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.

My Shocking Superpower

            I have a superpower.  I don’t know if everyone has their own superpower, but I have an ability that seems to far exceed the ability of everyone else around me.  What is my superpower, you ask?  Well, it is the ability to store electrons in my body!  I’m a walking Leyden Jar!

            The point is this:  I can generate static shocks.  Yes, I know, everyone gets a little shock now and then.  But I’m talking about a big shock.  Like, something around a 20kV range!  I’ve been able to generate shocks that travelled greater than 2cm through the air between me and a metal grounding spot.  And, yes, it hurts – really hurts!

            I don’t really remember when I discovered I had this ability.  I don’t remember noticing this superpower when I was growing up, but there is a simple explanation for that:  I grew up in the Pacific Northwest.  Nice wet moldy winters.  It wasn’t until I moved to the northern Midwest, with its super-dry and cold winters, that I realized my superpower.  And really, initially I just thought “this is what happens to everyone”, but over time I’ve realized that’s like if Joey Chestnut said to himself “well, everyone eats hotdogs.”  You may be saying “I get shocks all the time”.  But do you get 2cm shocks?  Of course, I really don’t know – there’s no competitive “shock-off” that I know of.  But if there was, I think I’d win!

            My wife claims that this happens to me because I work with devices that deliver shocks to people all day.  That is true, although the shocks I use at work are very small and very productive and not painful.  But my job did give me the understanding to figure out a way to mitigate the pain that is induced by my superpower.  As I studied the principles of electrical stimulation when applied to the skin, I learned that charge density is the important parameter that determines whether a nerve will get activated.  Thus, a high charge delivered over a small area will activate a nerve, but if you spread that charge out over a larger area, it will not be enough to activate the nerve.  I knew that every time I touched something and got that sharp pain – like someone just stabbed me in the finger with a needle – that it meant that the shock was activating nerve endings in my fingertip.  So, I said to myself, what I need is to spread that charge out over a larger area of skin and then it shouldn’t activate the nerve endings.  I needed some kind of flat metal object that I could use and carry around with me.  Something like…a key!  Keys are perfect.  So, the next time I got up out of a chair where I knew that if I touched something metal it was going to hurt, I first pulled out my keys from my pocket and held the big part between my finger and thumb.  Then I pointed the tip of the key towards some metal object (doorknobs, screws on outlets, steel sinks, metal fireplace grates, etc. etc.) and zap!  The spark jumped from the tip of the key to the big hunk of metal with a nice loud “snap”, but I felt no pain.  I can’t tell you how much of a revelation that was!!  From that day forward, I always carry keys and discharge myself to avoid the pain.  It works great.

            I’ve found that the three “C’s” are the worst:  chairs, cars, coats.  Certain chairs can be a problem – I’m sure it has to do with the material that they are made out of but I haven’t figured out the magic formula.  I’ve learned simple tricks.  For example, when I take my coat off, it is an evil force, waiting to shock me.  As I am letting go of it, it wants to zap me.  So, I’ve learned that when I take my coal off, I have to keep touching it until I can drop it on something.  If I try to hang it up, odds are I will briefly let go and then touch it again, and I will get zapped.  When I come in to my office in the morning, I have to carefully drop the coat, take out a key, discharge myself on the doorknob or door jamb, and then it is safe to hang up my coat.  Also, as a fun thing, when I take my key out, I can wave it around near the coat and hear all of the electrons popping and zinging as they jump from the coat to the key.  Great fun.

            My superpower presents some significant difficulties that I bet you never thought of.  For example, the chair in my office is great at generating static.  Every time I get up from my office chair, I have to get the key out of my pocket and discharge myself on the doorjamb before I go anywhere – otherwise I will shock the first thing I touch.  So, here’s the practical problem this presents – something that has happened to me a few times.  I am sitting in my chair, innocently working away, and someone will come by my office (my door is usually open) with someone they want to introduce me to.  Of course, the natural response would be to get up and shake their hand (ok, maybe a fist bump or elbow bump during covid).  But here’s the problem:  I know if I do that, I will shock them, which seems like a rather unpleasant greeting.  If I stay seated, I won’t shock them, but that doesn’t seem quite respectful.  If I stand up, I’m now a walking bag of electrons, waiting to zap.  So, the logical thing would be to get my key, touch the doorjamb first, then put the key back and then shake their hand.  All while the person is waiting to shake my hand.  But it seems odd to start a conversation with someone I’ve never met by explaining that I’m weird and I have this ritual involving a key and a doorjamb that I have to complete before I can shake anyone’s hand.  I don’t know how to solve the awkward problem except maybe to wear a grounding strap while I am sitting at my desk.  Also, not weird, haha.  Or, maybe I should only meet new people during the summer when it is humid.

            Taking clothes out of the dryer?  Pure torture.  I have to do it with one hand while I hold a key in the other hand, constantly discharging myself on the dryer.  I know other people get static shocks when they take clothes out of the dryer, but it doesn’t seem to bother them.  Why is that?  Are you all immune to the pain?  It feels like getting stabbed with needles – unexpectedly stabbed.  Is that just me?

            OK, well, the pain is one thing.  But I also know that I generate an electric force field around me!  When I use my key to discharge myself on an outlet screw (a nice metal object that is typically grounded), I can feel the hairs in my opposite arm stand up momentarily.  Sometimes I can feel my pant leg move when the spark arcs across from the tip of my key to the outlet screw.  Does that happen to other people?  No one has ever mentioned it to me.

            I have to tell you a story about my electron force field superpower.  This happened to me in April of 2025, when it was still dry enough in Cleveland for shocks to be a problem.  I was working at the hospital and, as I mentioned, every time I get up from the chair at my desk, I have to discharge onto something metal, or I'll get shocked on whatever the first metal thing I touch. Well, one time I got up from my chair and I forgot to discharge myself. And as I'm walking out of my office, I remembered that I had forgotten (I hadn’t touched anything metal yet). So, I got out my key and I happened to be passing a storeroom door with a big metal push code lock on it (not uncommon in hospitals).  The lock looked like the picture below and seemed like the perfect discharge point,

so I brought my key over close to it to zap it.  I always do it slowly because I like to see how far the spark will travel.  Zap!  There was a nice spark and then, simultaneously, in the room next door, I heard the paper towel dispenser click on and dispense a paper towel.  No one else was around at the time, so it seemed creepy that the paper towel dispenser would click on because it is the kind you have to wave your and in front of in order to get it to spit out a paper towel.  It looks like this:

I walked past the room and I didn’t see anyone there.  I was momentarily creeped out, because you have to wave your hand like an inch away from the sensor or it won’t click on.  But then I suddenly wondered “could it be that my shocking of the lock on the room next door caused the towel dispenser to click on?”  But I convinced myself that such an idea was ridiculous and it must have just been some random event and so I went on to my next meeting.

            However, later in the day I was at my desk and needed to get up again.  I was about to discharge myself on the doorjamb when I thought “hey, I’ll go over to that lock again and see what happens”.  So, I walked down the hall to the door, zapped the lock and……”whirrrr”, the paper towel dispenser clicked on and spit out a paper towel!!  Now I was seriously intrigued.  How in the world did that happen? 

            My first thought was that maybe, somehow, the spot where I was passing the lock was a perfect spot to somehow reflect light into the other room at just the right spot that it bounced off the back wall and hit the paper towel sensor just enough to trigger it.  So, I went back to my desk, sat at my chair, wiggled around a bit, and then repeated the experiment, only this time I walked near the wall and snuck up near the lock.  Zap!....Whrrrr!  Out came a paper towel.  I was so excited!  I yelled “That’s awesome!!” into the hallway, but there was no one around to hear me or see my amazing power.  So, I did what any good engineer/researcher would do:  I repeated the test.  Like probably five times.  By the end I had a nice stack of paper towels that I kept around as evidence.

            As I kept repeating this experiment, I considered the situation.  First, let me show you the layout.  The picture below shows the door with the lock and then further down the hallway is the open door where the paper towel dispenser was.  You can just barely see the side of the paper towel dispenser – it is mounted on the other side of the hallway wall.  The two arrows show the lock and the dispenser, and they are separated by about ten feet.

            My first thought was that my electric shock was going through the hospital’s ground wiring and making it to the dispenser somehow.  But I realized that was impossible.  The paper towel dispenser has an all-plastic housing and is battery powered.  It has no connection to the hospital’s wiring.  Actually, I’m pretty sure the lock is also battery powered because I couldn’t find any kind of a wire or conduit connecting into the door by the hinges.  The door is wooden.  The walls are standard drywall, although I’m sure the studs are metal because it’s a commercial building. 

            So that means, I believe, that the field from me discharging the static shock onto the lock has to be traveling through the air. And somehow it has to be at a high enough intensity that, ten feet away, it can cross the plastic housing of the dispenser, and somehow zap across some contact inside of the dispenser with sufficient energy to trigger the motion sensor (or circuitry or whatever it is) to cause it to dispense a paper towel.  I know it sounds crazy.  It makes no sense to me that such a thing could happen.  That’s why I had to keep repeating it again and again.  And I kept trying it every day until it finally got too humid to work anymore and then, over the summer, I moved away from that office and haven’t had a chance to try it again.

            I guess I didn’t get much real work done that first day – at least not for that half an hour or so where I kept repeatedly dispensing paper towels.  But I did learn one very important thing about myself…

             I have a superpower!!