From: rowe@pender.ee.upenn.edu (Mickey Rowe)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Emergence again...
Date: 20 Nov 92 18:56:31 GMT
Organization: University of Pennsylvania

In article <1992Nov17.174027.10071@hemlock.cray.com>
     robd@cherry09.cray.com (Robert Derrick) writes:

>Mickey Rowe (rowe@pender.ee.upenn.edu) wrote:
>
>[re: the use of the term "emergent property"]
>
>: Wherever the potential for this confusion remains, I'm against using
>: the word.  Anybody else?  
>
>How do you feel about substituting the term epiphenomenon?  This is more
>concise in that it means that the property in question is caused by the
>primary phenomenon, although it is not necessary that the cause/effect
>relationship be one that is intuitive, predictable, or reducible.

Sorry that it took me so long to respond.  I wanted to recall more
about the term as it's been used in the past.  I knew that hard core
reductionists don't like the term, but I couldn't remember why.  Well,
it seems to be that "epiphenomenon" (at least as it's been applied to
consciousness) doesn't entail causation at all (corrections welcome as
my still cursory search wasn't terribly fruitful).  In fact it seems
that when people use the term they mean quite the opposite--that the
epiphenomena sort of ride along side the actual phenomena, but do not
effect nor are they effected by the primary phenomena.  I still can't
say as that I understand exactly what the significance of the term is,
but it still seems to be a claim staked by those who would claim (as
Kalki might) that knowing brain states won't elucidate anything about
mind states.  As such I don't like it because it runs counter to much
of the evidence obtained from neuropsychology.

As for emergence, I flipped through the Patricia Churchland book that
I previously recommended to Kalki, and she describes emergence in a
way that Kalki would have agreed with.  I think that she also
acknowledged the way the A-life people want to use it, but still she
described emergence as a property that cannot in principle be reduced
to lower level descriptions of constituent parts (specifically she
stated the case (not her own belief) that consciousness as an emergent
phenomenon meant that consciousness could never be understood in terms
of neuronal function).

>This idea of K's that all destinations must somehow be reducible to
>a roadmap that details how you got there is jejune.
>
>In the simplest of examples:
>
>A cake that exists now is not reducible to a recipe of how to make the
>cake.  That information is not inherent in the cake itself.  What can
>be done is to deduce a way to reproduce the cake, creating a new
>recipe.  But there is no way of ever deducing the original recipe with
>absolute certainty.  That information is gone.

This sounds a bit more like functional psychology, and could represent
a different sort of barrier to the reductionist approach.  In order
for reduction to be possible in this instance, it must be correct that
mind states are the cause and/or effect of brain states.  However, if
the same mind state can be achieved via many distinct brain states,
(like the same cake being made from many different recipes) then it
may not be possible for you to understand brain states in terms of
mind states (even though the other way around could still be feasible
with enough information about what constitutes a brain state.  On the
other hand, it might be that knowing the "state" of a human brain is
possible only in the sense that you could in theory know the positions
and momenta of all of the water molecules in Kurt's cup of tea.)

[Other stuff (e.g. the natural nuclear reactor) deleted, not because
it was uninteresting, but only because I had nothing to add... MR]

>rob derrick				robd@cherry.cray.com

Mickey Rowe     (rowe@pender.ee.upenn.edu)