Re: mystery and emergence
Posted by
Kim Sorvig on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/mystery-and-emergence-tp3599553p3600114.html
Thanks Russ -
I'd agree that probability and "randomness" are a
couple of the questions I called baseline existential ones, as well as being
"fudges", particularly the over-used and much-abused term "random."
Despite having rather specific meanings to mathematicians and logicians, random
is still an inherently myterious and in my view suspect term. In practice
if not by intent, anything that 'Western' science can't describe succinctly
and/or predict is called random, and is the rationalist's equivalent of the
Magnum Mysterium. Personally, I think that is essnetial and wonderful,
though I know it insults some rationalists to their core. As I see, it,
rationalism is no-wise diminished by admitting that there are certain questions
outside its scope, and that making an assumption yea or nay about a couple such
unanswerables is sine-qua-non for logical investigation of the world at
large.
Emergence iself, it seems to me, is such a
mystery. We see the emergent cohesion of a bunch of dots on a screen,and
we know the underlying ruleset -- but we don't actually have an explanation for
what constitutes 'cohesion' either visually or functionally. It's a
mystery!
Kim S
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, September 07, 2009 4:55
PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] mystery and
emergence
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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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org