Wiring the Brain

In Part 3 of this series, I argued that organisms really do think about what to do, really do come to their reasons by reasoning, and really do make decisions, in ways that cannot be pre-determined.   If the neural computations are causally sensitive to semantic content, rather than detailed syntax, and those semantics relate to organism-level concepts, and all that information is integrated in a hugely contextually interdependent way, and is used to direct behavior over nested timescales, in ways that cannot be either algorithmically or physically pre-specified, based on criteria configured into the circuits derived from learning, which embody reasons of the organism and not any of its parts, then I would say that just is the organism – as an integrated self with continuity through time – deciding what to do.   I also argued that more fundamental principles of indeterminacy and emergence and organisation are the things that enable organisms themselves to come to be in...

There was some interesting recent discussion on Twitter regarding claims made in a new book by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder , in which she at least seems to assert that everything that happens in the universe is reducible to, and deducible from, the low-level laws of physics. Strikingly, she presents this view as an irrefutable scientific fact, rather than an arguable philosophical position. It’s worth digging into these ideas to probe the notion that the behavior of all complicated things, including living organisms, just comes down to physics in the end.     Patrick Baud quoted several passages from the book, “ Existential Physics ”, that argue that reductionist theories are the only game in town. With the important caveat that I have not read the book in full, and granting that some additional nuance is probably added elsewhere, it is worth quoting these passages in full to try and get the gist of these arguments. I’ve interspersed a few brief comments between the quot...

It’s not true, that there’s nothing new under the sun. The universe is producing novelty all the time. Galaxies, stars, and planets, where none existed before. New elements, new molecules – life itself, with the explosion of new species, and eventually new minds, capable of new thoughts. New types of things at new levels of existence – discrete entities composed of smaller entities, arranged in specific ways. New systems with new properties and new causal powers, governed by new principles. So where does all this novelty come from?   The term emergence is often used to refer to the appearance of qualitatively novel states or processes or properties that arise when things are combined in certain ways. But as with many metaphysical terms, it means different things to different people and in different contexts, and it’s not always clear what, if anything, follows from its use. In particular, it is often not stated whether “emergence” simply refers to an observed phenomenon in ne...

The concept of emergence just seems to rub some people the wrong way. The idea that there may be more in the whole than there is in the parts can seem like it’s cheating somehow, like we’re getting a free lunch, going beyond the basic laws of physics or even somehow violating them. This is especially true for varieties of emergence that claim that assemblies of parts can have causal power that the parts themselves do not have. (Ernst Haeckel) The basic premise of reductionism – the prevailing principle in much of modern science – is that all the apparent causality that we see in the arrangements of parts is really reducible to and fully explained by the basic forces operating on all the bits – the laws of physics playing out in ways that are certainly complex, but that require no other level of explanation. Any apparent purposiveness is an illusion, an epiphenomenon that plays no causal part in the dynamics of the system. The alternative to reductionis...