Ourcellves? (Identity)

by romansh , Sunday, April 06, 2014, 21:15 (3665 days ago) @ David Turell


> > Romansh: You see emergence in a miraculous kidney. That gives me a reason that you do mean it in a magical sense. Fair enough.
> > 
> > Brain plasticity, waterfalls and urination all involve mechanistic processes as far as I can tell. Our brains and what we perceive as thoughts involve mechanistic processes.
> > 
> > But in short ... an eddie involves changes in electron density around atoms as does brain plasticity.
> 
> Brain plasticity involves the growth of new axon connections,new neurons, astrocytes and glial cells, and modulation of synapses as well as your reference to ion charge changes as your reference in an eddie. It is not the same breed of cat, by any stretch. Life is more than mechanistic, and your comparisons to purely mechanistic examples don't work for me.-Yes I agree there are many of orders of magnitude difference in complexity.
So what? ... A good number of them boil down to changes in electron density around a central nucleus. -Reductionism does not make things simpler. It simply (tries to) isolate a system and then understand what is going on ... the various interactions within that system. If there is a behaviour that is identifiable that system it can be described as weak emergence.-For immensly complicated systems whilst we may not be able to isolate and describe all the interactions within that system we have no reason to believe (well at least I don't) that there is something magical going on.