Long Argument Part 3: Emergence considered further
I’ve been thinking more and more about emergence, and I just ordered a few books to further my knowledge (admittedly skimpy). Here’s how I conceive it now. When I speak of emergence, I mean "strong emergence":
Systems can have qualities not directly traceable to the system’s components, but rather to how those components interact, and one is willing to accept that a system supervenes on its components, then it is difficult to account for an emergent property’s cause. These new qualities are irreducible to the system’s constituent parts (Laughlin 2005). The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This view of emergence is called strong emergence.
Collapsing the story a bit, we see something like this:
Big Bang
First emergences: the four fundamental forces
Second emergence: quarks, electrons, neutrinos
Third emergence: hadrons (e.g., protons and neutrons)
Fourth emergence: atomic nuclei
Fifth emergence: atoms (hydrogen and helium)
Sixth emergence: stars and galaxies
Seventh emergence: the elements are created (via novae and supernovae) and chemical compounds: what we normally call "matter"
Eighth emergence: living things
Each emergence sees new entities come into being from the "stuff" (energy or forces or strings or whatever) that was present, though the properties and characteristics of each emergent cannot be predicted from what went before. Moreover, emergent phenomena are embedded in the matrix of their creation: each emergent uses what has previously emerged to create a new entity from the old parts.
For example, the quarks, electrons, and neutrinos that emerged were acted up by the four fundamental forces and followed the universal principle of everything following the path of least resistance. The regular matter—the elements and chemical compounds that we recognize as "matter"—is built upon and from the quarks and electrons and neutrinos that first emerged, though the quarks are now bound into particles and no longer exist separately, but they are the basis and are still present.
Similarly the living things that emerged on Earth still incorporate and use the previous emergents: the fundamental forces continue working as they always have, matter/energy continues following the path of least effort, but the way these things are now organized, into a self-replicating unit, is new. And with self-replication (passing along the characteristics of the originator, with occasional differences) and limited resources, evolution begins inevitably. Evolution simply describes how different patterns of replicators have different success rates, with the more successful creating more copies. No thought, plan, design, or will is present: the living things as well as the matter of which they are made all follow the path of least effort.
In a nutshell, the matter/energy and forces we observe in the universe today are a result of emergence from the Big Bang: simply following natural processes brought them into being from that initial event. First to emerge (in a sense) was physics, then chemistry, and lately biology.
No one doubts that simple animals and plants and fungi have no free will at all. Although they live and reproduce, their life follows the same trajectory and principle as matter and energy: the path of least effort. This is not to say that the result is simple. As I mentioned earlier, even pebbles in interstellar space have orbits of sufficient complexity as to be beyond computation: complexity and chaotic systems exist at every level of existence, the natural outcome of systems in which every part affects and is affected by every other part. But nonetheless, those arise from each component at every level following the path of least effort and interacting in the various modes possible.
Next I want to write about the emergence of humanity, the ninth great emergence.
You are on a great run, and I am learning a lot. Don’t let these remarks throw you off course.
Can you give some evidence of “the universal principle of following the path of least resistance?” You use this often and I do not see that it makes any real contribution.
Hume famously said:”power and necessity are qualities of perception, not of objects – felt by the soul and not perceived externally in bodies.”
It seems to me that whatever is, is: whether it came about by the path of least resistance or not is unknowable and not relevant.
It is possible that many “emergent” phenomenon may have been created but did not survive and are therefore not observed by us. .
Bob Slaughter
3 September 2010 at 12:38 pm
We certainly know from physics that matter and energy follow the path of least effort, from bodies falling to the course of electrons in matter, circuits, and lighting. Light follows the principle, as observed before. When you look at phenomena and search for the reason “why,” it seems always to be that the phenomena are explained by things acting under the principle of least effort. This even applies to living things. E.g., the reason the flower faces the sun is explained by reactions within the plant (chemical and physical) the follow the principle of least effort. It’s not as if the things have a choice, after all.
We do live in a chaotic universe, of course, and a falling rock (following the path of least effort) might be struck by, say, a meteor that knocks it off course, but the meteor is also following the path of least effort, and the paths of the two from the moment of impact follow the least resistance—otherwise, of course, they would have to have some sort of “will” to take a path that is more effort than the path of least resistance. Water never flows uphill, after all: always it seeks the path of least resistance.
So also in chemical reactions: the various atoms and energies and forces involved all take the path of least resistance—which is how we get physical laws, by describing such paths mathematically.
More info here. But just think about what it takes to turn aside from the path of least resistance and go instead along a path that offers more resistance. Can objects/forces do this? No.
LeisureGuy
3 September 2010 at 1:27 pm
Look at it this way: if something does NOT follow the path of least resistance, it is doing work and the energy (and intention) must come from somewhere. If you abandon intention, then everything simply follows to most efficient (least-effort) path. As we delve deeper into microbiology, we find (for example) that plants do what they do because their components (down to the atomic level and beyond) are all following the path of least resistance, based on the various interactions (chemical, heat, physical, electrical, and so on) going on within it.
LeisureGuy
3 September 2010 at 1:36 pm
Thanks for your long discourse and 3rd party reference. No doubt most (if not all) things appear to have followed a path of least resistance. This seems no different than asserting that things are compelled by their causes. The elevation of “path of least resistance” to a principle seems to me to be an unnecessary elaboration that does not add to your argument.
Bob Slaughter
3 September 2010 at 3:37 pm
It goes by various names: path of least resistance, path of least effort, path of minimal time (for light), and so on. I elevate it to a principle because so far it seems universally true in all sorts of phenomena, from the quark and gluon level through particles, atoms, lumps of matter, stars, galaxies, whatever: everything is (instantly and automatically) finding the path of least effort through all the myriad influences. As you say, it follows almost automatically from all phenomena bending to their causes and passing along the effects.
LeisureGuy
3 September 2010 at 4:05 pm