serpentor
Ethical calculus can be best described as the practical application of dynamic moral absolutism.
One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.
Determinism is the theory that every event, including human thought and cognition, is controlled by a precursor chain of events. Like a domino game, if you tip one over, the rest will tip over in a completely logical order. The philosophical proposition of determinism says that at the lowest and most fundamental level of existence, there exists no random events.
Emergence basically means that instead of having a chaotic soup of atoms and particles, we have instead ordered and non chaotic objects, that have a purpose beyond just existing as a soup of bound together particles.
Weak emergence explains that any such object in the universe can be reduced to, and completely understood, by examining and fully understanding the fundamental components of which the object is made of.
Strong emergence, on the other hand, predicts that we cannot do so, that there are things, like consciousness, that cannot be reduced, to say, the brain and the body.
If strong emergence exists, how can it be run by the laws of physics? And if it's not run by the laws of physics, how can we understand it, does it even matter? And more importantly, how can it interact with the laws of physics that the substance we know as matter is made of?
Weak emergence is like, if I take four equally sized sticks, I can arrange them to form a square. Here the square emerges on the interaction of the sticks.
Consciousness is also an emergent property, but the trick is that it's not best looked at as emerging for the interaction of neurons, but rather specialized sections of the brain interacting with one another thus yielding consciousness as a property of the reaction. These sections are composed of smaller 'offices' with their own degrees of specialization, and so on down til one reaches the neuron.
One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.
Determinism is the theory that every event, including human thought and cognition, is controlled by a precursor chain of events. Like a domino game, if you tip one over, the rest will tip over in a completely logical order. The philosophical proposition of determinism says that at the lowest and most fundamental level of existence, there exists no random events.
Emergence basically means that instead of having a chaotic soup of atoms and particles, we have instead ordered and non chaotic objects, that have a purpose beyond just existing as a soup of bound together particles.
Weak emergence explains that any such object in the universe can be reduced to, and completely understood, by examining and fully understanding the fundamental components of which the object is made of.
Strong emergence, on the other hand, predicts that we cannot do so, that there are things, like consciousness, that cannot be reduced, to say, the brain and the body.
If strong emergence exists, how can it be run by the laws of physics? And if it's not run by the laws of physics, how can we understand it, does it even matter? And more importantly, how can it interact with the laws of physics that the substance we know as matter is made of?
Weak emergence is like, if I take four equally sized sticks, I can arrange them to form a square. Here the square emerges on the interaction of the sticks.
Consciousness is also an emergent property, but the trick is that it's not best looked at as emerging for the interaction of neurons, but rather specialized sections of the brain interacting with one another thus yielding consciousness as a property of the reaction. These sections are composed of smaller 'offices' with their own degrees of specialization, and so on down til one reaches the neuron.
posted by samuel at 4:23 PM
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