From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!houxm!houxa!houxi!houxz!ihnp4!ihuxr!lew
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Title: Emergence & Consciousness
Article-I.D.: ihuxr.348
Posted: Thu Mar  3 12:54:04 1983
Received: Tue Mar  8 07:14:43 1983
Reply-To: lew@ihuxr.UUCP (Lew Mammel, Jr.)

I would like to relate some thoughts I have had as result of my exposure
to two sources, relating to the "problem of consciousness". These two
sources are a book, "The Self and its Brain" by Karl Popper and Sir John
Eccles, and a talk "Universality and Singularity - Phase Transitions and
our Understanding of the Physical World" by Michael Fisher of Cornell U.
(given at a Bell Labs General Research Colloquium)

The idea that unites these is the idea of "emergent properties".
Popper uses this term to describe properties or concepts which emerge
at different levels of organization. He asserts that these cannot be
reduced to lower levels of organization. They may be built upon, or
constrained by laws operating at lower levels, but they cannot be predicted
from knowledge of those laws. Popper contrasts this view with reductionism,
which he describes as the view that all of nature is "contained" in the
low level laws.

I really agree with Popper I think, but I don't understand why this view
should be considered inconsistent with materialism, to which Popper
evidently regards himself as opposed. It seems to me that the very term
"emergent" places emergent phenomena within the confines of nature
and natural law. This is in contradistinction to supernatural concepts
of self and consciousness which are not bound by natural law.

Popper's view was supported by Michael Fisher in his talk (though not
explicitly.) He waxed philosophical at one point and described how
the work he was discussing differed in view from the traditional
reductionist view. He was describing universal characteristics of
critical point phenomena. The characteristic he discussed was the
variation of the "order parameter" with temperature near the critical
point. The point was that this variation showed a universal shape
which didn't depend at all on the detailed properties of the material
showing the phase transition. It was the same for magnetic transitions
in metals, the liquid-gas transition in CO2, and the superfluid
transition in Helium.

I think it is fair to cite this characteristic as an emergent property
of the systems. It evidently can't be contained in the low level laws of
behavior, since it is common to different laws and even to grossly
simplified models. If it is a property of anything it is a property
of nature itself. Perhaps what reductionism neglects is the context
in which the detailed interactions take place. This context is not
a "blank slate" but does play a large role in the nature of emerging
properties. This idea is elaborated from a scientific viewpoint by
Ilya Prigogine in "From Being to Becoming".

Eccles, on the other hand, is a radical dualist. He unabashedly
embraces the self as a separate and controlling reality. He is
left with the dualist's problem of the interaction between mind
and brain. He poses this as a general program of brain research,
in preference to trying to explicate consciousness in terms of
physical phenomena. Eccles ideas are "disprovable" in that they
predict the brain functions are externally driven by the mind,
albeit in very subtle fashion. I can't fault his proposal to pursue
this line, but I feel confident that it will be shown wrong. I have
confidence that the control of the brain can be characterized in
terms of brain functions. The perennial failure to achieve this 
goal is cited by Eccles as a point in his favor. I think that
the dualist position is nothing more than a codification of our
ignorance of brain function.

	Lew Mammel, Jr. ihuxr!lew