Tag: causal emergence

Searching for Emergence

Mark Davis1 Comment

I have a longstanding interest in the concept of emergence as a way of explaining a wide range of human ideas and the natural world. We have this incredible algorithm of evolutionary change that creates novel life forms. We have, according to mainstream materialist accounts of philosophy of mind, a consciousness that may have a unique ontology (what really exists) of subjective experiencers and qualia and intentionality, but that is also somehow emergent from the meat of the brain (or supervenes or is an epiphenomenon, etc. etc.) That emergence may be weak or strong in various accounts, with strong meaning something like the idea that a new thing is added to the ontology while weak meaning something like we just don’t know enough yet to find the reduction of the concept to its underlying causal components. If we did, then it is not really something new in this grammar of ontological necessity.

There is also the problem of computational irreducibility (CI) that has been championed by Wolfram. In CI, there are classes of computations that result in outcomes that cannot be predicted by any simpler algorithm. This seems to open the door to a strong concept of emergence: we have to run the machine to get the outcome; there is no possibility (in theory!) of reducing the outcome to any lesser approximation. I’ve brought this up as a defeater of the Simulation Hypothesis, suggesting that the complexity of a simulation is irreducible from the universe as we see it (assuming perfect coherence in the limit).

There is also a dual to this idea in algorithmic information theory (AIT) that is worth exploring. In AIT, it is uncomputable to find the shortest Turing Machine capable of accepting a given symbol sequence.… Read the rest

Causally Emergent vs. Divine Spark Murder Otherwises

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One might claim that a metaphysical commitment to strong determinism is only porous to quantum indeterminacy or atomic indeterminacy (decay behavior for instance). Those two can be lumped together and simply called subatomic indeterminacy or something. Everything else is conceptually derivative of state evolution and therefore deterministic. So does that mean that my model for R fails unless I can invoke these two candidates? My suggestion of amplifying thermodynamic noise doesn’t really cut the mustard (an amusing semantic drift from pass muster, perhaps) because it only appears random and solely characterizable by these macroscopic variables like pressure and temperature, not because it actually is random in the molecule swirl.

But I can substitute an atomic decay counter for my thermodynamic amplifier, or use a quantum random number generator based on laser measurements of vacuum fluctuations. There, I’ve righted the ship, though I’ve jettisoned my previous claim that randomness is not necessary for R’s otherwises. Now it is, but it is not sufficient because of the need for a device like the generative subsystem that uses randomness in a non-arbitrary way to revise decisions. We do encounter a difficulty in porting subatomic indeterminacy into a human analog, of course, though some have given it a try.

But there is some new mathematics for causal emergence that fits well with my model. In causal emergence, ideas like necessity and sufficiency for causal explanations can be shown to have properties in macroscale explanations that are not present at microscales. The model used is a simple Markov chain that flips between two states and information theory is applied to examine a range of conceptual structures for causation running from David Hume’s train of repeating objects (when one damn thing comes after another and then again and again, we may have a cause), up through David Lewis’s notion of counterfactuals in alternative probabilistic universes (could it have happened that way in all possible worlds?),… Read the rest