Ever since I saw that post, I’ve wanted specific examples of the supposed idiotic uses of “emergence” as an explanation. EY just alluded to a lot of idiots he’s met, but memories of such exchanges are notoriously unreliable in terms of over-emphasizing just how bad people’s arguments were. Can anyone cite an otherwise-correct-thinking person who did what EY is describing?
(I just hope people are more willing to call such arguments deluded than they were when I said the same of Marcello’s “complexity strategy”...)
My mother, who has a Master’s Degree in Biology, and extensive experience in field research (wildlife biology) once talked about the possibility that the way we experienced what we call free will was an “emergent property” during a discussion we had. I pointed out that everything in the brain is a result of neurons firing, and so saying that any process was emergent was just repeating something we already knew. My exact phrase was “correct, but unhelpful”.
The book Foundations of Neuroeconomics (less wrong review) which generally seems like a useful book, says that some psychological phenomena might be in principle not amenable to reduction from psychology to lower level science because they are ‘emergent’. This is a side point in the introduction, and it doesn’t seem to affect the rest of the book.
Ever since I saw that post, I’ve wanted specific examples of the supposed idiotic uses of “emergence” as an explanation. EY just alluded to a lot of idiots he’s met, but memories of such exchanges are notoriously unreliable in terms of over-emphasizing just how bad people’s arguments were. Can anyone cite an otherwise-correct-thinking person who did what EY is describing?
(I just hope people are more willing to call such arguments deluded than they were when I said the same of Marcello’s “complexity strategy”...)
My mother, who has a Master’s Degree in Biology, and extensive experience in field research (wildlife biology) once talked about the possibility that the way we experienced what we call free will was an “emergent property” during a discussion we had. I pointed out that everything in the brain is a result of neurons firing, and so saying that any process was emergent was just repeating something we already knew. My exact phrase was “correct, but unhelpful”.
The book Foundations of Neuroeconomics (less wrong review) which generally seems like a useful book, says that some psychological phenomena might be in principle not amenable to reduction from psychology to lower level science because they are ‘emergent’. This is a side point in the introduction, and it doesn’t seem to affect the rest of the book.