Determinism Is Self Defeating

[Angrboda]

It sounds to me like there are several different concepts of emergent in play, including complex, unpredictible, irreducible, and chaotic.

I rather tire of people who don't understand specifically what they mean by the term substituting the word 'emergent' for whatever it is they do mean as a one-size-fits-all obfuscator. I'm not even sure that emergence is a valid concept, myself, but that discussion can await another day.



While the brain is incredibly complex, unlike physical systems for which Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the mathematics of chaotic systems apply, there is no obvious reason to consider the behavior of the brain and nervous system as not being predictable in principle. And it is in this latter, scientific sense that it must be considered, not in a philosophical sense, or in the sense of absolute proof. We don't have absolute proof of any natural law according to the standard of perfect predictability; that is not how science works. Science formulates a theory, novel predictions from that theory are made, the predictions are tested, and they either corroborate or fail to corroborate the theory. Uniformitarianism is an assumption, but not one without support. We need not perform the Michelson-Morley experiment millions of times in millions of places to "prove" that there is no ether and the speed of light is independent of momentum. If you have reason to believe that the laws of physics do not apply to a specific phenomena or system under examination, the onus is on you to propose a test which will show this to be the case and then performing it. Nobody is under any obligation to pay any attention to your idiotic warblings if you just toss up your hands and panic, "Oh my great gods! It's all so complex! I just don't understand it! It must be magic!"