Physics Guy wrote: ↑Sat Dec 04, 2021 7:06 pm
honorentheos wrote: ↑Fri Nov 26, 2021 8:50 pm
So certain aspects of emergence as simply acknowledging systems self organize according to natural law, anyone with even a middle school science education has some comprehension of how emergence works. But yeah, when it comes to the spooky bits of why we get life out of chemistry or consciousness out of biology, there is something magical about it. The universe is cool like that.
As long as it seems magical, I think one simply hasn't understood it. What Carrol says is quite true: the microscopic rules determine everything, but that doesn't help us understand complicated things, any more than simply understanding the rules of chess helps one understand the current world championship games.
On the other hand, however, whatever higher-level concepts that one might invoke to understand high-temperature superconductivity—or whatever—must also themselves be derivable from the microscopic rules. Until one can fill in those dots, accepting the higher-level concepts as independent axioms means leaving the problem unsolved and the phenomenon not understood.
And that we may have to do, because our brains are quite crude. I'd rather admit that as a failure, though, than try to spin it as a wonderful example of emergence.
That may all be so. I'm certainly no physicist and find writings from, say Carrol or Lee Smolin, enlightening without being able to originate the results they present. That's the nature of boards like this, I suppose. The discussion above isn't saying anything, though, other than one may find the unknown aspects of the universe fascinating or one may find them to be a failure of ours as a species to rationally explain everything or, by default, give that mystery the name, "God" and play along with a cultural myth formed out of a Semitic tribe's subjugation to multiple empires which eventually subverted one of those empires through a pretty appealing cultural meme...or whatever.
Let's say I have been using "emergence" in the same way you use "choice" and then what?
I see the problem below not being with my position but your understanding of it based on how you reflect it back to me:
The laws of nature that we know would allow uncountably many different universes from the one we have. Postulating that all of them are in fact somehow realised, and the one we have is just the one in which we happen to be, seems so un-parsimonious that I really don't think it counts as an explanation.
No one but MG argued that all possible universes are being realized in order for us to be in the one that happens to allow for us to exist. Again, magic, failure of our crude brains, call it what you will, the fact is ALL WE CAN BE CERTAIN OF is that the universe we exist in has the traits needed for human beings to have evolved. That could just be luck, it could be there are infinite universes that exist so of course we are in the one that we can be in because, well, that's not saying anything. Saying all we can be certain of is that the universe we find ourselves in is also one where we CAN exist is as parsimonious as it gets, to the point of being tautological. But using it as the end of an argument is disingenuous. If you then take the unknown or perhaps even unknowable explanation for that and then say we need to either have a solid explanation for "US" rather than "NOT US" or we must simply be ok with the mystery of it, we agree. But if we want to give one suggestion for why that is over the other, we've but begun to investigate the issue, not resolved it.
So here's what matters: Claiming fine tuning is proof of God is asserting it demonstrates divine intention. If one says that isn't true, because our existence is explained by fine tuning, period, that's dodging the reality of our situation where the majority characteristics of the universe don't align with other traits one should expect from a universe "fine tuned" for the evolution of human beings as a central purpose of the existence and form of said universe. Sure, the universe "selected for" human beings. But that's not "intention". It's one result among countless other selected for results.
Claiming fine tuning works for religion is a claim of intention being evidence for favoring the selection of as an intended end of the existence of said universe...and demands you then proceed to back that up with further examples.
Or, it's unknown. Magic. Cool. A failure of our crude meat brains. Whatever. But it's either the result of intention or it's not. And if it is, one ought to be able to see more evidence for it than the one that says, "Hey, things could have been different and we wouldn't have existed. So, the universe must have "selected" for us in a way that uses selection/choice to hint at 'favors' that abuses the way natural laws 'favor' certain outcomes over others by the nature of starting conditions having limited preferred outcomes...but without hidden intelligent intention behind them."
I don't know what you mean by "just an example of chaos theory-like delicate differences leading to broad diversity of outcomes". Chaos really exists, and most dynamical systems are chaotic. The fact that tiny differences in initial conditions would have made a very different universe is precisely a matter of chaos. Unless there is a basic error in the whole scientific picture of natural law, as differential equations with arbitrary initial conditions, the universe we actually have must be incredibly fine-tuned. Even if the equations themselves are not fine-tuned, either because the ones we have are somehow inevitable or because different equations would be just as good, the initial conditions must be.
We agree on chaos dynamics being real. Of course infinitesimal variances lead to fundamentally varied outcomes. I think you are shadow boxing an argument I'm not making, to be honest.