How Can Emergence Explain Reality? | Episode 310 | Closer To Truth 

Salute to every single person who is giving his/her best to decode the reality...

The expression of joy and bliss when the anchor spoke to the biologist really tells you about where is mind is at.

Many years ago, a prominent Physicist said to other: “You can not explain with atomic physics the formation of Ice.” And the deep answer was in the seminal paper: “More is Different” and this very day Solid State Physics born, thanks to Phillip Anderson, also a Noble Laureate.

so glad he used water as an example early on in the video. it is such a unique and marvelous substance which we take for granted. if it was not so abundant on earth we would keep it in museums because of its incredible properties.

Great episode. Even if, ultimately, we may understand everything using a reductionist approach, we are far from it. So, in practice, we are all "emergentists" at present. That's why we have many different sciences

Salute to these superb physicists.

Mr Kuhn's personal odyssey to get *"closer to truth"* has often appeared to be so ill-defined and circular as to be futile. So it is with great humility that I now both congratulate and thank him for his endeavours, as disparate pieces of "truth" have begun to fall quite spectacularly, into place. Thank you Mr Robert Lawrence Kuhn.

No matter how well you understand hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, you could never predict they would eventually combine to produce humans. Emergent properties will always be subject to chaos theory.

It’s a certain number of fields interacting, each field with its own limits and laws, and at the point where all fields intersect you get a specific phenomenon, together they act like a blueprint ‘looking’ for the right environment to manifest what this specific combination of fields happens to do. It’s top down, and once manifestation has happened the combination of fields attract other fields to build further complexity in combination with the environment where manifestation has occurred.

I recall Lisa Randall discussing "effective theories" in her books. It seems that different scales have different rules of organization.

Muscle cells are classical. The simple expansion and contraction of single cells when synchronously combined into one bicep and tricep can move our arm. Now what can happen when neurons fire? Do they form some synchronous process? Do these slowed down process make a slower reality emerge? I say yes (in Robert's voice?) Why? Why because there are waves and pulses emerging from our brains. This tells me something synchronous is happening.

Excellent production! Fully appreciate the multiple perspectives from all of these experts and the moderator’s synthesis. Thank you😊

I've always been told to call 911 if an emergence occurs (112 in Spain)

7:30 I think what's missing in the reductionist view is that there is Control from the macroscopic levels of emergence that goes back down to the microscopic. For example, if there is no way to compute the outcome of an emergent property Faster than nature can do that calculation, then it's impossible to predict that feature. You might be able to retrospectively explain it, and you may have guessed that something was about to occur, a phase transition, but you couldn't have predicted what that transitions effect would be on the microscopic elements, the Control comes from the emergent properties not the low level properties. Some prime examples; Stock market. Free will. Invention. Evolution. What happens at the end of the Universe. Consciousness. etc etc.

Keep up the amazing work Robert and team. Keeping us informed and inquisitive regarding the latest thinking, this is valuable work for our time!

Outstanding to watch - Many, many thanks !

Strong emergence is definitely a thing in Biology. One example is homeostasis, a dynamic that characterizes all life forms, where organisms regulate their internal states (ph, ion-gradients, temperature etc.) to maintain an environment that allows the dynamics of life to continue in that organism by staying away from chemical equilibrium.

Organization itself contributes to emergence; put ingredients together to make bricks, put bricks together to make houses; put houses together to make neighborhoods; put neighborhoods together to make towns, put towns together to make counties, put counties together to make states, and on and on. What is driving organization, where does it come from?

A lot of this kind of skirts the issue. "Emergence" doesn't mean that phenomena can't be broken down into smaller components, just that doing so doesn't tell you more about them. Emergent phenomena, like the game of chess for example, do theoretically exist as smaller components (the atoms that make up the neurons in our brains that constitute knowledge about chess, along with the physical pieces and the boards of chess that exist in the world), but it would just be ridiculous to think about chess on this level. Materially speaking, in order for us to know about and understand something we have to describe and store information, and even if it's possible to reduce everything in theory to the atomic level this is just not an efficient way to store information about phenomena, so we don't. Reductionism leads to a lot of useless excess information about things that are better described at emergent levels.

5:47 Me, most of the time when trying to understand.

The problem with the house and brick analogy is that in nature the "houses" and "bricks" build themselves. There are no architects or brick layers. Like M.C Escher's Drawing Hands. (12:00 - 15:00 )

One of the best I’ve seen.

Usually, when someone refers to a house, they define it as a specific building where a person and their family live. Home, on the other hand, is more abstract as it can be anywhere a person or family lives. The house is made of concrete. Home is the place one can always return to for comfort and simply paradise to be fully understood reality as we wish upon to complete in everything "Strong Emergence."

Amo este canal cada día más! Saludos desde Argentina

robert , thanks for your work , this helps

I wonder what Peter would say about the fact that the mind can penetrate and gets lodged in the body (emotions), but that the body cannot perceive and regulate mind and thoughts? In cognitive sciences, we definitely say that the mind can regulate body experiences. The body definitely has an effect on the mind, but the mind can always, any time it wants, regulate the emotion's impact on the body. What would a reductionist like Peter say about this I wonder? And it is an assumption for those who are psychologists or counselors that the strong emergence of consciousness has downward causation. Working from the top down it goes like this: consciousness can observe thoughts, which generage emotions which are lodged in the body. All this process can be regulated from the position of self-transcending awareness, top-down causation. Wow!

The difference between individual bricks, and a brick house is the arrangement of bricks. After all, one could disassemble a brick house, and make a patio or a road. Just because certain arrangements of component materials have different functions doesn’t mean that they are manifestly different in their composition. it is just that certain arrangements of atoms making up biological structures lead to properties that seem distinguishable from their component make up.

Please bring the Stuart Kauffman and Peter Atkins to a discussion about this subject.

As an amateur scientist I always pondered how one could explain biological phenomenon base on the laws of physics. Strong Emergence defies reductionist explanation of what is happening

“Emergence” seems like an emergent characteristic of too many philosophers locked in a room.

I love Peter.

The idea that just because you believe in emergence you don’t believe in the explanatory power of science is absurd. You just don’t believe in the explanatory power of quantum particles that much. You believe that things at different levels of reality require their own explanation. And since it’s most likely that reality isn’t even computable, it’s only natural to assume that we can always only discover partial theories that hold in a certain domain. It’s still a worthy endeavor though.

A simple example of emergence from simple rules to complexity is chaos theory and the Mandelbrot set. And I wish that Kuhn would stop saying "I we knew everything about..." Does he not understand that we never will know everything?

16:42 this is very problematic. You might think that it's nothing, but it is. The idea that we humans are separate from nature, and that we are creating something independent of nature, suggests how disconnected we are from reality/nature

Another beautiful intro with an amazing content ✨✨❤️❤️👌👌💯💯

The ‘conscious’ aspect of the universe is far more basic _and_ complex than anyone can truly know You really gotta see time and space as more unified, though And distinct

For phase transitions of water (solid/liquid/gas); temperature, pressure and volume play a role in the phase transitions. So for emergence in general, there may be ingredients that mix with the physical reality. May help to better understand the nature and existence of such ingredients. Are temperature, pressure and volume incidental or causal in phase transitions from solid to liquid to gas?

Great show! But like any great show, it only increases the questions that we wonder about. One such question would be: Is there any physical phenomenon or property that is NOT emergent? For instance how do we know that electrons or quarks are not themselves emergent phenomena? Perhaps the ultimate goal of Science Itself is to pierce all the way through the Maia; the veil of Illusion conferred by Emergence, to physical things "in themselves". But it seems quite possible to me that such an endeavor may ultimately be futile. I think Plato had it right two and a half thousand years ago: The only things we can grasp are the shadows on the walls of the caves of our minds, produced by an Unknown Reality. Steven Hawking once said that almost everything can be derived by Math, but then he asks (paraphrasing) : "But what is the Fire at the Heart of Reality that breathes Life into the equations and causes them to BE?"

I'm reminded of Saruman the White in The Lord of the Rings. When he comes under the influence of Sauron he is no longer "The White" and explains to Gandalf that he has abandoned whiteness because it can be broken up into all the colors, to which Gandalf replies "He who breaks things apart to discover their nature has left the path of Wisdom."

My favorite relationship is the heart cell actions exist to support a structure that is a pump. It shares and exists only w support of others to create a macro emergent vital property.

16:55 "One of them is from nature, one of them is something that we as humans have created." Trick question - humans are nature.

Crazy to think all of us today 95% of the people will all be gone in 80 years or so, just freaks me out i was a entity that existed to know why, where who, and what is this place of being

These videos gimme the same energy as bush does...

If this side of reality is complicated and beautiful then the other side must be just as complicated and beautiful take thought and senses just the flat ideas of thoughts in a vast realm

Let's not confuse emergence with unpredictability. The carbon atom can combine into an almost infinite number of molecules. We cannot readily predict in an actual situation what molecules will form, but when an actuality appears based on carbon atoms, the system (for the most part) can be explained in principle base on the properties of the carbon atom, which can be explained by physics. Note I said for the most part. When conceptual information processing (aka brain) starts, a new dynamic might have emerged, a dynamic not in principle explainable every by the underlying parts. But, in general, don't confuse emergence with the inability to predict what will emerge.

Reality emerges out of One's desire not to be alone. Hence the significance of 1 Corinthians 13:13.

I don't see compulsive reasoning to conclude that "reducionism" and "emergence" are in opposition to each other. What happens, when in a natural build-up a critical new level of complexity is reached, amounts to a new form of inter-acting both between the new realities and downwards between them and their more simple constituents.

Emerging causation bottom up, emanating constraints top down. Light constrains the emerging structure of a tree. The emerging structure of a tree emanates down constraints to increase the probability of photons striking chlorophyll molecules. Emergence ultimately explains nothing without emanation.

The human element is a point of difference. One expert says that water can be deduced from all the knowledge of hydrogen and oxygen- another expert says studying bricks can't get you a house, but these two are not the same. In a house, an agent of design is introduced. Conscious awareness is the whitehead on a wave, it is the turbulence of feedback where the finger of nature touches itself. If we acknowledge the difference between things as they are, and things as we've made them through language the world is a lot more clear than insinuated here.

Small influences big. Can do this cos it knows how.

19:40 The existence of "simple underlying rules" infers that nature is NOT "un-directed and random" as Darwinian evolution claims. "Rules" and "Laws", regardless of simplicity, are still the product of mind. Un-directed random natural processes have never been scientifically demonstrated or proven to be capable of producing functional / coded information as that required for biological systems, even at the most primitive levels of biological life.

A rare episode actually getting closer to truth. Nice to see an episode not devoted to ponderous pondering of imponderables, like free will, the meaning of life and the characteristics of G*d. EDIT: Oh well, the meaning of life had to stick its nose in anyway. AND EDIT: Can't leave well enough alone. A theologian taking perfectly good science and composting it into Woo! Like some amateurish time travel novella, "going to the past to fix the present", only it's the other way!!! GASP!!!

I'm too dumb to understand the conversations 🙌

Please interview Dr Jonathan Schaffer!

Hi Robert:-) I enjoy your programes. When it comes to emegence and if you ever come to Copenhagen you should really talk with Claus Emmeche of the Copenhagen University you wont regret it! Best regards, Nikolaj

Water is life. However, only in the middle phase, liquid.

so...emergence is a continuous feedback loop-learning cycle. not that hard to understand.

I find very interesting the book A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. I'm also a big fan of Peter Atkins.

A smart person. Yes. Downward causation. NOT emergence. I described how and why in my book and papers 20 years ago. No one gets it-they fail to consider all the variables and implications. Now people are starting to see what I saw so many years ago, so I have been re-writing my book which predicted all these new views and careers now. Sometimes I actually look at history and I know it so well it feels like I was part of the cause of that too. I also made an experimental methodology which shows the effects. I hear historians explaining Egypt and I am like: that’s not how it happened or what that means. Seriously.

There is more to the world than the sum of its parts. Perhaps environment is an extension of consciousness itself.

21,45 that is the core question .

Sometimes the only way to know how a system works out is to step it forward. The long term outcome is not encoded in the generating rule.

I find myself deeply sympathetic to both reductionist and emergent explanations of reality. But there was one word by Peter Atkins coming at the 8:63 (9:03 mark) which left a strong impact on my thoughts. The word was 'defeat'. Referring to unwrapping the mysteries of proteins he said, "It's fiendishly complicated...but the fiend is not going to defeat us." It led me to ask myself if there was some transcendent quality of space-time at the quantum level which could survive and run concurrently with the layers of emergent properties as scales increased. It led to a startling conclusion after many decades of focus on the matter. The quantum foam as home to particles which pop into and out of existence describes an environment where emergence, and more specifically a regenerative architecture of emergence is the spring, the fountainhead at the end of a reductionist's search, the fundamental road map, a synchronicity of orbital and expanding paths which offers the best explanation for the dipole moment found in every subatomic particle. It may turn out that the dipole moment is the springboard of matter and ultimately consciousness itself.

The book [A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics From the Bottom Down by Robert Laughing, 2006. ] is a gem

How do humans break complexity of their conscious tasks? Imagine somebody asks about directions. He is given instructions verbally. He will interpret the language(cerebral cortex) then decide to move accordingly. I guess the brain will unconsciously go through layered approach: instructions are interpreted, stored and eventually converted to impulses to muscles and joints at every step. The details of neuron cell or muscle cells or synapse transmitters let alone lower down to atomic level need not be worked out as the system can call up existing mature internal modules as required. This is what complex software/hardware designs do nowadays and that evolved independently.

Quantization on the lowest level produces patterning at all levels above. An atomic Mandelbrot like fractal patterning. Just quantization or state snapping (like electron shell states)

Endless like as dreams.. sometimes you see a few dreams consequently but places and time has no relation between them as if you move in timeless and placeless... but all dream has one common side which is you never see your body:) endless is like this for me :)

I'm gonna start, before I completely watch this video, by making it a duo by adding 'Complexity!' 16:00 He introduces this. Now I reframe his question: "Why does complexity increase up the levels?" 'Beyond Einstein: Emergence and Complexity.' ------------------------------------------------------- The physicists and chemists and mathematicians have had ungodly control over the beliefs of science for too long. These reductionists, at their basement levels, can only derive causation and hence determinism. Whereas as one ascends up each level of emergence, complexity (to my mind) increases. So, even properties at the lower domains can not foresee the properties that arise at higher realms. Hence, free will is possible because like biology, the whole and it's behavior is greater and is not dominated by the sum of the lower parts. "Even God can't see or predict this!" For the physicists out there, who's to say that even time and space not not transcend it's own rules, and perhaps consciousness is the thing that is already doing that. The search for reality is still extremely young. Footnotes: Perhaps even language is emergent. The introspective, seeking, intellectual needs ever more ornate words and longer sentences to describe and understand larger imagery and visuals. Biological systems can also work down the levels, at least until the boundaries of chemistry. External macro forces and events can generate depression, whereby chemical levels are altered. "No, you aren't depressed because of an 'imbalance'. You're depressed cause bad stuff happened to you." A New View: Emergence, Complexity, and Downward Causation. -------------------------------------------- Conclusion: This video defies complimentary words. Why is it not possible for me to double-like it? 💜

When we daydream . It's a gravitational ripple picked up at LIGO. Throwing off out thoughts. I knew it!

I am shocked at how few views Closer To Truth videos get 🤷🤦🤦🤦

we know only some "components" of Reality, such as matter, space, the present. We do not know what matter, space and the present are. I suggest you think about it a bit before choosing a topic.

Always so much to learn, it never ends... I've always wondered how are creator knows and provides everything for us if there is one. And how we figure things out. And there always something different in the process and the outcome. is god himself evaluation does he really exists. The one thing that baffles me in this world🌎is the there an after life... and not ONE person on this planet knows. it always keeps me wondering i guess I'll find out when I take my final breath I'll know the truth🤔🙂

I think a portion of the problem is that reductionism has more predictive power in fields where relationships between components are well understood and acknowledged. Like in physics. I think in fields like biology, relationships between components are less well understood and underappreciated. Emergence is the result of relationships, and if reductionists gain understanding into and incorporate these relationships into their models, then they'll be more effective at explaining complexity

It doesn`t seem prudent to profess that man knows the ways of God.

Every single thing in this universe contains the infinite, what do we think keeps the atoms moving? It was'nt just a big bang, it still IS a big bang, everything is being sustained, all the the elements obey a force, and that force is infinite. It is our consciousness that looks out of our eyes. When a body is dead, how do the eyes look? 'Dead' because the life consciousness has left the body. That life force is also infinite, because it comes from the infinite, and returns to the infinite. All these things are just a bunch of words, until we FEEL it, we need to CONNECT to it, but we will find no connection outside, it is only when we connect with the infinite within ourselves that we can be connected once again, and feel true fulfillment. The mind has it's place, but when it comes to fulfillment and truth, it is totally the wrong tool, it just gets tangled in more and more webs of theory's and ideas, it is finite trying to understand the infinite. When this busy mind is still, it is then that we can start to feel what is real within us, something that has been covered up over the years we have forgotten where to look for it, we have used our brain so much, that we have lost contact with that calling that comes from within us, but we can connect, we just need to find it inside.

Quantum Gravity Research institute. Please interview those guys. Regards.

RLK, Which scientist did you interview who was in Iceland?

Thanks for the video. Scientific method may have its limits in what it could ultimately tell us about nature and the universe, but it is extremely good at what is was designed to do in the first place. Perhaps we need a new methodology than science to explore the emergent. Really looking forward to discussions around emergence going from 'yes or no' to 'what, how and why'. Otherwise it feels like the discussion stays entirely philosophical and there's nothing groundbreaking to be expected from the 'emergent' perspective - science, when borne, was designed and defined to leave out the subjective. It was meant to be a tool we could use to understand nature, not a weapon to attack with or a fortress to be defended. So my problem with the emergence view is that, it never gives the satisfaction, doesn't cure my human curiosity, regardless of whether emergency is fundamental or not. Every time I hear something like 'the whole is more than its parts' with these examples, my mind keeps asking the question - so what next? And, now how do we go about the whole, where does the path lead us? Please, enlighten me.

Too many and loud commercial breaks spoil the presentation

If strict reductionists eventually achieved a complete understanding of the house through complete understanding of the bricks, wouldn't that itself be an emergent understanding?

Anyone who believes this will have a good foundation for thinking that the stage actor is an emergent property of the curtain.

Engineers know they have to study material composition in order to construct structures that might collapse under their own weight.

Wetness emerging from quantum mechanical properties of water is nothing at all like inner subjective experience emerging from quantum mechanics, which gives absolutely nothing beyond a precise description of how stuff moves around.

To put it simply...the universe is the way it is and you have to deal with it. This particular universe has these particular laws and everything within is the way it is due to those laws. It just so happens that the things within are complex enough to interest millions if not billions of great minds throughout history to study them. The statement above is pretty much as far back as we can go at the present time. Otherwise you get into the why and how about the universe itself.

This is the same question as the question of free will.

Might energy add new levels together or on top of one another for emergences? At some point energy develops ability to direct it's own emergences?

An equation needs data, a context to be applied to. Reductionists ignore the obligation to apply the fruits of their labor. We need scientists to model analytical "inverse physics" equations that tell you what input is required to produce some outcome. This has happened in isolated incidents, like programs that generate optical lenses and computer circuits. Other disciplines don't have tools like that usually due to funding or computational complexity. We need a better, analytical "inverse physics" than brute force (human design, machine learning, trial and error)

16:59 Nature had milions of years to develop, and see what our processors look like today, and how they looked just 50 years ago.

We can know all there is about the physical laws of the universe but that doesn't explain why there is anything at all. that doesn't explain consciousness. My guess, which many will disagree with, is that consciousness gave rise to matter . From consciousness emerged the 'fine-tuning'..which in turn triggered evolution of both universe(s) and life itself. Therefore consciousness has ALWAYS existed.

What is the Present? A place where Time rests before continuing.

So it's all about the sequence or the position of atoms relative to each other which leads to different types of masterpieces of science. Ex- Human Brain, Fuel or the potatoes

Could simple rules come from energy? Do simple rules have a greater capacity to interact leading to greater complexity?

Is the Schroedinger equation an emergent property of Nothingness? Does Logic imply the Schroedinger equation, based on energy tautologically equaling kinetic plus potential energy? Does Absolute Nothing generate the Schroedinger equation, or a series of Schroedinger-like equations, one for each fundamental premise of logic; whose fluctuations create universes and multiverses?

"Downward Causation is real." ... Matter cannot exist without physical laws and constants first existing. Physical laws and constants cannot exist without mind / consciousness first existing. Mind / consciousness is Prime. Mind / Consciousness exists before matter. Mind / Consciousness sets in motion Downward Causation.

The electron has a role in consciousness.

If one could produce the most minimal form of life from arrangement of matter, it would settle a lot of philosophy (not all). I see it as conscious ignorance that people are more focussed on creating highest form of life, human level "intelligence" (known as stupidity in my view) rather than trying to start from the most simple form of life and intelligence.

❤️☁️❤️

Could energy provide the organization for a collection to have emergent property(s)?

15:20

"It can go only one way" "(lower level might be able to explain higher level, but not vice versa). Are we really sure of this? Consciousness -- a high level -- seeks to understand and manipulate lower levels, and sometimes to manipulate its own level even even higher levels (social structures). Thus creating new emergences. Penrose's ORT hypothesis suggests the further possibility that consciousness may determine quantum outcomes at the lowest level. Self-reference in Godel suggests a non-reducible level of mathematical consciousness. Self-reference in consciousness -- whether power-hungry drunken vicious circles as Hobbes and Hume and Bertrand Russell thought, or virtuous potency-generating circles as Hegel thought, or both -- may generate new levels. Consciousness makes us aware of reductionist laws including the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and motivates us to seek to overcome some of them. As you know, there are a lot of thoughts about how we can probably ultimately get around the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and live for an infinity of time as a species or as an intelligence. The possibilities go beyond life in real time to infinite timed life in virtual time or in other dimensions of time, and other theories of time as reversible. With the 2nd law around only for a couple centuries and trillions of years ahead of us (as long as we don't destroy ourselves), it's unlikely that the 2nd Law will stand forever. Time generates evolution - it is an emergent property of time. Evolution generates further emergences, by favoring any pattern that has greater capacity to perpetuate or reproduce itself. Emergence generates life as a form of self-reproducing and -perpetuating patterns. Life generates awareness, self-awareness, consciousness, self-reference, thought.. Thought generates deliberate efforts at perpetuation, search for higher principles, agonizing over whether we can ever find intrinsic justification or the good in itself, efforts to overcome constraints. Hugely successful efforts in the past, overcoming many constraints that had long been assumed to be eternal laws of the universe. From the ever-accelerating efforts to overcome past constraints, there are likely to emerge many hypothetical outcomes beyond the ones already achieved. These may include generation of multiverses on our own part, and reversals of or end runs around the 2nd law of thermodynamics.