Ourcellves? (Identity)

by David Turell , Sunday, April 06, 2014, 19:55 (3883 days ago) @ romansh


> Romansh: And before we get drawn down the rabbit warren of emergence ... can we be clear which sense of emergent we are using the word ... strong or weak
> 
> And I will quote Bedau again ...
> >>> Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities?-Why leave out the remainder of the quote? :-"Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing."-Emergence is not a rabbit warren. We all experience it in our consclousness and our vision. Do not forget that quantum mechanics underlie all of our reality and we seem to get something for nothing because of that, and we really do not understand the quantum realm. Bedau's comments about discomfort, and traditional worry are non-material conscious thought disturbed about trying to apply reductionistic materialism to emergent thought.-Look at my entry about vision. (4/6 14:58)If it is reduced to retinal cells, travelling ions and reception by neurons that give us a sense of vision we still can't see the picture from the parts. Note I said a sense of vision, an energent phenomenon. We know the parts add up to pretty pictures in our heads. What we experience seems as sharp as a digital picture, but alot of fuzziness gets us there. Biological systems are not fully mechanistic. By virtue of the way they work they cannot be defined as just mechanistic, and that is the problem in trying to approach it that way. I am a proponent of strong emergence and rely on the weirdness of quantum mechanics to support my contention. Do I fully understand consciousness or my vision, as examples? Not really, but I have to accept what I experience.