(November 23, 2021 at 1:29 pm)Alan V Wrote: The emergent position (as contrasted with reductionism) is that there exists both bottom-up and top-down causation. Brains create their own information which is often as causal as any more direct physical cause of behaviors. This means that potential causes are sometimes selected and not merely added together as in a mathematical equation.
(November 23, 2021 at 11:13 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote: For the brain, it needs to work in a certain way, it needs to be logically and this means having rules, having circuits, which means it is deterministic.
Free will decisions are virtual, yet still causal. They are in addition to what is merely determined on a less complex level. That is what makes them emergent.
I am saying all this to contrast the perspectives of emergent materialism with reductionistic (deterministic) materialism. Science has not decided which is correct yet. Scientists and philosophers are still arguing over the issues, and many have strong opinions one way or the other. I have read books expressing both perspectives.
For more of an overview, see for instance Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy.
How would determinism prevent emergent properties from existing, or the brain from making decisions? Emergent properties are still based on a physical framework.
Yes, at a level of complexity, it is best to discuss causes in terms of high level abstractions, and not chemistry. In an information processing system, information is a cause, and in a re-entrant system, abstractions build to become their own causes of future choices.
This would all still happen, whether or not determinism is true. As it happens, it is likely that determinism is not true, because there is quantum randomness, but how does randomness improve the ability of a system to process information (actually it might - stochastic averaging may be part of the operation)?
I'm with you - emergence is a fascinating field, and because of chaos, it becomes impossible (even in principle) to trace choices in a brain back to reducible causes. It would be impossible to "debug" it back to primary causes -- the causes exist in the form of beliefs and preferences, on top of beliefs and preferences. I read that emergent states can always be modeled by a strange attractor in a chaotic system. The attractor becomes effectively a new cause.
