I’ll see your Phineas Gage…

            If you’ve done any reading or listened to any talks about the “mind-brain” issue, and especially about the scientific rejection of the concept of a “soul”, there’s one name that you’ve probably heard mentioned in literally every book or talk about the topic.  It’s not the name of a scientist or philosopher or even a theologian.  I bet this never gave much thought to the mind-brain problem.  He certainly didn’t know any neuroscience.  Yet there he is, a central character in the whole discussion.

             His name?  Phineas Gage.  Mr. Gage was a railroad construction foreman who lived in the early- to mid-1800’s.  What makes him famous is a work accident that he experienced.  Specifically, he was tamping down some explosives with a rod and there was an explosion that drove the rod through his eye/cheek and exited the top of his skull, destroying a significant portion of his left frontal lobe.  Miraculously, he survived the accident and lived for more than 10 years after that accident and was able, after some time, to return to employment as a stagecoach driver.  Importantly, some of the physicians who treated him recorded the events in detail and he became rather well-known even during his lifetime.  Key to the “existence of the soul” issue, it was reported that his personality changed significantly after the accident.  This seems to be the first clear evidence that damage to the brain could cause changes to personality, thus localizing personality to the physical brain rather than in some external “soul.”[1]  There is a lot more to the story and a lot known about the whole situation, but I’ll let you read that elsewhere on the internet. 

              This one single event is often given as the definitive “nail in the coffin” for the concept of an immaterial soul or mind or any such thing.  Here’s an example of the finality with which Mr. Gage’s case is presented:

 

“Phineas Gage’s case shattered the myth of an immaterial soul, showing that personality, identity, and decision-making come from the brain. Neuroscience confirms this—damage the brain, and you change. Dualism fails to explain how a soul could control neurons...Unsettling or not, the evidence is clear: we are our brains—nothing more.”  [From an internet post by someone identified as Theitant]

 

              This is just one example and you’ll find this same sentiment expressed in many ways repeatedly throughout the literature.  I mean, it’s obvious isn’t it?  Phineas Gage experienced severe damage to the frontal lobe of his brain and his whole personality changed.  Presumably, if he had an immaterial soul, it would not have been damaged by the very physical spike that passed through his brain.  If personality was determined by the soul, then his personality should have been unaffected by damage to the brain.  Thus, the obvious conclusion is that our personality arises in our physical brain and has nothing to do with a soul.  And, further, if the soul doesn’t have anything to do with our personality, then why even hypothesize the existence of a soul?  Any intelligent person should realize that the brain is all there is – there is no soul and never was.  

              Not so fast.  I have two points I’d like to bring up about this “open and shut” case against the soul.

              First, there seems to be a very simple analogy that calls into question the jump to the conclusion that is made from the Gage case.  I will use the analogy of a radio, which, granted, was not invented for another 50 years after Gage’s accident.  A battery-powered radio is a very cool device, especially if you didn’t know how it works.  Let’s say you lived in Gage’s time and someone travelled back in time and gave you one of these magical devices.  It is a completely enclosed system.  You can hold it in your hands and you can easily see that nothing goes into, or out of, the radio.  But it produces sounds!  You can hear people talking through it and so on.  Where do those sounds come from?  Maybe you hypothesize that the radio has some kind of immaterial thing you call a “soul” that produces the sounds that you hear.  It’s nice to listen to music while you work so you decide to take it with you to your job on the railroad construction site.  While on the job, an unfortunate accident occurs in which an explosion causes a metal rod to be shot right through your radio.  Parts of the radio are missing, but somehow the radio is not totally destroyed.  It still makes sounds, but now the sounds are all staticky and you really can’t make out what people are saying.  The “personality” of your radio is totally different.

              Well, now your idea of a “soul” inside the radio is destroyed.  You know that the physical rod couldn’t have destroyed the radio’s immaterial soul, so the sounds coming from the radio must come from the physical components inside the box.  Obviously, the sounds must have been coming from little people and little bands playing inside the radio, and they got damaged by the spike.  It’s an open and shut case – there is no such thing as a “radio soul.”  Right?

              Of course that’s ridiculous.  The sound that a radio produces are generated at the radio station, which could be miles away, and they are transmitted through the air to the little radio you have next to you.  When the metal rod damages your radio, it doesn’t damage anyone or anything at the radio station.  The transmission is still occurring just fine.  But now the receipt of those signals is disrupted so that the sounds that your little radio produces are no longer decipherable.

              Isn’t that exactly analogous to the situation with Phineas Gage?  Obviously his soul was not damaged, but the instrument through which his soul acts – his brain – was damaged.  I fail to see how this is an open and shut case against the soul at all.  Yes, it does give us insight into how the soul might interact with the brain, in the same way that damage to the radio helps us to have some insight into what kind of transmissions the radio receives.  But there is no way that what happened to Phineas Gage “shatters the myth of an immaterial soul.”  I guess, to me, this analogy seems so obvious that I just don’t understand why the whole case is so famous.

              I’d like to dive into the radio analogy more deeply sometime in the future <here>, but for now I want to go to the second major issue I have with the conclusions drawn from Mr. Gage’s accident and change in personality.

              To explain my second major issue, I’m going to use another analogy.  Ultimately, in the end, I think that the Phineas Gage event actually helps to illustrate a very strong argument for the soul!  Let’s see if you agree.

              I’m going to use the analogy/example of human motor learning, which certainly does happen in the physical brain (and, in my opinion, not in the soul).  Think about learning to throw a baseball.  Just about anyone can learn to throw a baseball.  But how many people can throw 90 mph fastballs for strikes?  Well, there are a few, obviously, and most are highly paid pitchers in the Major Leagues.  But how did they learn to pitch so well?  Certainly, there are various paths that each pitcher has taken to get to where they are, but there is one universal that is never violated:  they all had to practice.  For years they had to practice.  By the time they get to the big leagues, they’ve probably thrown literally millions of pitches throughout their life.  Millions.  There is just no way around the slow process of motor learning via practice.

              What would you say if someone one day picked up a baseball for the first time and started throwing 90 mph pitches for strikes?  I’ll even grant you someone who has been very athletic throughout their life and runs marathons and lifts weights and so on.  That still doesn’t allow for someone to just pick up a baseball and instantly become a big league starter.  That could never happen.  And it doesn’t happen for a simple reason:  such learning requires neurons to learn the proper sequence of firing and for those patterns to get ingrained in the neural networks of the brain and spinal cord.  That is a slow process.  There’s no way to substantially speed that process up.  It takes the time it takes.

              Tragically, though, you could go the other way in an instant.  A major league pitcher could have a stroke or some other kind of trauma and the motor area of their brain could be damaged and they could instantly and permanently lose the ability to throw pitches.  In fact, they could end up with a paralyzed arm that couldn’t even hold a baseball, let alone throw it.  Although this would be tragic, we would not consider it anything out of the ordinary.  That’s how brain damage works.  It’s instant.  But there’s no reversing of brain damage instantly. 

              My point in this analogy/example is that instant changes in the brain occur in only one direction:  they always involve a destructive outcome.  Learned traits are lost.  Personality is changed for the worse.  Memories are lost.  Knowledge is lost.  In order to get constructive outcomes, the process of training the brain is painfully slow.  No one gets hit in the head and suddenly becomes a major league pitcher or a concert pianist or an Albert Einstein.  Negative physical changes in the brain can be instant.  Positive physical changes in the brain are not instant – they take days to weeks to years to happen.  That’s just the way the brain works. 

              With that backdrop in mind, let’s consider for a moment a few people who ought to be much more famous with respect to the mind/brain problem than Phineas Gage.  I’m talking about people who have transformed themselves instantly without brain damage.  If Phineas Gage is evidence that the brain controls our whole personality, and that blowing out a tenth of it causes an obvious change in the personality of an individual…well, then I present to you…

 

Saul of Tarsus,

              or

Augustine of Hippo,

              or

Clive Staples Lewis,

              or…

any of the many many other people who have had a radical, essentially instantaneous personality transformation without having a tenth of their brain damaged!

 

              In fact, their transformations – at least some of them – are more profound, more pronounced, and much better documented – than good old Mr. Gage. 

              Let’s just stick with the story of Saul of Tarsus for the moment – a story I have addressed previously <here>.  Saul was a learned, well-trained Jewish religious leader in the first century AD.  He had made it his goal in life to hunt down Christians and, if possible, get them sentenced to death.  But one day, on his way to hunt down more Christians in Damascus, he had a transforming episode that changed his entire view of life, faith, and life purpose.  The episode lasted less than a few minutes and yet the transformation was drastic and permanent.  He went on to become the leading proponent of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and wrote major sections of the Christian Bible.

              You may not agree with Saul/Paul’s life purpose, but you have to admit that this transformation was constructive (not destructive), instantaneous (relative to physiological brain changes), and permanent.  Compare that to what happened to Phineas Gage.  The personality changes to Mr. Gage required the total destruction of approximately a tenth of Mr. Gage’s brain.  Where was the explosion in Saul’s brain?  There was none.  After his transformation, he wrote literary works that stand with the best of all time.  If personality is totally determined by the physical brain, then what possible sudden rearrangement of neuronal connections could possibly have happened to cause such change in an individual’s personality?  A conservative estimate is that Mr. Gage completely lost at least 10 million neurons.  How many neurons had to suddenly change their firing patterns in Saul’s brain in order to achieve what was an even greater transformation in personality?

              I suspect that the only argument is to try to downplay the degree of transformation for these individuals.  Spare me.  The documentation regarding Mr. Gage is pretty good, but there is considerable disagreement about the extent of his change in personality.  On the other hand, I have books and books and books describing the transformation of the individuals I mentioned above.  And I could pull out an endless series of other people whose lives have been transformed in an instant.  Many of them are living right now – they could be your neighbors.  The evidence of their transformed lives is often etched in their bodies…tattoos on their skin, scars on their arms, etc. – all clear evidence that they once lived a very different life than they do now!  How does such instantaneous transformation happen in a physical brain?

              My hypothesis would be that the instantaneous transformation happened in the soul, which then became apparent as it worked through the brain.  If you could measure someone’s brain activity during one of these transformations, I don’t think you would find 10 million neurons suddenly changing their firing patterns.  That seems physically impossible, based on what we know of how brains work, how neurons learn.  Yes, the transformation becomes apparent through the actions that happen via the physical brain, but the initial instantaneous transformation occurs in the soul, not the brain.  If you have already rejected the idea of a soul long ago, you won’t agree with me; but at least you have to recognize that the rejection of the soul is premature until there is at least some reasonable hypothesis as to how a positive transformation, on the scale we observe in these cases, can happen in the physical brain alone.

              Maybe you will argue that personality can be transformed significantly by small, progressive changes in just a few neurons of the brain.  You might hypothesize that the neural networks in these individuals were at a tipping point, where a change in one neuron has a broad effect over a whole network of neurons.  Kind of like when the mechanical odometer in old cars would go from 99,999.9 back to all zeroes.  I don’t think I can disprove the “tipping point-waterfall cascade-odometer” hypothesis, but that seems extremely far-fetched and doesn’t fit the evidence we find in these transformed lives.  But, I guess you’ll have to stand confidently on that idea, as weak as it seems, because you surely wouldn’t want to admit that Mr. Gage isn’t the open and shut case against the soul that it is claimed it to be.

              So…I’ll see your Phineas Gage…and raise you Saul of Tarsus!

 

 

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[1] I find it hard to believe that this was the first evidence of the importance of the physical brain in shaping a person’s personality, but it is such a spectacular and shocking story that I think we can at least say that it was the first famous and broadly recognized evidence that the physical brain shapes personality.

Emergence 5 – Strong Emergence and Downward Causation

               I have been exploring the scientific and philosophical concept of “emergence” (starting <here>).  Summarizing my previous entries in a single sentence:  my contention is that when you really analyze what emergence means when it is used as an explanation for consciousness, it is actually just another word for consciousness, and thus explains nothing.  

              Previously we discussed the concepts of “weak emergence” and “strong emergence”.  “Weak emergence” refers to emergent properties that are, at least in principle, explainable by the underlying physical properties.  In my opinion, weak emergence is ubiquitous, but has nothing to do with human consciousness.  In “strong emergence”, the connection between the higher-level events and the underlying physics becomes strained and broken in some manner.  I previously made the claim that it is very misleading to use the terms “weak emergence” and “strong emergence” because it makes it sound like the two terms are related, whereas, in reality, the two terms have almost nothing in common.  I suggested that a better term for “strong emergence” was “beyond physics” (i.e. “metaphysics”) or, even more simply, “consciousness.” 

              I said there were two features that tend to get combined under the heading of “strong emergence”, and that these two features are also so different from one another that they should each be given a separate descriptive term – i.e. they shouldn’t be combined under a single term.  The first feature of strong emergence was that the emergent property cannot, even in principle, be explained by the underlying physics of the situation.  You can read that entry here.  In today's entry, it is now time to address the second feature of strong emergence.

              The second major feature often lumped under the term “strong emergence” is the idea that, in some manner (often undefined) the emergent property can exert a top-down effect on the underlying physics or the underlying fundamental particles.  This is often referred to as “downward causation.”[1] 

              It’s hard to come up with an example of downward causation, so I’ll start with something hypothetical.  Let’s say that the flow of water molecules could be described as an emergent property called “river”, and then “river”, by virtue of where it decides to flow, exerted an influence on the water molecules to make the water molecules move where the river “wanted” them go.  That would be an example of “downward causation”.  The emergent property of “river” would be obeying its own laws that are outside, or in addition to, the fundamental laws that govern the interactions of the water molecules.  In this case, if you applied the fundamental laws to all of your water molecules, you would find that they are not moving exactly as you predict because the river is exerting an outside influence on one or more of the water molecules (that influence is, in this hypothetical example, not itself included in the fundamental physics of the situation).  Now, that is not how it works with water molecules and rivers.  Rivers are defined by the collection and interaction of the water molecules that make it up, as well as the environment surrounding the water molecules (i.e. the molecules that make up the river bank and river bed).  There is no separate, distinct “intentional river flow” that exists apart from the fundamental principles of physics for the entire system.  Thus, in reality, river flow is actually an example of weak emergence, not strong emergence.

              You may wonder “well, what example could there possibly be of strong emergence?”  That is a valid question!  Frequently, people devolve to using consciousness as the primary (or only?) example of strong emergence, something I find pretty circular. 

              Sometimes people come up with examples of “emergence”, where, if you listen closely, you will realize that there is a human involved in their example somewhere along the way.  A conscious human.  Let me give you a very common example of this:  traffic flow as an emergent property of multiple cars driving on a road.  Traffic patterns arise (emerge) from these cars as they drive, patterns such as the stop-and-go waves that we get stuck in on our way to work.  You can’t just examine a single car driving along and predict the various kinds of traffic patterns that will emerge from a whole group of cars on the road.  Thus, traffic patterns are considered an emergent property.  Philosophers will then say “just like complex traffic patterns emerge from a group of single cars driving on the road, so analogously, consciousness could arise from a group of neurons acting in a complex network.”  There are two important problems with this.  First, traffic patterns are weak emergence and, in fact, can typically be simulated with software.  The comparison between traffic and consciousness is based on an implied link between the weak emergence of traffic patterns and the strong emergence of consciousness.  What is that link?  They both have the word “emergent” in them – but otherwise they are unrelated concepts!  That is why I think it is wrong to use the term “strong emergence”, as I pointed out in my previous entry on this topic <here>.

              However, there is another funny thing about calling traffic an emergent property and then using it as an analogy to explain how consciousness arises from the brain.  Cars don’t do anything unless they are driven – driven by a human being – a conscious human being.  Cars don’t make decisions; the human drivers do.  Presumably, those humans utilize their conscious brain to make those decisions and initiate the actions they make as drivers.  This is like defining a word by using the same word in the definition.  In some real way, traffic flow is just the action of a lot of conscious human drivers making their conscious decisions.  To then describe traffic flow as an emergent property and therefore analogous to consciousness seems very circular to me.

              Sometimes examples of strong emergence are open systems rather than closed systems.  Open systems are those where there are “outside influences” on how the system behaves.  These outside influences then can become the top-down influence of strong emergence.  For example, life itself is sometimes put forward as an example of strong emergence, because it emerges from the underlying biochemical activity, but life also seems to exert a top-down influence on what the living thing does.  Living things do purposeful activities but the underlying chemicals and reactions do not have anything like “purpose” as part of their properties.  But living things are not closed systems.  They must constantly ingest some kind of energy to keep going and stay living.  They are also living within an external environment.  To me, this seems analogous to the “water and river” example I gave earlier.  The banks of the river are the environment that the water finds itself in, and the banks exert an influence on where the water molecules go.  But, if we include the river bed and river banks into our fundamental system, then there is no emergent “top-down” influence.  I feel that claiming something has an emergent, top-down influence when the system is open is suspect.  It seems that those outside influences need to be brought within the explanation of the system in order to determine if there is strong emergence.  I’m sure there is plenty of debate on that particular point.

              In the last entry, I argued that the first aspect of strong emergence, the aspect of a disconnect between the “emergent” property and the underlying physics, was typically just another word for consciousness.  Or, I suggested the word “metaphysics” be used in this case.  So, what word should be used to describe this second aspect of strong emergence – the aspect of downward causation?  In my opinion, we already have a word for that:  “will”.  Maybe more commonly in philosophy, the term “agency” is used.  But, it seems to me that downward causation is just describing the higher-level system exerting its “will” on the lower-level system. 

              For the purposes of this discussion, I am not claiming any particular freedom in the term “will” in this case – i.e. I’m not claiming that this is necessarily “free will”.  If you are a determinist, then maybe you would call it “determined will”, I don’t know.  In fact, even though I am a strong proponent of free will itself, I don’t think that downward causation always fits under the category of “free” will.  Just “will” – or “agency” – or maybe even “purpose”.  I think that life is actually an example of this concept.  Living things exhibit a purpose.  Thus, I would consider life to be a strongly emergent property, except that I would never use the confusing term “strong emergence.”

              So, to summarize, I think that the terms “weak emergence” and “strong emergence” are very misleading.  I propose three terms to describe these ideas.  First, the term “emergence” would be retained to describe those things that would be typically categorized under “weak emergence.”  Then I would use the term “consciousness” for those things that have the first aspect of strong emergence – that they somehow depart from (or modify) the laws of physics.  And finally, I would use the term “will” or “agency” for those things that exert downward causation that is independent of the underlying physics.  I have previously introduced my thinking about how I see consciousness and agency as being connected in human behavior in my discussion on the soul <here>.  I think consciousness and will are related, but are not the same thing. 

              Now, given this background, we will go back to the discussion on water molecules and liquidity.  Next time.

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[1] Is there some bigotry on our part when we place particle physics always at the “bottom” and things like life and consciousness at the “top”?  Why should increasing complexity be seen as “higher than” or “above” things that are less complex?  And are quarks and gluons actually less complex than humans?  If so, then why is quantum mechanics so difficult for humans to understand?

Emergence 4 – Weak and Strong Emergence

               In previous entries I have been exploring the scientific and philosophical concept of “emergence” (starting <here>).  Emergence is the concept that something can have a property that isn’t apparent in its individual parts.  I’m interested in this concept because a common refrain from neuroscience is that consciousness arises as an emergent property of complex networks of neurons.  I won’t rehash the previous discussions – you can read them for reference – but my contention is that when you really analyze what emergence means when it is used to describe consciousness, it is actually just another word for consciousness.  

              Last time, we started considering the property of “wetness” that emerges when a bunch of water molecules get together at the right temperature and pressure.  The individual molecules themselves could not be described as being wet, yet the property of wetness emerges from the collection of them.  There are at least three aspects to consider regarding the wetness of water:  1) wetness can refer to the sensation that we feel when we touch something wet, 2) wetness (or liquidity) can refer to the fact that the water is in a state of being a liquid (with all of the properties that flow from being a liquid), and 3) “wetness” of water is a measurable property. 

              Previously we discussed the first aspect about the sensation of wetness <here>.  In this entry, I’m going to be addressing the second instance – the idea of liquidity as an emergent property.  However, before we dive into that, we’re going to have to make a detour and discuss the concepts of “weak emergence” and “strong emergence”.  I really didn’t want to have to talk about these concepts, because I think they are totally misleading, and they have been variously defined by different academicians, which adds to the confusion.  I will try to be brief and, if you are really interested in this topic, there are plenty of videos floating around the internet that discuss weak and strong emergence in various levels of depth. 

              “Weak emergence” refers to emergent properties that are, at least in principle, explainable by the underlying physical properties.  If you have a materialist or physicalist viewpoint, then you generally think that all emergent properties can be explained by the underlying physics, and thus weak emergence is all there is.  Weak emergence is extremely powerful in science, engineering, and mathematics, because it allows you to describe how things work in the universe without having to resort to incredibly complicated and highly impractical calculations based on fundamental particles and fundamental principles.  For example, you can describe the trajectory of a ball knowing the equations for position, velocity, and acceleration and the initial conditions of the throwing of the ball.  You don’t have to know how many atoms are in the ball or what kind of atoms the ball is composed of or anything like that.  The beauty of this approach is that, given just a few bits of information, you can figure out when and where the ball will hit the ground with a very high degree of accuracy.  It’s amazing that this kind of “simplification” works so well.  Somewhere, in your early physics classes, you started with these equations and built a lot more complicated equations after that to describe the activity of all sorts of things.  The point is that you could go through your entire Dynamics 101 and Dynamics 201 courses and never even have to know that objects are composed of atoms.  It never needs to come up.  However, everyone would agree (I’m pretty sure) that you could do these calculations at the atomic level if you had the time, computing power, and appropriate knowledge of the location and velocities of all of the particles involved.  Further, if you did those calculations, you’d come up with the same answer that you get with your Dynamics 101 equations.  Either approach is describing the same event, it’s just that using the description of the dynamics of physical objects is soooo much more practical.  In this case, weak emergence isn’t describing anything new – it’s just that weak emergence allows us to describe things in a much simpler way and only have to know about the particular scale of the system we are interested in.  It prevents us from having to work our way down to fundamental particles and fundamental physical laws to describe everything we encounter.  Weak emergence is incredibly powerful – it is not “weak” at all in that sense – and nearly all of science and engineering owes its existence to weakly emergent properties.  It allows us to observe properties and make predictions and perform repeatable experiments.  I don’t want to downplay it.  But, in my opinion, it has nothing to do with human consciousness and it really has no relation to strong emergence.

              In “strong emergence”, the connection between the higher-level events and the underlying physics becomes strained and broken in some manner.  This makes strong emergence fundamentally different than weak emergence.  But, to further complicate the whole issue, there are two features that tend to get combined under the heading of “strong emergence” that are also so different from one another that they should each be given a separate descriptive word – i.e. they shouldn’t be combined under a single word.  It’s a lot to unravel, so please bear with me for a bit as I describe these two features and then try to bring things back around to the topic at hand.

              First, strong emergence has the feature of describing some new emergent property that cannot, even in principle, be explained by the underlying physics.  If you are a physicalist, in particular a reductionist, then you would not accept that anything like strong emergence exists.  You would simply say that, sure, there may be some things that we can’t explain based on the underlying physics right now, but that is just a limitation on our practical ability to gain the necessary knowledge of the initial conditions and make the necessary calculations.  You would claim that everything would be, in principle, explained by the underlying physics.  Strong emergence, if it exists, implies that the underlying physics is not sufficient to explain the universe[1].  Many proponents of strong emergence gloss over this critical point.  With strong emergence, a property emerges from the underlying components that cannot ever be explained by any detailed description of the underlying components.  Sometimes, a scientist or philosopher will claim (or admit) that consciousness is, quite possibly, the only example of strong emergence that exists in the universe.  I find that kind of funny.  If you think that way, why call it “strong emergence” then?  Why not just call it consciousness?  If that is the case, then how does strong emergence explain anything new about consciousness anyway?

              OK, but before I get to the second major feature of strong emergence, I want to stop here and point out what I believe is a sleight-of-hand deception that is occurring here.  By using the word “emergence” and tacking on the “weak” or “strong” descriptor, it gives us the sense that the two terms are just describing degrees of the same thing.  It seems like strong emergence is just a bit “more” emergent than weak emergence.  They must be analogous to each other, right?  They’re just on some kind of continuum from weak to moderate to strong, right? 

              Wrong!  This is why I don’t like the two terms at all.  They are describing two fundamentally different concepts and they should not be given the same descriptors.  There is a world of difference between a way of describing a system that is simply a shorthand method allowing us to do physics, and the generation of some completely new feature that doesn’t follow the fundamental physical laws.  The fact that most physicalists (which probably describes most scientists) would readily accept that weak emergence exists everywhere and strong emergence does not exist anywhere, should give you a clue that we’re not describing minor differences in degree!

              If we were to create a Venn diagram of the universe of weak emergence and the universe of strong emergence, I submit that the only overlapping region of the entire diagram would be under the heading of “terms that contain the word ‘emergence’”.  It’s like if we renamed the direction “south” to be “weak north” and we renamed the direction “north” to be “strong north”.  That doesn’t make strong north and weak north related – they are polar opposites (literally)!  The terms strong emergence and weak emergence have a similar relationship. 

              I don’t really know how these two terms came to be connected with the same word “emergence.”  Personally, I would leave the term “emergence” to be used exclusively about everything that we put into the category of weak emergence.  I would then eliminate the term “strong emergence” from the language of science and philosophy.  As I have already claimed (<here>, <here>, and <here>), strong emergence is simply another word for consciousness, and only adds confusion and zero additional clarity to the whole discussion.  If there is resistance to use the term consciousness (because, let’s say, you think that quantum entanglement is also an example of strong emergence[2]), then what alternative term should be used?  Well, in strong emergence, we are describing a new property that is apart from, or in a systems sense, “above” or “beyond”, the fundamental laws of physics.  Don’t we already have a term for “beyond physics”?  Well…yes we do:  “metaphysics”!  It’s already a common English word, defined appropriately and ready to be used.

              Haha!  Most people who want to describe consciousness as “strong emergence” wouldn’t be caught dead using the term “metaphysics” in place of strong emergence.  Why?  I can tell you why[3].  It’s because weak emergence, and thus just simply “emergence”, is strongly tied to fundamental physics, physicalism and reductionism.  These are all well-respected in the STEM world.  So, the term “strong emergence” becomes a reasonably well-respected term because of its association with weak emergence.  But, my point is, they don’t associate with each other, they have never associated with each other, and they don’t even live in the same neighborhood.  Replace “strong emergence” with “metaphysical property” and all of a sudden the concept will be shunned by the STEM world. 

              Given all that, I know that no one is going to swap the term “strong emergence” with “metaphysical property”.  It just won’t happen.  But it should.  So, I’ll make a more practical suggestion:  replace the term “strong emergence” with the term “consciousness”.  That would solve the issue, in my opinion.

              I’m going to stop here in this entry, as I think I’ve sufficiently offended all lovers of “strong emergence”.  And I haven’t even addressed the second feature of strong emergence – a property that, not only should it not be lumped with “weak emergence”, it should not even be lumped with “strong emergence” or “metaphysical properties” or even “consciousness”!  But that will be for the next entry – here.

              And, of course, I am supposed to talk about the liquidity of water as an emergent property.  That’s going to have to wait until I finish this discussion of weak and strong emergence.  That is here.

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[1] I will just acknowledge here that there are some philosophers who claim to have identified a way to claim that strong emergence still acts within the laws of physics and, instead, just puts boundaries around what can happen (e.g. Nancey Murphy and others).  But I can’t address that issue right now and I’m not really sure well-accepted that approach is in the broader scientific and philosophical communities.

[2] Surely a topic for another time – not now!

[3] This is just my conjecture.  I’m not expecting any academician to admit to this!

Emergence 3 - Wetness of Water

               A while back, I started exploring the idea of “emergence” in a previous entry <here> and then again <here>.  Emergence is the idea that something can have a property that doesn’t exist in its individual parts and wouldn’t have been anticipated just by observing the parts themselves.  I’m interested in the idea of emergence because it is so commonly used as a possible explanation of how consciousness arises from a network of neurons in the brain.  “Consciousness as emergence” is the idea that when a complex network of neurons interact, consciousness emerges from that network even though it is not present in any one neuron.  My contention is that, when you really analyze what emergence is, it is actually just another word for consciousness.  If my contention is correct, then saying that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain is the same as saying “consciousness is consciousness”, which, of course, explains nothing.

              So far, I’ve talked about the meaning of words that emerge from various arrangements of letters, and the image of a picture that emerges from a painting (example:  Mona Lisa).  In both cases, the “emergent property” was shown to be equivalent to the conscious perception of that property.  However, it seems to me that there is a lot of disagreement about what constitutes an emergent property, so I’m not sure my first two examples are sufficient to establish my contention.

              Therefore, today I’m going to address the property of “wetness” that emerges when a bunch of water molecules get together at the right temperature and pressure.  The molecules themselves could not be described as being wet, yet the property of wetness emerges from the collection of them.  I think this is pretty much the quintessential example of an emergent property, which I expect is due to the use of this example by the late philosopher John Searle.  Searle is probably best known for his “Chinese Room” analogy of consciousness.  In my opinion, Searle is one of those people you enjoy listening to even when you don’t agree with them!  Here’s how he used the emergent property of the wetness of water in his arguments:

 “All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher level, or system features. It’s about as mysterious as the liquidity of water, right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H₂O molecules, it’s a condition that the system is in; and just as the jar full of water can go from a liquid to solid, depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules.” — John Searle

               I don’t think anyone would argue that the wetness or liquidity of water is not an example of an emergent property (except for those who don’t think there are any emergent properties at all).  Thus, if I could apply my previous reasoning regarding words and paintings and show that the emergence of wetness is just conscious perception, then I think I would have a strong argument to generalize to “all” emergent properties (until someone can show a property that breaks the rule).  However, it’s not that easy in this case, and that’s because the idea of “wetness” or “liquidity” has multiple aspects to it.

               There are at least three aspects to what we mean when we talk about the wetness of water that I will need to address.  I’m going to address the easy one in this entry, and address the other two in future entries because they have broader implications to this discussion.  But let me introduce the three aspects here so you can see where I’m going.  First, wetness can refer to the sensation that we feel when we touch something wet.  There is “something that it is like” to touch something wet.  Second – and here the term “liquidity” or “liquid” is generally used – wetness can refer to the fact that the water is in a state of being a liquid with all of the properties that flow (literally) from being a liquid.  The third aspect is that the “wetness” of water is a measurable property.  Soapy water, for example, is “wetter” than pure water and has properties that can be objectively measured to demonstrate the degree of wetness.  Thus, surely, if I can independently measure a property, I can’t claim that it is “all in our mind” can I?  That will be a discussion for the future.

               In this entry, I’m taking the first instance where wetness refers to the way wet things feel.  When we touch something wet, there is a way that feels to us that is instantly recognizable from touching something solid.  Often, we can “see” wetness as well because of the way light shines off of something that is wet, though we can also be fooled by, say, a very high gloss solid surface.  The point is that when we are talking about this instance of wetness, we are talking about a sensation that we feel through our hands or wherever it is that we are touching something wet.

               If you’ve read through my first two entries on this topic, then what I say here should be very familiar and not surprising.  In this case, feeling the wetness of water is directly analogous to seeing the Mona Lisa in a painting – it’s just a different sensory modality.  Given that, we can follow the same path and ask ourselves “where does the wetness exist?”

               In the case of wetness as I’ve defined it, we can easily see that wetness does not exist in the water itself.  That’s because I’m focusing on wetness as a sensation.  The water molecules themselves do not “feel” anything (though they do experience forces from other water molecules – something we’ll have to address in the next entry).  So, when we describe the sensation of wetness, we are clearly talking about something that happens to us when we feel something wet.  Where does that sensation of wetness “reside”?  When we touch a wet surface, the water molecules must interact without our touch sensing organs in our fingertips.  Maybe the Merkel cells or Meissner’s corpuscles are activated in a certain pattern.  I’m going to make a guess that a single water molecule is not enough to activate one of these sensory endings.  Wetness, it would seem, almost certainly requires the activation of multiple sensory endings in a certain pattern.  I’m not sure what that pattern is exactly, but it would surely be spread out among an area of skin, sending an array of action potentials back to the brain.  Although there would likely be some processing of these signals in the dorsal root ganglion and maybe spinal cord, nowhere in the transmission of these signals is there a single cell that lights up to indicate the sensation of wetness.  This is completely analogous to the discussion of seeing the Mona Lisa.  There is nothing in the transmission itself that indicates the perception of the emergent property we are discussing. 

               Ultimately, as before, the sensation of wetness never even coalesces in the neurons in our brain.  There is processing of the sensory signals for sure, but there is not a single “endpoint” neuron that lights up with a little display that flashes “wet, wet, wet” to indicate the sensation of wetness has been perceived.  Instead, it is our conscious perception of wetness that is the “endpoint” of this process.  Thus, as we have found with other emergent properties, the emergent property of wetness just is the conscious perception of wetness.  Emergence is consciousness.  Emergence, in this case, isn’t analogous to consciousness.  They are the same thing.

               I acknowledge that this entry is not a particularly deep argument.  By focusing on the sensation of wetness, I’ve basically asked “where is the conscious perception of wetness?” and then answered that it is in our consciousness.  It’s kind of obvious.  But I’ve come across some authors on the topic of consciousness who don’t seem to recognize this obvious link, and so I felt it was necessary to spend a bit of time on this.

              What is more interesting is the question of the second and third aspects of wetness.  Can these be considered emergent properties?  And, if so, surely they do not reside solely in our consciousness, do they?  We’ll address those issues next.