You're a world treasure Sabine.

@EffySalcedo

4 жыл бұрын

*plays treasure by Bruno Mars*

@deanbuss1678

4 жыл бұрын

Yeah she is. Especially since an uneducated Yank such as me can pick up what she's throwing down.

I love that Dr. Sabine talks about everything related to foundations of physics and its puzzling semi-philosophical issues. I am glad to know about this channel.

You have some of the absolute best science / physics content. Impeccable. Thank you.

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

she does good; is that a beattles song?

The “wave” at sporting events analogy was perfect. Especially to us that remember what sporting events were like.

@juanausensi499

3 жыл бұрын

It was. It's only people getting up and down... but a real wave is formed. You can measure the amplitude, the frequency, even the energy that it carries.

@ryanlyle9201

3 жыл бұрын

​@@juanausensi499 I'm thinking the energy carried is directly proportional to the alcohol content of the individuals as well. A drunken macro-state if you will.

@boukadoumramy8653

2 жыл бұрын

@@juanausensi499 how do you measure its energy and its frequency ?

@juanausensi499

2 жыл бұрын

@@boukadoumramy8653 The frequency part is easy: you count complete cycles by time unit. For energy, i was thinking of a good answer but ... i finally realized i haven't one. You got me there. Maybe it is possible to calculate it, and i'm just incapable to figure it out. But now i'm thinking sports wave is different from a normal wave (i think it is still a wave, tho) but the energy behaviour is not the same. In a normal wave, for example the wave on a pond created by throwing a stone, the impact of the stone is the initial energy, and that energy is transported away by the waves. You can infer the energy of the stone impact from the waves, calculating how much energy is needed to move the water involved in the wave. But in the sporting wave, there is no initial energy transmitted, but several synchronized energy inputs from the people doing it. Trying to calculate the energy of the wave like we do with the water wave would give us an answer without meaning (what event with so many energy caused the wave?). At least, if we consider the energy mechanical energy. Maybe the energy transmitted is not mechanical in a sports wave, because people moving up and down is not causing mechanically the next row of people to move, instead they move because they are imitating the other row. So maybe we should talk about memetic energy? Well, i was tought to stop when i sounded like a raving madman, so i think i'm done here. I don't know if this is deep insight or plain nonsense, it's up to you to decide.

@boukadoumramy8653

2 жыл бұрын

@@juanausensi499 I don't think it's an actual wave because it does not obey the laws of reflection and transmission , like if you were to place a wall , what happens to the energy of the wave ? It just disappears out of the blue . It's not going to be reflected or transmited to the other side of the wall

Clearest explanation of emergence I've ever heard. I feel like I really understand it now. Thank you, Sabine!

In the lockdown times, I look forward to your weekly videos more than ever. Thank you!

Simplistic. emergence is taken as either a predictable interaction (e.g., conductivity) or a property or event not predictable for knowledge of the constituents (i.e., strong emergence -- cf Broad, 1925). In the latter case, the concept is a tautology (how do we know when consciousness will emerge from neural organization? When that organization is sufficiently complex. When will it be sufficiently complex? When consciousness emerges). The general ideas are so watered down ("watered" actually can be taken as a strong emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen in correct combination; of course this "property" brings in tow the question of the physical reality of the emergent property of wetness). Anyway, if, like far too many, you like fast food for thought, this is a video for you.

I actually started watching your videos, Sabine, after I saw you in a KZread video having a discussion with Erik Verlinde when I was searching for as much information that I could find about his emergent gravity ideas. I feel I've come full circle now with your emergence video.

Sabine I am reading your book “ Lost in Math “ again, New Meaning and Ideas are Are Emerging every page I read , every time I read it! Thank You 👍🦊

I watch your videos to learn new things even if I do not fully comprehend the topic. Keep up producing your videos.

@4623620

4 жыл бұрын

Don't worry, you are curious, trying to understand and enjoying it, that is more than can be said of the majority of the human race. ;)

Whether you count something as "strong emergence" rather depends on what you count as an "explanation".

@kosatochca

3 жыл бұрын

It's so sad that only hardline philosophers of science and psychologists have elaborated the problem of explanation. Teleology is unfairly discarded across natural sciences to the point that if your theory called teleological in evolutionary biology it's almost dealt as some sort of insult

@slash196

3 жыл бұрын

@@kosatochca Teleology and explanation are not synonyms. Teleological explanations are not the only kind.

@kosatochca

3 жыл бұрын

Ben Feddersen well I’ve just elaborated one of the more problematic example. Nevertheless, I think there is a strong bias towards direct A to B explanation in natural sciences and generally system theory is one of the most formalized challenge to this thinking

That was a really concise video! Emergence in this context is a new word for me! But it is definitely something I'll consider from now on when thinking about natural phenomena. Thanks very much for posting this Sabine! All the best to you and everyone else here. If we have to stay at home, what better thing to do than think about the universe! 😁

@SabineHossenfelder

4 жыл бұрын

Thanks! Happy you find it useful!

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

in any spark the way may shine mabe is there just is blindding us.

@austin3789

4 жыл бұрын

@@SabineHossenfelder thanks for your uncommon clarity. Are designed things, like picture mosaics and cars, only strongly emergent by analogy and are actually weakly emergent or are they actually strongly emergent?

@mycurrentadventure

4 жыл бұрын

@@austin3789 Maybe @Sabine has a better answer, but I think only a self-organizing system is weakly emergent by itself - because you could compute/deduce what the organization would likely be from the constituents. Designed things *might* be weakly emergent from the total system of designer and raw materials together ... that is, if we had a sufficiently good understanding of both we could model what would result (think: ants + dirt = ant hill full of tunnels). I say "might" here only because, as @Claude points out in another comment, the proof that a sufficiently complex system is weakly/strongly emergent is currently intractable (both computationally, and that it likely requires we have perfect knowledge of the constituent parts)

Very Informative and to the point, as always. Thank you Sabine!

Thank you so much for the video. I am doing a course on genomics and stop-by here just to learn something about the concepts of emergence and reductionism. The channel content is just great !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That was really good for me - the discussion of strong/weak emergence. Very clarifying and motivating. I'll remember that.

Gotta say, I'm a free will proponent and this is one of the strongest arguments I've heard. That said, it's not without faults. Take neurology for instance. We have mapped the entire brain and have found no properties that would create emergent consciousness that I am aware of. A neurologist told me about the emerging dialogue that this has produced. If this stands we have not only at least one thing that shows strong emergence, but that thing is most relevant to understanding anything at all.

Incredible explanations! I’m so happy that I found such a great new science channel!

Just talked emergence a couple days ago, this came at the right time! Stuart Kauffman has written good stuff on emergence, I found Origins of Order very interesting.

Aw, come on! You can't drop a bomb like "consciousness is weakly emergent" and not elaborate! Now I am sad. ;)

@BrettHar123

4 жыл бұрын

Weak emergence? It is an assumption that neural networks produce consciousness, because consciousness can’t be derived or measured, only inferred from subjective reports.

@fbkintanar

4 жыл бұрын

There has been decades of research into consciousness as a weakly emergent phenomenon from cognitive processes and their underlying biophysical systems. I only keep up with a small part of that research but it already seems feasible to give an account characterizing "consciously seeing color" as something emergent while still fully naturalistic (explainable in terms of natural science). Primates see the color of a piece of ripe fruit at a granularity which is consistent with their evolved capacity to interact with their environment: they can grasp a piece of fruit while feeding, which is selective for their species. In the language of ecological psychology of perception (J.J.Gibson) primates are perceptually attuned to invariants in the exposed surface of the environment in line with the affordances to primate action in the perceptible environment they live in. At a low level of physical explanation, there is a flow of photons radiating out from the reflective surface of the fruit, which is sampled at a certain distance away by rhodopsin molecules in two retinal patches. What is emergent is a physiologically complex response to those sampled photons, which gives some information about depth (information about distance that guides where the primate hand should grasp the fruit) and color (is the fruit ripe enough to be of interest to a hungry primate now, or at a future date when it is riper?). But not all primates have the same color vision physiology, some are trichromats and some have red-green color-blindness and others are completely color-blind and see the world in black or white. So, for example, most humans can see a rainbow of possible colors, while others cannot distinguish red and green by their experience of the hue of surfaces. One group is conscious of the difference between red and green tomatoes, while another is not, and this will affect their propensity to pick them when hungry for a ripe tomato. This provides a reasonable explanation of the "easy" problem of perceptual awareness, which is at the very least an important part of consciousness. Philosophers of mind have distinguished a "hard problem" of explaining consciousness in terms of "what it is like to be" experiencing something in a conscious way (this started with discussions about "what is it like to be a bat"). These "what it is like" aspects of experience seem to involve "qualia" or the first-person phenomenological feel associated with a class of experiences (say the feel of seeing a ripe tomato, if a viewer is a trichromat or has red-green color blindness). I don't know if the following explanation works in general, but one way to account for qualia is in terms of how members of the same species (or a physiologically similar group within a species) have a shared scheme for cognizing the objects around them and their properties. Not only are primates attuned to objects like pieces of fruit, as social animals they are attuned to the purposeful behavior of the other primates in their troop or community. These behaviors seem to have an underlying mental cause, the behaving primate uses beliefs and desires and perceptions to guide action. For humans in particular, a typical human with language (non-autistic, let us say), their social functioning depends on attunement to the mental states of the other humans they interact with. Mental states of others are not directly perceptible but can be reliably inferred from their overt behavior. If you are not sure whether you are correctly cognizing a mental state, you can always ask them and they will tell you. Humans learn attunement to mental states like beliefs and desires and experiences of seeing (and maybe some aspects of that higher attunement is innate, like face recognition is innate or hardwired in the physiology of specific brain regions, and not constructed "online" from general cognitive capacities like seeing lines, contours, textures and color patches). Humans are attuned not only to the content of what somebody sees (the piece of fruit, or maybe the concept of a fruit which isn't really there at the moment) but also the mental state of seeing, which may have a "what it is like" character or phenomenological feel. If we consider human cognitive capacity to recognize and classify (for subsequent action) the objects and events in external perceptible scenes, this may involve a third-person scheme of attunements. This term "third-person scheme" refers to recognizing properties that are somehow "objective" and independent of the point of view of a cognizer (first person) or some interlocutor perceiving the same scene (second person). On the other hand, considering the higher-level cognitive capacity to recognize and classify the mental states of other humans (inferred from evidence like behavior, reports, social conventions and other background knowledge), this seems to involve an extended scheme of attunement to mental states. This extended scheme seems to associate with certain objects of cognition (the mental states of others or the similar mental states of the (first person) cognizer) certain properties of "directedness of mental states". A mental state is about something extramental, a characteristic that has been called "intentionality" in the philosophy of mind and language (e.g. John Searle's book _Intentionality_). The cognition of mental states as having some kind of content property that identifies what the mental state is about provides a basis for language and a broad range of higher cognitive functions. Such a scheme of attunements to mental states could be the neural and cognitive basis for the emergence of a system of concepts, including concepts that are shared through language and the lexicalized concepts called words. Since the same scheme of attunement to mental states is used to classify mental states of others and the cognizer's own mental states, many states come to be associated with what they feel like to a (first person) cognizer; the scheme associates qualia or phenomenological character to mental states. The scheme for cognizing mental states is a third-and-first person scheme of attunement, it provides a basis for attributing the property of consciousness to certain mental states. In summary, the higher cognition of mental states (inferred from evidence like behavior, reports, social conventions and other background knowledge) invoke a third-and-first person scheme where certain mental states have associated qualia or phenomenological feel. It is useful to make a distinction between the type of an experience (with respect to a shared scheme, fixed for the moment) and the occurrence of an experience of that type. Successful perception involves recognizing a signal as being of a certain type, in a way that can regulate afforded action. For attunement to invariants in signals like photonic flows from surface reflectance from nonmental obects or events, a third-person scheme seems to be adequate; and so qualia and phenomenological feels may not be relevant. Successful cognition of the mental states of others involves inferring from ongoing perception of behavior (and integrating it with remembered facts and knowledge). In this case, a species like (neurotypical) humans invokes a third-and-first person scheme that classifies the mental states of others as having "the same" type as what the cognizer could experience first person. When ascribing a mental state to a non-autistic person, an observer infers that there is a physiological-cognitive occurrence in that person that is relevantly similar to an experience of the same type that might occur in the cognizer themselves. The cognizer knows with certainty what their own experience fells like, and if they correctly attribute the same type to the mental state of the other person, they will also associate the qualia of the mental state with what occurs in the other person, with some assurance but a lower level of certainty. There are many details that need to be worked out by cognitive scientists before they get to an adequate theory of consciousness as a phenomenon that weakly emerges from the physiology of brains, sensory organs, controlled movement and the facts of social interactions. (For example, in a clinical setting you would like a theory that helps characterize certain aspects of consciousness of a patient along the autistic spectrum, as a basis for diagnosis and recommending therapies.) But in principle, such a theory could be worked out without invoking some nonphysical strong emergence. At least that's how it seems to me.

@MichaelPiz

4 жыл бұрын

@@fbkintanar Thanks very much for that. As I'm not a specialist, It will take me a few readings to completely understand it but it will certainly be well worth the effort.

@fbkintanar

4 жыл бұрын

@@MichaelPiz Lol, I wrote the thing and even for me, upon rereading it sometimes the logic doesn't really seem to flow. I revised one part (starting in the third paragraph), which ended up adding a couple of paragraphs. I hope it is a bit clearer now. I wrote this for my own clarification of issues I have been thinking about for some time, but I would welcome any detailed (constructive!) comments or questions. Cheers, and stay safe and healthy!

@jdsartre9520

4 жыл бұрын

@@fbkintanar TLPTWDRBWTLPGSOHKPPF (too long plus text walls, didn't read but wanted to. please give summary or highlight key points por favor)

The best example of a brilliant mind is the ability to explain important concepts to someone like me....Thank You.

Emergent is about meaning of things the analogue of the sum of constitutions of your photograph picture can not determine the whole picture ,like you said, but it's about a new law of physics that emerged from it. (Frogs and automobiles or machines have the same meanig). Love your videos.

Great video. Can you do one on emergent gravity too? I'm desperate to understand that better, but it's a tough subject. Your way of explaining makes it easier to understand.

Really nice video, Sabine! I just got a question: could "strong emergence" be mistaken for "weak emergence" because of a methodological practice? Perhaps with a truly rigorous definition of "strong emergence", where it would be impossible to describe an emergent phenomenon by its constituents, I would bet the negative. But if we relax the "impossible" condition, do you think it's possible to discriminate between "strong" and "weak" emergence through inference? For instance: I can construct a model that describes a phenomenon from its constituents but at the cost of ascribing too many free parameters and getting things really complicated. On the other hand, I can have a simpler model (the meaning of simple is always debatable), but at the cost of having a "quasi-strong" emergent phenomenon. So we may evaluate whether a simple model is preferred depending on the type of emergence it suggests to us to interpret the phenomenon. In this way, can we be confident enough that in practice there isn't any evasion from a strong or "quasi-strong" emergence or if such evasion isn't a _a priori_ assumption in the construction of our models? If so, isn't this a form of reductionism (in the negative logical/philosophical sense)? Also, the dichotomy discussed by many on the Gravity vs Standard Model couldn't be situated in this emergence debate?

So refreshing. I liked the way she used the term “periodically” in the sense of repetitive or cyclic movement without having to explain her usage. The meaning was naturally emergent from context.

@doctorbobcannabuzz

4 жыл бұрын

Johnny Ragadoo canna-sapiens.com/in-god-we-rust-the-beauty.html What she’s talking about actually is at the heart of life and it’s explained in this monograph

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

for the word emergent there is submergent that sach a thing olone cant be, south cant go to north nither north can go to south which is need to create a newtral.

@johnnyragadoo2414

4 жыл бұрын

@@doctorbobcannabuzz "Random statistics cannot explain life since it is statistically too improbable to exist." That is a fascinating paradox. I must read further. Thank you for that link. By random improbable statistics - that you and I would happen to communicate - I'm enlightened!

@johnnyragadoo2414

4 жыл бұрын

@@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668 A nice observation, Espacio. Nature couldn't abhor vacuum, since there is so much of it, but monopole magnetics will probably never be found.

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

@@johnnyragadoo2414 do black holes are systems with some kid of sharge since they are made by matter and matter as magnetism always has 2 poles? if no charge then what happen to the the poles.

Could strong emergence be understood as entropy reversal? If time were flowing in reverse we might see lots of things strongly emerging and find weakly emerging things difficult to understand and seeming impossible.

"Emergence" frames reality exactly upside down, at least for anything as complicated as an organism. It's not that particles give **rise to** the behavior of an organism, but that an organism uses the powers of its matter (particles) for its own ends. Notice how organisms discard individual molecules (as waste) once they cease to be useful to the organism's maintenance of its form.

Is there enough computational power in the known Universe to be able to predict Mozart’s Jupiter symphony (let alone our response to hearing it) based on the behaviour of atoms in Mozart’s body?! I’m inclined to be with the philosophers on this one... Thanks for your thought-provoking videos. I’m a big fan. ❤️🇮🇪☘️

@mikel4879

4 жыл бұрын

mrroneill99 / The bacteria has its own existential frequencies. It can be said that it has its own "music", its own "mozart kind bacterium" and "symphonies". Does it matter to the reality of the human world ? Does it matter to the reality of the Universe ? It is its "mozart bacterium symfony" somehow something "special" to the reality of the Universe ? The same for a Galaxy ( any Galaxy ) : it has its own frequencies, its own "music" and symfonies ( and maybe its own "mozart Star"🙂) ! Does it really matter to the reality of the Universe ? NO ! It doesn't matter at all ! What is "Mozart" and the "feeling" of its "music" to the reality of the Universe ? Nothing ! Absolutely ZERO ! It is a "minuscule" entropic blip ( almost "nothing" ! ) of an almost zero "entropic" phenomenon in a huge ocean of endless entropic phenomena.

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

the 12 are in music so it goes in steps, 6 up 6 down.

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

some how 12 goes with 10.

I've been curious about this term for a while , thank you.

Thank you for a very clear definition of emergence. I use that term to help explain the question What Is Life. (It is an emergent phenomenon.) I think the concept of emergence can explain where people go when they die. They don’t go anywhere. They just stop existing. The particles that made up the life form may still be there after death but the life (the emergent property) is gone. Where does a tornado go after 24 hours? It doesn’t go anywhere. It just isn’t anymore. Once you understand emergence, something out of nothing (and vice versa) makes perfect sense.

This video is going in my library. I will have to review it later; this is beyond fascinating and very well summarized.

Very interesting concept. I need to watch this numerous times.

Wow, that video gave me something to think about... This will occupy my mind for quite a while now. Thanks!

I have been trying to write an essay on emergence and this is the best explanantion that I've read so far.

Very good idea to explain this concept to people! Thank you very much!

Hi Sabine! Absolutely love your videos, they inspire me to want to do a bachelors in pure science (I have one in aerospace engineering). Anyway I am wondering, with many cases in nature such as the cellular structures, ecosystems, or really life itself, and chemistry as a whole would those not count as strong emergent? Or at least unclassifiable since we have not proven the ability to predict behavior of chemical systems or biological systems? A specific example is we can know the full genome of an embryo and know the physical and chemical properties of the womb but still not be able to predict the exact resulting offspring. Or weather, we can't predict weather. Doesnt that, by the definition you gave, mean that there are countless examples of strong emergence in nature?

@shreyas5886

2 жыл бұрын

Our inability to predict how an embryo would develop or how the weather will change reflect the fact that we have incomplete information about these systems, rather than an insufficient understanding of the underlying mechanisms. For example, knowing the genome and the physico-chemical properties of the womb are not sufficient to determine how an embryo would develop. Much of embryonic development is determined by spatiotemporal patterns of gene expression (protein synthesis), which is a dynamic process in a noisy out-of-equilibrium environment, in contrast to the static information encoded within a genome. More generally, biological as well as climatic systems are typically high dimensional (many degrees of freedom) and nonlinear, which can make them stochastic or chaotic respectively. In either case, even thought we know the underlying equations of motion, our predictive power is limited because 1) we cannot keep track of all relevant degrees of freedom and 2) we don't know the initial conditions of the system with infinite precision. Thus, natural phenomena can still be fully reconciled with weak emergence.

This video goes well with your reductionism video since emergence is one of the proposed exceptions to the ideas of reductionism. This also ties into the idea of determinism since, in this view, all action is initiated and controlled from the bottom up. I'm not the only one who thinks this is nonsensical, but it is not testable, so it will remain a matter of opinion (or belief for the hard determinists) until some future time when some future scientist comes up with an experiment that can produce hard data, or maybe never since it really is an opinion.

Thank you so much for taking this on! This could be a first. Edit: can you make a followup digging deeper?

Another example I saw of strong emergency was in music. There is a way to make a music in such a way that if it is played many many times faster It will become some other song. There is a music youtube channel by Adam Neely where he does that. It is a similar idea of the mosaic. But instead of change the spacial scale, you change the temporal (frequency) scale.

This was surprisingly fascinating, thank you for sharing this! :)

@nosuchthing8

2 жыл бұрын

I rate your comment as being strong

I am glad to know the correct terms to describe emergence in physics ‘weakly emergent’ to distinguish it from the concept of emergence in philosophy. Using the correct verbiage is part of my enjoyment in learning the philosophy of science. This is an important role in the communication of science from the real scientists to the rest of us amateur enthusiasts of science, imho.

I think there is an important distinction in relation to emergence between classical and quantum logic, and by extension between classical and quantum mechanics. Note, when I say logic, intend the probability logic. Kolmogrovian for classical logic, Born rule defined for QM. This distinction stems from the encoding of correlations. In classical logic it is trivial, meaning that the correlations are encoded (in the deterministic limit) by the determined configurations of the systems and there is nothing more. The absence of a deterministic limit for quantum logic (corresponding to the incompatibility of dynamical quantities, which is the structural core of QM and its logic), results in a genuine, non trivial, encoding of correlations, i.e. entanglement. Philosophers might say that quantum logic, and QM, is holistic, where classical logic/mechanics is not. This is intended to express the fact that the information encoded in the whole is more than the information encoded in the collection of the (isolated) parts. Now, this should immediately be recognized as a relevant factor for the notion of emergence, simply according to its definition: emergence refers to the collective properties of systems giving rise to some new "behavior" (theoretical model) which is not recognizable in the constituent parts considered singularly. If the base theory is classical, the only possibility for emergence is epistemic, i.e. what emerges is dependent on the recognition by subjects, but there is still nothing more than the parts. If the base theory is quantum, emergence can be in itself genuine, because it has the possibility of being reliant on the genuine encoding of correlations that is entanglement. This is one essential point to realize in respect to understanding QM and the importance of the fact that we have QM and not simply classical mechanics as our fundamental physical theory: that emergence is not only an epistemic or theoretical operation, but *because* we have quantum logic as fundamental, and it is holistic, *then* emergence can be genuine and objective. The fact that emergence is genuine and objective in QM, comes specifically from the fact that it is connected to entanglement. As an immediate corollary, emergence is mechanical/dynamical in QM. Again, this is not valid in classical logic, where emergence is solely epistemic. This is extremely important for the interpretation of QM, due to the relation of entanglement and decoherence. Colloquially, I like to say that decoherence is the "insider view" on entanglement, to a large extent they are the same, seen from different perspectives (entanglement from the "outside", decoherence from the "inside"). Thus in QM we have this very important result: that because of quantum logic, because correlations are genuinely encoded as entanglement, decoherence is the genuine, objective and mechanical/dynamical emergence of classical logic within quantum logic. This emergent classical logic is the possibility of reconnecting the quantum theory to our physical experience, which is determined (to a resolution limit, not necessarily an infinitely determined resolution limit), i.e. classical in its determination (to the same resolution limit). A few notes on the meaning of "emergent classical logic within quantum logic": CL is a genuine novelty respect to the fundamental QL, but this emergent CL is still completely QL; it is not "pure" CL in the sense that it is not fundamental or defined separately from QL, and in particular it does not allow the infinite removal of uncertainty, i.e. the deterministic limit, at some point CL is no longer valid and where that occurs is decoherence dependent. On the question of weak and strong emergence. It is in classical logic that the distinction is unequivocal between the two. But the situation is different in QL due to the sense in which QL is holistic in respect to the encoding of correlations. QL strikes a sort of middle ground, one might say it is a model for "weak strong emergence" :P This is simpler when we say what it means (it's just a play of definitions, so it is very simple when we say to what definitions we refer to): it is "strong" in the sense that what is emergent is not solely reliant on the collection of the individual states of the systems, but it is weak in that what is emergent is fully encoded within the complete theory of those same systems, the point being that such theory is holistic. This is the proper sense, I think, in which we can have a model of "(weak) strong emergence", i.e. of genuine emergence, within a universal theory: the theory needs to be holistic. As it turns out, we do have a model for this proper "strong emergence" and it is nothing less than our fundamental physical theory: quantum mechanics. A "strong strong emergence" would instead be a theory for the collective which is distinct from the fundamental theory of the parts, and at this point we have two theories, and obviously neither of those is universal as there is the other one. As Sabine noted, we do not have any evidence that this is required, just one theory might well suffice. I think that these considerations on the possibility that what is emergent is genuine or not, "not" meaning solely epistemic, should lead us to rethink things we give as granted. Do we really think that the Boltzmann argument that links classical statistical physics to thermodynamics is fundamentally correct? Or does it only happen to get the right result (and we already knew what the right result was) by a wrong heuristic argument? I think that thermodynamics is genuine and objective, I think I know that it is mechanically/dynamically emergent. And I think I know that genuine, objective and mechanical/dynamical emergence is not possible in a theory fundamentally based on classical logic. Which would imply that the Boltzmann derivation of thermodynamics within classical statistical physics is flawed because impossible, and that thermodynamics is properly a quantum phenomenon.

Dr. Sabine, would you speak about Emergence Theory, as put forth by popular videos on KZread just over the past five or six years? (There's a very slick video on it out of California.) The question I have for you about it is: is it worth the time, or, in your opinion are there other theories more worthy of research? Thanks! I love your videos.

But the difficult question is: what is a "constituent" of something? What does it mean for a set of things to be "more fundamental" than another? We are used to think of "constituents" as *small* units of stuff, and we usually take "more fundamental" to mean "smaller". This certainly happens in particle physics, but also in many other branches of physics. Even when a more general candidate (e.g. linearity - "constituents" are summands) is applicable, usually the "summands" are somehow related to smaller systems. But this "fundamental is small" paradigm (even if it has worked well so far) is not justified in purely epistemological terms, it's just linked to the contingent fact that in our world we experience space, and that phenomena of (spacially) bigger stuff are explainable/describable in terms of smaller stuff. Who knows, maybe we will have to abandon this assumption ( small = more fundamental) when we will face quantum gravity phenomena... And this may open the possibility for new "fundamental" things to not necessarily be small (relative to an appropriate scale), hence giving the impression of what we would now call "strong emergence" (between two scales).

@fbkintanar

4 жыл бұрын

I agree that clarifying the notions of "constituent" and "more fundamental" are crucial, and that it is a mistake to limit our attention to "smaller constituents". In many condensed matter phenomena, and in biological systems, we may want to consider different aspects that make up a whole, and each aspect may be as "big" as the whole. Something like this may be relevant for more "fundamental" physics, where I have no expertise. If a quantum field is constituted from many symmetries, it doesn't mean that a symmetry is "smaller" than the field, they are both as big as the universe. Symmetries could be seen as aspects of the whole.

Congratulation - one of your best lectures.

It's like I'm back in Engineering school watching your videos. Fun stuff to think about!

Hi. and thanks for the great content. I have got at request. Would it be possible for you to elaborate on why strong emergence and the standard model contradicts each other? Im not a scientist, but i find this wildly interesting.

Congratulations - one of your best videos.

I was obsessed with emergence like NKS before. Thanks for supporting . -- String theory, as it stands, incorporates both deterministic and probabilistic elements. At its core, string theory aims to describe the fundamental particles and forces of nature in terms of vibrating strings rather than point-like particles. While the theory itself is deterministic in its equations, the vast complexity of the interactions among strings can give rise to emergent phenomena that exhibit probabilistic behavior, especially when considering quantum effects. Therefore, while the fundamental laws may be deterministic, the outcomes of certain events or processes can be probabilistic due to the complexity of the system

Given current events, I expected that before the video ended Sabine would relate epidemics and pandemics as emergent properties of living, specifically human, populations. Like a wave at a stadium, a pandemic does not exist in isolation in a single human, rather it emerges from collections of humans and their interactions - with a virus or bacterium as the seed. In any case, this is a great video.

Fantastic video, on an extremely interesting subject. Being judgemental (strong emergence probably not necessary) helps orienting oneself. However, I believe the question about strong emergence/strong reductionism is altogether irrelevant. Each physical theory has its area where it is applicable and should not be used outside of it. The justification for theories is exclusively Denkökonomie. To claim there'll be a theory applicable to all levels of reality (strong reductionism) is just as presumptuous and speculative as to claim there are levels of reality wholly incompatible with lower level theories (strong emergence). Wherever there is overlap of areas of applicability the "higher" level can use the "lower" level. Also: Is decoherence at the core emergent phenomena?

Very good video, Dr. S.H. The stadium wave was an excellent analogy. It seems to me that emergence is just a synonym for spacetime-aligned causality. If the constituent elements followed the same reactions but each at a different far-separated time or in a different far-separated place or following random vectors or world lines, the emergence wouldn't occur. It is the fact that these reactions take place in a spacetime-aligned way that our pattern-finding brains identify the emergent property as "something."

@stevenjones8575

4 жыл бұрын

I do wish that you'd gone a bit further into your take on consciousness. It was uncharacteristic of you to dismiss discussion on something we know so little about. In all the videos I've seen of yours, you've been very good about cautioning both your peers and viewers against overstating the sureness of a finding or viewpoint. But your view of (forgive my paraphrasing), "We have no examples of strongly emergent phenomena; I assume consciousness is weakly emergent because everything else is," was a bit circular and seemed much more dogmatic than I expected to hear from you. I assume my paraphrase of your view lacks much of the nuance behind your actual view, but that is what was communicated to me in this video. Perhaps you could do another video to expound upon your view? Thanks again for the excellent content.

@kennethboykins264

3 жыл бұрын

Interesting. How do our brains fit in this casually aligned spatio-temporal modal? If emergence is merely how our brains scale, fit, or pattern objects in space and time then aligns our patterns our brains? Strong emergence exist anywhere one cares to look. Light propagates through space and time but its massless which means its outside of space and time. Matter, gravity, space and time strongly emerge from the interactions of massless energy outside of space and time. From the refrence frame of a single photon the Universe does not exist

@carl-magnuscarlsson7713

2 жыл бұрын

@@kennethboykins264 gobbledygook

I’m so glad I stumbled upon a comment referring people to this channel

This was quite fascinating. Thank you, Professor Hossenfelder. This should provide a measure of inoculation against a potential emergent ID argument.

The illustration of 'strong emergence' with a photo mosaic is beautiful. I didn't understand the distinction without it.

Pls make a video on quantum field theory.. would love to know your thoughts on it

Nice talk, but I think "strong emergence" is pretty common: 1) no elements of a plane can fly but when putting them together in a certain way they fly; 2) wood and air don't have fire in them, but when you drill the wood, fire emerges. 3) a painting of flow has no flower in it, but when you look at it, flower emerges in your mind.

Thanks for clarifying that!

Consciousness emerges from the physical world just like sound, but, contrary to sound, it literally takes on a life of its own. We can be sure of it because we live that life, it is the only thing we have direct access to.

First a caveat; I am a physician, not a physicist! Now the comment. I watched your video on "Free Will" and found it to be very interesting. From my limited perspective, your arguments about deterministic vs. probabilistic systems were compelling. But this video leaves me with a question (actually, many). Although we, as human beings, are made up of atoms, all of which observe the laws of physics and chemistry, isn't it possible that our "free will" (as it is conceived by common language and usage) is an emergent property of this physical/biologic system of complexity? This questions strays into philosophy, perhaps, but mightn't this emergent property also grant us moral culpability that we, otherwise, would not have in a completely deterministic system? Anyway, I love your videos! You are a fantastic teacher (even though I am hampered by remedial math and only retained smatterings of my undergraduate physics). Thank you for your great work!

Very illuminating, thanks. Your hair's looking good.

Love your videos. Thank you.

Thanks for explaining the scientific definition of emergence. 👍

Thanks for weak emergence. Not just strings. My doctor also agreed. 🙏 That Network Dynamics of Social Behavior in Coursera was a pretty good course.

Philosophically speaking, I know strong emergence is true for at least one part of me, whenever I watch Sabine's videos :)!

There are example of strong emergence in words, especially compounded words. We call them exocentric if the emergent meaning is strong. French has many of these words, take "tue-loup" (lit. wolf killer), a name for Aconit plants.

Gut erklärt und faszinierend, wie üblich. Danke aus bewölktem Wien, Scott

I think that even the picture of the cat can't be considered as an example on strong emergence, but it's a subtle example on weak emergence. The reason is that if we study the individual properties of the small pictures, and from that we study all the possible patterns that we can get by arranging them together, then the picture of the cat will be one of those patterns :)

Sabine... love you... period...

@istvansipos6395

4 жыл бұрын

@UCSngiONM8WfY_QnSTTgozLg it's simple... every video enhancing my life she makes... music or science it doesn't matter... and i am grateful for that...

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

what part?

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

@@istvansipos6395 amen, amar.

Any breakthrough in the study of consciousness, which is an emergence phenomenon?

Love the new background!!

Interesting a subject that i have always been interested about, ive spent many sleepless nights wondering about the universe and how it came about, whether it was accident, or design, im going to go for a design, kinda like a large jigsaw puzzle to figure out bit by bit, the universe is sooo cool!!!

Thank you for this very well structured video. The clear distinction between weak and strong emergence is particularly important. To say it bluntly: I think that strong emergence is kind of a superstition, which is tragically supported by many people claiming to be naturalists, like Michael Schmidt-Salomon and Martin Mahner. Actually it does not explain anything. It is the claim, that there is no reductive explanation to a phenomenon and no alternative explanation is offered. The statement that something is strongly emergent has the same explanatory power as the incomprehensible will of God. Kind of a replacement for God for Atheists or Agnostics which want to preserve the idea of being somehow beyond physics.

@michaelyaziji

2 жыл бұрын

I agree. But that is not to say it is not true. Rather it is to say it is a fundamental truth that cannot be reduced to constituent parts. All axiomatic features. “ strongly emergent” and “axiomatic/fundamental” are similar in meaning; emergent just has the added suspicious that we think the quality is somehow dependent on substructures.

When I was a kid, my family took a yearly vacation to New Hampshire to spend a week or so on the beach. I remember looking at the water and visibly seeing the horizon off in the distance curve ever so slightly panning from jetty to jetty. I know the people that are in support of arguing a round flat model are closer to those living in Kansas(flatter than a literal pancake) verses the advantage of seeing the Atlantic ocean from the east coast United States.

Agreed. Strong emergence is most easily approached through biology - conception gestation infancy childhood adolescence etc.However density is the key imperative - in your examples of the wave imperative, identifiable parts must be sufficiently dense to propagate, which complexity encapsulates a priori as critical proximity.

@CoranceLChandler

7 ай бұрын

Critical proximity? I don't think I'm familiar with that term

@cliffordbohm

6 ай бұрын

Each step in biological development follows from prior steps. There is matter being provided by first the mother and later as food that is self acquired which is assembled following processes that weakly emerge from genes and other higher level derived components. Even the behavior of genetics understood as a process of weak emergence.

Love your vids/blog.

How lovely that you add consciousness as emergence at the end

You are so good! so so good!! thanks for the work !

Mind blowing. Thanks!

What are your thoughts on gravity being an emergent property of matter interacting with the quantum vacuum?

"We would see deviations in particle physics" This is the instance of a theory taken as an established fact in this video. The theory could be changed, while the finite collection of the observations keep unchanged in the limit of experimental accuracy (5% - 10% in a particle accelerator.) In very complex systems, even a very small deviation can have drastic consequences.

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

even the cosmos looke coyote it really is in armony in a fine tune balance, when not then is not any more.

@Sidionian

4 жыл бұрын

Test

1:02 I don't think that the atoms in a gas need to move periodically for the sound to be transmitted, do they? I can imagine in the case of standing waves they might do, and I think sonic refrigeration is an example of such a case, but I can also imagine a pressure wave propagating through a gas without inducing any kind of harmonic motion in the constituent particles. Indeed, it seems you _need_ random motion to maintain the isometry and the acoustic properties of the macro-system. This might seem a bit nit-picking, but I think it matters when we are trying to pin down emergent phenomena and epiphenomena and whether there is a difference.

3:25 consciousness is an exemple of strong emergence. We couldn't explain or predict that consciousness arise from the interactions of fundamental particles

Hey Sabine, has anyone described what the rear of a light beam would look like? If I turned on a beam of light, I can imagine it travelling at the speed of light as it speeds thru space. But, when I turn it off and I observe the beam from its source, what would I see? Likewise, from that rear vantage point, would a beam turned off from a searchlight that's 3 feet in diameter reduce in size as it departed? If so, at what speed?

I'd be interested to see a measurement postulate "weakly emerging" from quantum mechanics.

@haros2868

22 күн бұрын

Exactly, someone has to be a fool to say quantum decohererence is weak emergent. Its strong and i would even say radical, same with consciousness. You have to be a panphysist to believe comsciousness is weakly emergent. This is the most rotten science channel

0:05 Is the fact that I keep understanding here "emerging means becoming a parent" a case of weak emergence or of strong emergence?

is there any video where you’ve shared your thoughts on how qualia logically supervenes on the physical?

Well there are good reasons why some people think that consciousness might be strongly emergent. If you think that there is a "hard problem of consciousness" it is natural to resolve the mystery this way; i.e. there is still a categorical difference in the understanding of complex macroscopic systems (like human brains... ) and conciseness itself. One way to think about this is to consider some kind of explanatory gap argument: all scientific theories do is giving us structural and functional understanding of the described object & no structural and functional understanding can ever explain how consciousness weakly emerges. Contrary it is "easy" to imagine a principal reduction of weakly emergent phenomena like color or even psycho-sociological properties of brains down to the standard model. But even if I know everything about a certain brain and calculate all its weakly emergent properties starting with a fundamental physical theory (maybe even predict its behavior and properties in a hard deterministic manner) my explanation lacks consciousness. Consciousness will always be an "ontological add-on" so to speak; -we could live in a Zombie-world (identical world & no consciousness) having the same fundamental physics as ours. Or at least by just looking at a hypothetical theory of everything describing this world we can never tell if we live in the Zombie or non-Zombie world. However there are other conclusions someone can draw of this line of reasoning. Maybe there is a way how consciousness weakly emerges that simply transcends our current understanding or there is a restriction in principle (no conscious observer can ever understand how consciousness arises). Finally someone might even argue that since there is no current example of strong emergence and that it seems that we cannot explain consciousness in principle that it might be fundamental.

@maudeeb

4 жыл бұрын

What might a test for strong emergence look like? Or put another way, how is weak emergence, or bottom-up causality, falsifiable? It seems to me the assumption that all is weak emergence we are yet to understand is as much an 'explanatory gap argument' as anything else, with the double assurance that no method is available to suggest otherwise.

@inccommensurable600

4 жыл бұрын

@@maudeeb hmmm I guess there is none. But I can imagine a mathematical/logical theorem proving that something we learned about the structure of consciousness is in principle not derivable from our (current) fundamental theory of nature -or maybe it is in principle independent like some mathematical hypothesis are independent from a certain set of axioms. However, these discoveries would always leave room for the assumption that either our current fundamental theory is wrong, or that that the description of consciousness we have is just an useful approximation/model. So there will never be a bullet-proof test. Therefore I think the problem here is even deeper. It seems like that our (current) scientific method just relies on reductionism/weak emergence and does not allow for anything describable by science to be strongly emergent --it just transcends the realm of our current scientific paradigm. Personally I don't think that strong emergence is the right way to resolve the hard problem of consciousness (which I still consider to be a real problem).

@maudeeb

4 жыл бұрын

@@inccommensurable600 I think you're right about the problem being deeper. I suspect there is something about our metaphysical view of reality that puts us in a logical bind. Even the definition of strong emergence, the need of a 'novel property', seems problematic. If we take 'novel' to mean 'not an extension of constituents'. then how can it also be a sub-property of those constituents. The very notion of properties is unavoidably reductionist.

Interesting perspective to strong emergence is that for every sufficiently strong consistent formal language there exists statements that are not decidable. It follows that every theory of physics that is build on set theory will have undecidable statements from axioms, or the theory is inconsistent. It could be possible that for any physical theory there exists some physically meaningful statement that is not decidable from the axioms. This would yield strong emergence. About consciousness: We have no formal language in which we are sufficiently even able to talk about consciousness. It is very weird to then say that consciousness is an emergent property of modern physical theory. Consciousness is not movement of our body, it is not electrical signals. It is about the existence and the content of experience. Even if one were to build a theory that characterizes when a system is associated with consciousness, this would not mean that we are even capable of giving a formal definition for consciousness. We by definition aren't able to understand strongly emergent systems from their parts. Arguing against the existence of strongly emergent systems by pointing out that all systems we know are weakly emergent is a bad argument. It would be a good argument if we already knew all systems.

In times of Corona I'll just link my students to your videos. And -- as a homework -- I'll assign your music videos. Thank you so much for all of this. Sei gsund (jiddisch)!

@espaciohexadimencionalsern3668

4 жыл бұрын

Corona time is to hot in here Ineed a cold one.

Sabine, may we re visit this subject again soon ? It intrigues me.🤔

I read someone on the comments talking about cause and effect. Can you talk about cause and effect in physics? Is a correct way to interpret physics? Is wrong in some theories or broken in some phenomena? I hope you find this topic interesting. It's clear to me now I can't be calmy having lunch while watching on your videos. This time you shock me again when you said "la ola" rofl xd. Very interesting clarifications you did in this video. Thanks Sabine.

@clmasse

4 жыл бұрын

Every science rests on the hypothesis of cause and effect, otherwise there can't be science at all. Therefore the scope of science is in principle very restricted.

@94josema

4 жыл бұрын

@@clmasse Hello Claude, are you a scientist? Philosopher maybe?

@clmasse

4 жыл бұрын

@@94josema I'm just a scientist, but I don't despise philosophy like 99% of the (worst) physicists.

I happy Dr Sabine did not trash emergence like she did the multiverse (I hold on to the multiverse). There are many people who deny emergence or complexity science because they seem to mystify the actuality. I think I can subscribe to weak emergence physically. I think weak emergence ought to be enough to explain most of the fundamentals of consciousness. Various parts of the brain light up under a stimuli and produce a sense of consciousness which includes qualia. I think mind however is a collective belief system (Dr Yuval) or sort of a jargon dictionary for constructed entities that allows for individual brains to connect and exchange information. For example you can be scientifically minded or money minded or career minded. I feel I have the necessary theories (of course I agree there are other minds as per Theory of Mind). So there you go : brain, consciousness, mind. I have budding theories. Of course, we have the vagus nerve and mirror neurons for heart and brain and complex emotions.

Consciousness "qualia" are such a different *kind* of property, it is hard to even imagine a "weak emergence" explanation. :) If I understand your argument correctly, it goes something like this: While we might not have enough information to give a weak emergence explanation for consciousness, we should still assume it is weak emergence because strong emergence requires giving up on reductionism. Is this what you are saying?

Sabine, can there be emergent behavior from the collective interaction of quasi particles? Or to be more general; emergent behavior from collectively interacting emergent behaviors?..a second order of emergence.

Very clear. I feel thankful to whatever that made me run into this video

Good presentation. I agree with you about what we know about physics so far. But paradoxically I wonder if insisting on that is also just philosophy. Math seeks symbolic self consistence. Science seeks measurable self consistence. And philosophy seeks defining that which we can not know.

Hi doctor, I was wondering if Conway's "games of life" and similar cellular automata can be considered as systems exemplifying strongly emergent behaviors.

@SabineHossenfelder

4 жыл бұрын

Yes, good example!

@09bidon

4 жыл бұрын

@Sabine Hossenfelder, on the contrary, in the article "Weak emergence" (Bedau, 1997), Conway's game of life is a perfect exemple of weak emergence, not strong emergence as he says.Cf onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0029-4624.31.s11.17

Brilliant as always Sabine. Would an example of strong emergence, something that cant be derived from the properties of its constituents, be the higgs field? The higgs field in particular seems to be everywhere and yet has no reason to be, or to have a quantification where there might be more in one place than another. (As I understand it). Quantum fluctuations and energy of a vacuum also seem vaguely strongly emergent in that random production of ephemeral particle pairs from nothing seems to be inexplicable, even if consistent with laws of physics.

Consciousness being weakly emergent would imply some degree of panpsychism (or even straight out idealism), that's why people came up with this idea of strong emergence, to try to avoid the inevitable conclusion and try to save physicalism.

@haros2868

22 күн бұрын

Finally someone with a brain.. weak emergece=every property is the sum of the parts. So neutrons are comscious too. So molecules are conscious too... Panphysism is an absolute inevitability. This video is rotten garbage. And some might ask ok whats wrong with panphysism?? I would answer berserkly, SLEEP. Sleep, anesthesea, comma are absolutely impossible under panphysism!

*Brilliant analysis!.......SHARING*