completely agree with you. Clearly, everything obeys the fundamental laws of physics, and everything can be reduced to the behavior of the lowest levels. The problem, as I've already mentioned, is that we simply cannot predict the behavior of the entire universe by bean-counting atomic interactions. It's not just a complicated and laborious task, it is actually IMPOSSIBLE to make any accurate predictions about say, politics or economics, using quantum physics alone. Analogously, we cannot predict human behavior by studying neurons alone, or design the next Windows system using binary digits alone. The new emergent systems have new rules which MUST be known in order to comprehend the shifts of the lower levels. That is why I told the original poster that we should be mapping all levels instead of focusing on the bottom alone. Charting the "destiny" of any single atom in the universe simply cannot be done through extreme reductionism. All the arbitrary dualistic divisions at our level of reality - say, the difference between a man and a fruit - must be taken into consideration to understand what's going to happen to an atom inside a fruit that's going to be swallowed by a man. Regarding my distrust of quantum speculation, I was referring to your invocation of Everett's model, which was already steering near the edge.

"given space to exist" ---- This, and all else which may emerge, are conditioned by the presupposition of existence in and of itself. It has been long understood in classical theology that existence in and of itself is the singularly self-evident and unconditioned axiom. This is that to which the term "God" refers in classical theology: ipsum esse subsistens, or as Moses records more simply, "I Am".

Kyle, like it

In the universe the boundary conditions for what's about to emerge are constantly changing, dynamic, and indefinite since we can't pre-state what new thing is exactly coming into the universe within a theoretical framework. The best we can do is deduce something after the fact of its emergence.

Can you give me sources please?

I like Descartes better.

+Henry Vandenburgh That was very young sounding thing to say.

Of course. Because we all know that magic its a better explanation👍

there are thousands of species with neurons, some with more than humans - they are alive and functioning, but conscious (sentient) or reasoning.

So dismissive! I'm always wary about people who're just authoritatively dismissive about something, without reason. He comes off as egotistical, sorry.

Affirmative.

+SeanMauer "As a creationist" you're a compete moron.

Love & Division No.

+Alfred North Whitehead As Russell would say, the hunter perceives the white tail of the rabbit to be designed for his seeing based on no telos but his own.

Love & Division As a creationist you draw your conclusions from faith to God and not to scientific research and evidence. Thus you're in the wrong place here trying to reason in favor of creationism . I am not trying to reject your belief but creationism has nothing to do with reason neither has any usefulness beyond faith, e.g. you can cure people by inferring Darwinian reasoning to medicine but you cannot do the same with creationism except if you believe in miracles. But miracles have nothing to do with reason and science. If they did they wouldn't be miracles they would be part of science. And to be more specific "radical emergence" is not the same as "intelligent design" or "creationism" they are not indistinguishable. In fact they are irrelevant to each other. Either could be true or one of them could be true and the other false, or both false. For example, and for the shake of argument let's say creationism is right. The creator of the ladle designed it as a tool to serve soup. But some chef discovered an ingenious way to use the ladle to extract spores out of pomegranates efficiently by hitting a half sliced pomegranate on its behind with the convex side of the ladle. I bet that the creator of the ladle never thought of this use of his/her creation. That is what St. Kauffman calls "radical emergence". The use of an object could be much more complex than the "purpose" of its creation. That could be translated that if both creationism and radical emergence is right then not even God (the creator) knows what humans (creation) could do in the future... but this is absurd because God is supposed to know everything.

TheActiveStorage The discovery of a structure in embryos called "organizer" just published a few days ago in www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0150-y. The fact that we don't know today how something works it doesn't mean that we have to stop researching. Your reference to "materialism" is irrelevant. Physicists have shown that matter and mass are emergent properties of spacetime and quantum fields, by discovering Higgs mechanism (this kind of emergence is not radical because we know its mechanism). What you have in mind here is rather a concern about determinism (which is also banned by quantum mechanics and non-linear dynamics i.e. chaos theory). But researchers in embryology have reasons to explore for mechanisms driving cell differentiation. These mechanisms need not be deterministic. Most of the reasons for research are for discovering new cures. That's why I cannot understand why people should think of this matter closed (that is the embryo's development is driven by some supernatural forces) and don't try to find a useful and comprehensive explanation, if that's what you suggest.

Affirmative.