Bill

This whole business has been around for a long time. In my opinion, the key word is "emergence" (and its relatives). Matter assembles itself by chance and "life" emerges. Life evolves, and a brain is created, and out of the brain, "mind" emerges. These emergent qualities seem to prevent philosophical understanding because our brains (minds; whatever) seem to balk at the whole idea of "emergent properties." How can you put together any number of pieces of "matter" and get an emergent property called "life," anyway? How can living matter so organize itself to produce a "mind," anyway? And why is the human mind so privileged with respect to all of the other animal minds we have studied, anyway, with our emergent quality of "symbolic thinking" (the quality described by Terrance Deacon as being the main distinction between humans and animals in his book <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=625" target="_blank">The Symbolic Species</a>).

I think that Dan Dennett's idea of "design space" is the best metaphor for understanding emergent qualities. The so-called "Laws of Nature" establish a "design space" within which things can operate. At the initial conditions of our "Big Bang" universe, all that exists is space, time, and energy. Matter doesn't appear within the "design space" of our "Big Bang" universe until some number of years after the "Big Bang." Matter is thus an "emergent quality" of organized energy. (Actually, the process that creates matter from energy appears to be related to the overall cooling of the universe as it expands.)

Thus, the whole business appears to relate to the idea of a necessity for certain specific conditions to exist before an "emergent quality" can appear. The universe must cool to some specific degree before matter can emerge from the surrounding energy. Matter must organize itself in some particular way before life can emerge from matter. A brain must evolve in some particular way before mind emerges from the brain. And the brain and mind must co-evolve (Deacon's term) in some particular way before a human-type symbolic mind can emerge.

Are humans the end result of this process, or just another step along the path to future (greater) emergent qualities? It is impossible for us to say with any definiteness that the so-called "Laws of Nature" (or "design space") will or will not permit any further evolution and the development of additional layers of "emergent qualities." We are only now just beginning to grasp the true nature of these questions. Answers would thus seem to lie a long distance into the future.

== Bill

Wyrdsmyth

Mind is to matter

as

Software is to hardware.

John Page

Responding to point 3 - I have no problem with a theoretical model of the mind that employs protein manipulation, other molecular interaction or even atomic and sub-atomic mechanics to support certain aspects of the mind's function. I think our current level of ignorance should remind us to keep open-minded.

Responding to point 4 - This begs the question of what manipulates the matter which manipulates the mind that manipulates matter (ad nauseum). To understand what's really going on we need to break out of the current paradigm and, as I think Bill is suggesting, investigate how the physical processes of sentient beings support abstract thought processes.

Cheers!

mturner

**
Hi Bill;

I believe that it is clear that 'emergence' is a statement about the quantum leaps in form experienced in the universe, but form is different from substance. Emergence is what happens, in general terms, but how does it happen, and why does it happen? Is mass/energy the basic substance, or is it an emergent form of a truly basic non-physical substance?

Emergence seems useful as a tropic, intuitive, descriptor, but what does it really stand for? What is the actual dynamic driving these quantum leaps? Does emergentism tell us, or is emergence merely a catch-all term for the inexplicable, and thus essentially vacuous?

To me, there is no Mechanist accounting for emergent phenomena, which leaves a big hole in Materialism.

pax,

mturner

Bill

As a believer in string theory (at least, at present), I would assert that strings are the "truly basic non-physical substance" you refer to. In string theory, both matter and energy emerge from the equations that describe the vibrating strings. We are just not far enough along in the development of the theory so as to be able to actually write down those equations in full...... this is, of course, a real problem for those who would insist upon exactitude in a response. The word "emergent" does seem to be used in circumstances where causality is not apparent, and thus I would agree that "emergent" can be a bit of "a catch-all term for the inexplicable," as you suggest. However, I would argue that it is not also "vacuous" because it does assert that an as yet undiscovered causal relationship does apply.

We have made some progress in establishing some parts of the causal relationships at each such interface point, so yet again, I would argue that the use of the word "emergent" is not "vacuous," but rather an admission of ignorance while, at the same time claiming that clear evidence exists pointing towards and eventual causal understanding at some point in the future.

Einstein described (at a high level) how matter and energy "emerge" from one another (the famous E=mc**2). More remains to be accomplished, for sure.

And while we can't quite get to the point of creating life out of raw chemicals (yet), we are to the point of understanding the underlying chemical structure in excruciating detail, so that it would appear to be merely a matter of developing appropriate synthesis processes so as to allow the first totally artificial life form to be created.

Another confusion is apparent at the interface between "living" and "non-living." In fact, the exact boundary between "living" and "non-living" is somewhat arbitrarily defined. The most popular definition leaves a virus on the side of the "non-living" while a bacterium is on the side of the "living." Still, it is difficult to agree that something as complex as a virus is merely an inanimate collection of atoms; an arrangement of atoms into molecules and molecules into a virus "device" of some sort.

But, philosophically speaking, the very fact that this interface point is not at all obvious leads us to believe that the distinction may, in fact, not be very real. Thus, the idea of "life" as an "emergent" quality of matter and energy may not in fact represent any real qualitative change. Once this fact is grasped, the idea that this is an entirely natural evolutionary development is far easier to accept.

The further we delve into these matters, the more we see the huge complexities involved in each of them, but also (and at the same time), we see that they are all appear to be eventually explicable as entirely causal relationships. Thus, there is truly no real mystery to any "emergent" quality. It does represent an area of human ignorance at this point in time. But we surely do have enough clues to be able to predict with a substantial hope of vindication that a wholly causal explanation will eventually be forthcoming.

== Bill

excreationist

Well there was an experiment like this - I think it involved worms learning something and being ground down and fed to other worms. But a possible explanation for the transfer of "memory" is that the chemical messengers (hormones) were just transferred. And I think there was another experiment where a mother rat was made to be fearful or something, and the unborn baby learnt this. This would just be the emotion-related hormones being absorbed by the unborn baby.

Ierrellus

Very useful insights have been been posted here! I agree with the concept of emergent qualities. Any organism I've ever read about begins in a condition of physical simplicity and grows or matures into a certain degree of physical complexity.

Yes, a new paradigm is needed. We have here a theory in search of a model. Perhaps the following idea may prove useful:

Extraterrestrials land their spacecraft on the White House lawn. After calling all military personnel to readiness, the president calls for an emergency meeting with his chief advisers. He asks them how we could communicate with the aliens once they decided to disembark.

It was decided that since the aliens arrived in a spacecraft, assumed to be constructed by them, they knew geomety and physics. It was also decided that they must be considerably smarter than us to have figured out space travel over such distances.

It was suggested that since the beings could construct a craft, they would think symbolically about what is other than themselves. Communication with them, then, would be a matter of translation of symbols among beings with identical mental capacities.

Ierrellus

Bill

You've probably either read or seen Contact, by Carl Sagan. Now try out <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=661" target="_blank">Beyond Contact</a> by Brian S. McConnell. It explores those ideas in depth.

== Bill

Bill

Whether they are simple hormones or the transfer of more complex chemical(s) in some sort of a related fashion, it is clear that some kind of physical transfer is taking place when memories are moved from one organism to another. These experiments (and some are pretty gross) only serve to attempt to isolate the specific chemical memory retainer in any given species. Worms have very simple memory mechanisms (presumably), while rats are not tremendously different from any other mammals (other than, perhaps, humans) in their memory capabilities.

I should mention at this point that this is all somewhat controversial as it amounts to a resurrection of Lamarckianism (the transmittal of "acquired characteristics"). Other than for mutations (which are not really "acquired characteristics"), the DNA isn't altered during the lifetime of the parent organism. So, there cannot be any genetic transmission of acquired characteristics from parent to offspring at any point during the lifetime of the organism.

So, I think that the point of this sort of research is to attempt to locate some other physical mechanism (non-genetic) for the transmission of "acquired characteristics" from parent to offspring. From what I've read, there has been some success in this regard, and perhaps the experiments of this sort are along those lines.

== Bill

Ierrellus

Thanks, Bill, for recommending McConnell. Sounds like an informative read!

I wish my memory would work on details. I remember a PBS program about birds in a certain city who had learned to peck off the little cardboard lids on milk containers which were left at doorsteps. Something happened to cause those birds to abandon that area. Decades later, and after these birds had known generations of progeny, the birds returned to the area. The descendents of the former birds "knew" how to remove the lids from the milk jars!

Please elucidate on findings of non-genetic transfer of the engram.

Ierrellus