Emergence: not understood (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 23, 2019, 13:12 (2129 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID:: It [emergence]is not 'spooky'. We know how ice works. We enjoy a symphony from 50+ coordinating members of an orchestra. What emerges is what we hear. Of course it emerges. Life emerges from all of the coordinated activity by all its cells, but we still don't understand its 'conductor'.

dhw: Precisely. Nobody knows how ‘emergence’ works. These extracts (thank you editing the article) give us no answers at all, but I do think emergence is ‘spooky’, because we can’t see a conductor that coordinates the actions of all the intelligent players, and we don’t know who composed the symphony in the first place.

DAVID: It just brings up God as conductor.

dhw: Ugh, this image is becoming too laboured! I’ll stick to the fact that nobody knows how emergence works!

DAVID: Ah! I bring up God and you run. All of the biological simultaneous reactions in coordination create life. We can stop with that.

No, it is the orchestral image I run from. We have intelligent players (but you don’t believe in intelligent cells), we have a known and visible conductor (not visible or known in cell coordination), and we have an unseen composer who created all the instructions (a nice image for your God, but you think God is the conductor). Too messy.