![]() ![]() It will be fascinating to ponder this question on your journey through the simulated brain. Or perhaps more challengingly, in a virtual environment in a virtual reality, still stuck inside the computer. Thus, we'll have to put this brain in a robot. One interesting further question arises: how important are all the interactions between our physical bodies and the physical environment? There is good reason to believe that this is critical. Taking this example into the domain of interest here, does this mean that we can switch out our biological neurons for artificial ones, and everything should still function the same, as long as we capture the essential interactions in the right way? Some of us believe this to be the case, and that when we finally manage to put enough neurons in the right configuration into a big computer simulation, the resulting brain will support consciousness and everything else, just like the ones in our own heads. Of course, they have to be there, and meet some basic criteria, but they are nevertheless replaceable. In effect, the interaction itself is what matters, and the parts are mere place holders. Thus, there is a level of transcendence that occurs with emergence, where the behavior of the more complex interacting system does not depend on many of the detailed properties of the lower level parts. But over a wide range, it doesn't matter what the gears are made from. There might be subtle factors like friction and durability that vary. You can make the gears out of any kind of sufficiently hard material, and they will still work. Computer models can capture many complex interactions and reveal nonobvious kinds of emergence.Emergence can be illustrated in a very simple physical system, two interacting gears, as shown in Figure 1.1. CARLA WOHL (Correspondent) : It is mysterious how a flock of birds or a school of fish move as one, with such grace and coordination, as if there's one brain behind them all or an invisible force. Only panel b exhibits an emergent phenomena through the interaction of the two gears, causing things like torque and speed differentials on the two different gears.Įmergence is about interactions between parts. Both panel a and b contain the same parts. Figure \(1.1\): Simple example of emergence of phenomena, in a very simple physical system: two gears. The result is an attempt to capture the essence of emergence. Often the only way to practically achieve this reconstruction is through computational modeling. However, one also needs to go in the opposite, oft-neglected direction, reconstructionism, where the complex system is actually reconstructed from these simpler parts. The classic scientific process of reductionism plays a critical role here, where the complex system is reduced to simpler parts. What makes something a satisfying scientific explanation? A satisfying answer is that you can explain a seemingly complex phenomenon in terms of simpler underlying mechanisms, that interact in specific ways. “Ultimately, we want to explain under which circumstances we will see novel properties,” says Larissa Albantakis, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.īut the study of emergence is, by turns, promising and maddeningly difficult.\) In both cases, simply understanding the basic constituents of the system doesn’t explain the phenomenon in question, never mind allow you to recreate it from scratch. Neuroscientists, meanwhile, find that consciousness seems to emerge from some collective behaviour of neurons. ![]() ![]() Ontological Emergence: Features 2. It mediates between extreme forms of dualism, which reject the micro-dependence of some entities, and reductionism, which rejects macro-autonomy. In physics, for example, some materials exhibit superconductivity, where large numbers of electrons can move without resistance, and yet it isn’t always clear why. The general notion of emergence is meant to conjoin these twin characteristics of dependence and autonomy. “There is a sense in which nothing in science makes sense without emergence,” says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and author based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Emergent phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and a proper grasp of how they come about could hold the key to solving some of our biggest mysteries. The wetness of water is an example of an “emergent” property: a phenomenon that can’t be explained by the fundamental properties of something’s constituent parts, but rather manifests only when those parts are extremely numerous. Put lots of them together in the right conditions, however, and you will get wet. There isn’t even anything wet about a single water molecule. Rain is, after all, just molecules composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and there is nothing wet about hydrogen or oxygen on their own. THE next time you get caught in a downpour, don’t think about how wet you are getting – but how you are getting wet. ![]()
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