Re: mystery and emergence

Posted by Russ Abbott on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/mystery-and-emergence-tp3599553p3599835.html

Nice explanation. This summer I was in Australia. While there we visited the Sydney aquarium and the land animal "zoo" next door. I found myself amazed at the enormous variety of kinds of life and the niches that they occupy. Even though I understand evolution and am firmly convinced that it's the right way to look at the world, I was still filled with wonder at what I saw. Perhaps mystery isn't the right word, but wonder and amazement come close.

Even quarks as we know them embody an inherent mystery -- besides how do they come to function the way they do. Our current theory of quarks includes probabilities and randomness. It seems to me that there is a mystery there all by itself. Attaching words like probability and random to that sort of behavior is less an explanationthen an acknowledgment that there is no explanation -- which is essentially what a mystery is. And that is built right into the theory. It's not even a meta-question like how come quarks (or strings, or whatever) operate according to whatever theory/laws describe how they operate.

-- Russ

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Kim Sorvig <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick and all --

I would have to say that many mysterious phenomena are not emergent.

 

It takes one missing piece of information in an otherwise linear deductive process to create "a mystery."  The cat jumps into the window and knocks over a kachina that strands there, while I am away.  At least for a while, it is a mystery how that happened.  It is even more likely to be mysterious if the cat's behavior is atypical, or if I don't see a path for it to get from the floor to the window.

 

Secondly, there are mysteries that I doubt we will ever be able to reduce, with certainty, either to a linear explanation or to one involving emergence.  Esamples "What preceded the Big Bang?" or a religious version thereof;   "What is outside the Universe and how can it have a boundary?";  or  "Where did quarks get the ruleset under which it can be shown that they operate?"    There are a small number of baseline existential questions in which mystery is both inherent and irreducible.  I know that assertion will get some of the true Rationalists going, and I am not looking for a big fight.  Such questions are very few in number, but I believe there are a half-dozen or so that we are obliged to 'fudge' (that is, give operational definitions to them) in order to proceed with rational analysis of the remaining 99.99% of inquiry.

 

Thus, from either a simple or sublime perspective, there can be mystery without emergence.

 

Last but perhaps not least -- and a reason for not making mystery an essential part of a definition of emergence -- mystery is an experiential quality more than an "objective" phenomenon.  We can retain the sense of wonder and of mystery even after we have analytically understood how some phenomenon happens.  Mystery is a willingness to remain astonished, and as such is not discrete enough to define other terms.

 

My two-cents worth -- which are bound to mystify some folks!

Kim Sorvig

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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org