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    Every purported 'emergent' property of higher levels has,... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Higher-level functions in human beings are ontologically dependent on lower-level processes but are not reducible to them.

    Every purported 'emergent' property of higher levels has, historically, yielded to lower-level mechanistic explanation upon sufficient scientific progress.

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    1 reason for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

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    Reason for
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    • 1.Consciousness, vitalism, and élan vital were once viewed as irreducibly emergent; neuroscience has progressively explained them mechanistically.
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    • 2.Every historical case where emergence seemed fundamental (heat, life, chemistry) dissolved into lower-level physics upon investigation.
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    • 3.If emergence were truly irreducible, we'd expect diminishing returns in explaining higher phenomena; instead, reductionism keeps succeeding predictively.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.Complexity at scale creates genuinely novel constraints and causal powers (e.g., traffic flow) unexplainable by particle physics alone, even in principle.
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    • 2.The claim conflates epistemological reducibility (explaining via lower levels) with ontological emergence; a phenomenon can be both causally real and mechanistically describable.
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    • 3.Induction from past successes cannot guarantee future cases; some organizational properties may resist lower-level reduction due to computational or practical limits.
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    Connections

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    Consciousness & Mind1 linked

    Related

    Complexity at scale creates genuinely novel constraints and causal powers (e.g.,...Consciousness, vitalism, and élan vital were once viewed as irreducibly emergent...Every historical case where emergence seemed fundamental (heat, life, chemistry)...Higher-level functions in human beings are ontologically dependent on lower-leve...
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    If emergence were truly irreducible, we'd expect diminishing returns in explaini...Induction from past successes cannot guarantee future cases; some organizational...The claim conflates epistemological reducibility (explaining via lower levels) w...

    Details

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    claim
    Perspectives
    2 (1 for, 1 against)
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    1 edit