On 30 April 2014 23:47, Alberto G. Corona <agocor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Emergence means that the higher level is idependent of the substrate > and produce effects in the substrate. That means that once emerged, it > does not matter if is the result off a darwinian process, a numeric > simulation or an intelligent design, it is as it is and start to work > with their own rules, influencing above and below it. > > http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/nature.pdf I find that paper rather unconvincing. So what if we can't predict football from the Schrodinger equation? This doesn't imply the existence of downward causation as anything physically fundamental, it just says that the computations are intractable, or maybe just that they would take an impractically long time to run. But if he* isn't* saying downward causation is physically fundamental, he's comparing apples with oranges, and the result is bananas. The stuff about the atoms having to be in "exactly the right place" at the time of the big bang is reminiscent of Hoyle's junkyard-to-747 argument. It misses out all the ordering principles that might come to bear, and basically appeals to our incredulity. Well, duh, that couldn't *possibly*happen - could it?!? But to see how vitally important that original arrangement is, let's suppose we do a thought experiment and stir all those original atoms around randomly. We can churn them around a lot (but to be fair we should leave the average density and average quantum fluctuations as they were in "our" version of the primordial gas). Let's do it a trillion trillion trillion or so times, with everything from one atom being moved to whole galactic masses being rearranged, and consider what might be the results. Well, gravity and evolution will still take their courses. So we'll still get planets and in some cases, life. In the cases where we only moved a few atoms, we'll probably get something indistinguishable from our Earth, and even the Mona Lisa. This is just the idea of a multiverse, which the author of the paper has turned upside down to make it into an argument from incredulity. But all one can really say is that differences in initial condtions will produce a range of outcomes, presumably ranging from almost exact copies of Earth through to entirely different galaxies (the proportions will I suppose involve chaos theory - maybe moving one atom really *would* butterfly-effect its way through history to stop Earth existing, or let the Nazis win WW2, or at least give the Mona Lisa a moustache....) But the bottom line is that we'd get something reasonably similar from similar starting conditions, and all one can say is, again, so what? So our starting conditions happened to produce our universe, but slightly different conditions would have produced a slightly different universe. Whatever next ... "Pope still Catholic" ? So appealing to the "exact conditions" being needed to create our "exact conditions" as though this is something special or important is deeply suspect, IMHO. I get enough of that "precisely arranged" nonsense when I discuss backwards causation, and it looks like downwards causation needs similarly specious appeals to our incredulity. (Still, maybe all the hot air and hand waving will have an unexpected effect on lower levels of physics...) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
