Scientists uses both of these to explain everything and to understand nothing! Here, I am going to show them that they are contradictory, and so compel them to choose one! Emergent property is said to be a property present in the whole, but which is absent in the parts! So it is something worse than the following scenario: if you interrogate each and every American, you find that non of them like war. But together, they make up a war mongering whole! No! It is saying that even during a war time, it can be possible that the individual soldiers are not fighting at all! The war is fought by the whole army, but the individual soldiers are at peace with each other! This illogicality is needed to save what they call 'physicalism', as I will elucidate! Of course they cannot explain how properties can possibly emerge. It is pure sorcery!
You have probably been told that 'you are just a collection of chemical reactions'. So your beleifs are reducible to chemical reactions. But if this is so, then logics demands that your beliefs should be able to affect chemical reactions! They don't like this, of course. So they build an illogical bulwark! 'Beleif' must be a property of a large ensemble of particles but which the individual particles lacks! A large number of particles 'beleive' but each particle is not beleiving!
Of course they donnot use this criteria consistently. A large number of particles forming up the macroscopic objects 'moves' and so this drove scientist to think that even subatomic particles do move. Infact they tried to understand the motion of macroscopic objects by trying to analyse how atoms behaves! So the choice of what is or what is not emergent is arbitrary! It depends on the scientist's own prejudices and what he subjectively want it included or not in the fundamental world! It is not about understanding at all, since if we say that properties surreptitiously emerge in macroscopic world in ways that no one can understand, then of what use is there in trying to analyse the subatomic particles?
When it suits them, of course, they reduce you into subatomic particles. This is the main argument of the famous physicist termed Sean Carroll when he says 'the idea of soul contradicts the known particle physics'. Then some other physicists nodes like numbskulls as if the physicist has given a decisive blow against the 'soul' idea! How can you conclude this, if admittedly, the brain has some other properties that is not present in the properties of subatomic particles? Might this other property, identified in the whole brain, but which is absent in the constituent particles, be caused by the soul, incarnate in the brain as a whole but not in the individual paurticles? How can you tell this, if admittedly, physicists cannot deduce properties of macroscopic objects from the behaviour of microscopic particles?
'Emergence' is an organized ignorance! It is an 'envelope' with the word 'knowledge' written on it but with ignorance inside it! It was concocted by people who have a problem with simply saying 'they don't know'. A physicist cannot explain how macroscopic world behaves using his pet block game of shuffling subatomic particles, but he wishes to convince people that he is getting close to 'theory of everything'! To receive a lot of fundings, he needs to convince you that you can understand everything by gawking at whizzing particles in an ever growing fatter accelerators! But if you ask him to explain how a speck of dust moves using the knowledge he gained from the accelerator, he get stuck after some 3 steps! So he tells you that the speck of dust has 'emergent property', meaning that its property is entirely something else absent in the particles he was gawking at, and yet the particles makes up the dust!
There is no property that is present in an ensemble of components but that is absent in all the individual components, unless it comes from an additional thing 'incarnate' in the system, but not in the components! 'Emetgentism' is falsehood! Consider a floating ship. You may think that since Steel, sometimes, sinks, then a ship, floating as a whole, can be made up of sinking components, or pieces of steel. Such is the superficial observations that leads someone to talk of 'emergence'. But 'sinking' and 'floating' should be understood as sloppy concepts that should be better termed 'downard force being greater than upward force' of 'upward force being greater than downward force'. Then everything sinks to some extend, or if you like, everything floats to some extend. 'Floating' means the force of water is greater than gravity. So each and every particle experiences the force of water. Each particle is fully capable of floating, just as the whole ship. For insance, if gravity was weak, as in some planet, then the peaces of steel would float. Each atom experiences an 'upward' force which together, they sum up to be greater than the 'downward' force, and then the whole thing floats. The same way should be in any other so called 'emergent' property. The properties must exists in the components, but only in different ways or amounts. The combination happens to them in a peculiar way so that the properties sums up to manifest the property hidden in the components.
The need to invoke 'emergence' actually rather underscores the limitation of knowledge we might gain by studying things in isolation. We cannot know everything about the electron by studying it inside an accelerator! We cannot know of things that the electron is ABLE to do, but which it DOES NOT do it inside accelerators. It sucks for a particle physicist who wants to believe that ever bigger accelrators is a key to knowing and understanding everything! But it is true! Furthermore, we cannot know if there are extremely small forces acting on the electrons which cannot be detected in accelerators, but which we can, in an ensemble of gazillions of electrons! Take for instance gravity. The equations of quantum electrodynamics ignores gravity, and yet they cannot detect anything wrong with those equations, by studying them in accelerators. Only when we see large groups of particles in the macroscopic world do we notice that there is, infact, another force of nature! (But physicist did not say that gravity is emergent simply because, unlike consciousness, etc, the current prejudice allows a physicist to regard gravity as fundamental existent in nature!).
But how might we 'hide' mental behaviours etc in the subatomic world like we can, gravity?. In the latter, gravity simply sums up so it becomes big enough to detect it in a macroscopic object. But the mental behaviour etc is more like 'vector sum', meaning merely heaping matter together does not necesarily manifest the behaviour. So it is more like magnetism. In magnetism, the tiny magets must all face the same direction. So we might suggest a similar thing in mental behaviour, and other similar so called 'emergent' phenomenon.
So it is a mistake to think that an electron inside the brain etc will behave in the same way it does inside an accelerator. But it is even a greater mistake to say that this behaviour is due to a property termed 'emergence', as if to say that 'we realy know what causes the unique behaviour and guess what, it is emergence'. 'Emergence' is a term for 'it arises in ways we don't understand'! It is not an understanding of any sort! Instead, scientists should be open to the possibility that electrons are under influence of forces that are too tiny to detect say in accelerators but which they sum up, in some way, in large ensembles, so that the large ensembles manifests behaviours that seems absent in the individual electrons. Or in short, acknowledge our ignorance rather than using words like 'emergence' that seems to sound like we understand what is happening when, in fact, we don't!
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