“Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem.”
Is it a good description then? I can’t even find the quote you use from Wikipedia (not exactly a top notch citation in the first place). That certainly doesn’t seem like a good description at all. It doesn’t really even describe what emergence theorists talk about. If your entire point is going to hinge on one description, maybe shop around for a good one. Just saying.
“Now suppose I should say that gravity depends on “arisence” or that chemistry is an “arising phenomenon,” and claim that as my explanation.”
Now hold on, let’s take a step back. My spider senses are tingling… something certainly feels wrong about that sentence...
“Depends on”… I’m sensing an equivocation here. That certainly isn’t a synonym for explanation. But let me double check my terms.
“Explain” (verb, Merriam Webster):
1.) to make plain or understandable
2.) to give the reason for or cause of
3.) to show the logical development or relationships of
That is definitely is much broader than dependence. In fact, explanations are not even mutually exclusive (I challenge anyone to give a sole explanation of a thing in the sense of explanation above). I’ve never heard anyone use emergence as the kind of explanation you’re suggesting (im not even sure there is a such thing as an “explaination in its own right”). All I can say is give actual sources.
“A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective ‘emergent’ from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different”
These examples definitely sound different to me. And isn’t this a bit circular? Testing the meaning of a term by seeing how you feel about it in a sentence? Is there a term I can’t perform this exercise with and get the same result? The magic example is even sillier. Quantum physics sounds like magic to many people, that doesn’t really tell us anything outside of how those people feel.
“You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before… it feels like you believe a new fact, but you don’t anticipate any different outcomes.”
I certainly anticipate different models of phenomenon I consider emergent. I anticipate a different level of precision, or a different kind of precision, or a completely different unit of measure. I anticipate what kind of investigations will be more fruitful for the same effort. I anticipate the fallacies and mistakes I might make. I certainly think differently about the phenomenon. I might not anticipate the specific behavior of a thing directly, but why is that a necessary condition for explaination? A similar thing can be said about chaoticness.
“Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?”
We’ve jumped around from explanation to dependence now to hypothesis. These are certainly not all the same thing. I might hypothesize that a given thing has the property of emergence, and then give reasons as to why that is the case. I can hypothesize that the property of emergence has such and such consequences. In that sense the property of emergence does not fit the same outcomes. Whether “emergence” is a property we should care about in the first place is a different question.
“Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem.”
Is it a good description then? I can’t even find the quote you use from Wikipedia (not exactly a top notch citation in the first place). That certainly doesn’t seem like a good description at all. It doesn’t really even describe what emergence theorists talk about. If your entire point is going to hinge on one description, maybe shop around for a good one. Just saying.
“Now suppose I should say that gravity depends on “arisence” or that chemistry is an “arising phenomenon,” and claim that as my explanation.”
Now hold on, let’s take a step back. My spider senses are tingling… something certainly feels wrong about that sentence...
“Depends on”… I’m sensing an equivocation here. That certainly isn’t a synonym for explanation. But let me double check my terms.
“Explain” (verb, Merriam Webster): 1.) to make plain or understandable 2.) to give the reason for or cause of 3.) to show the logical development or relationships of
That is definitely is much broader than dependence. In fact, explanations are not even mutually exclusive (I challenge anyone to give a sole explanation of a thing in the sense of explanation above). I’ve never heard anyone use emergence as the kind of explanation you’re suggesting (im not even sure there is a such thing as an “explaination in its own right”). All I can say is give actual sources.
“A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective ‘emergent’ from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different”
These examples definitely sound different to me. And isn’t this a bit circular? Testing the meaning of a term by seeing how you feel about it in a sentence? Is there a term I can’t perform this exercise with and get the same result? The magic example is even sillier. Quantum physics sounds like magic to many people, that doesn’t really tell us anything outside of how those people feel.
“You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before… it feels like you believe a new fact, but you don’t anticipate any different outcomes.”
I certainly anticipate different models of phenomenon I consider emergent. I anticipate a different level of precision, or a different kind of precision, or a completely different unit of measure. I anticipate what kind of investigations will be more fruitful for the same effort. I anticipate the fallacies and mistakes I might make. I certainly think differently about the phenomenon. I might not anticipate the specific behavior of a thing directly, but why is that a necessary condition for explaination? A similar thing can be said about chaoticness.
“Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?”
We’ve jumped around from explanation to dependence now to hypothesis. These are certainly not all the same thing. I might hypothesize that a given thing has the property of emergence, and then give reasons as to why that is the case. I can hypothesize that the property of emergence has such and such consequences. In that sense the property of emergence does not fit the same outcomes. Whether “emergence” is a property we should care about in the first place is a different question.