Ignorance or near ignorance should never stop a blogger's blathering (what I am about to say is clearly consistent with the above principle):
The emergent property of a whole is not merely the sum of the interactions of its parts according to their individual, pre-emergent properties. Something more is going on: something new. If sentience is regarded as an emergent property, then no machine could be sentient, for the product of a machine's operations is nothing other than the result of the interactions its parts. Someone might object, however, that under certain circumstances new properties might emerge from from the interactions of the machine's parts. One can respond to this objection in either of two ways. First: definitionaly (sp?). If a machine IS a machine then it has no emergent operations. Period. Or (call this 1b) one might recast the same point in the form of a modem tollens argument: if machines can have emergent properties, then there is no reason in principle why all mechanical interactions could not have emergent properties. And in this case there really are no purely mechanical interactions; perhaps the cosmos is one big partially awake organism. At this point, speculative philosophy of science has merged with new age monism (at this point GK Chesterton's statement "Those who don't believe in God will believe in anything" comes to mind).
The other alternative is to look for patterns in the emergence of new properties. One guiding principle might be "operation follows being," which suggests a twofold sense of emergence: emergent operation and emergent being (in this context "being" means the characteristic in virtue of which something remains able to operate when it is not operating and in virtue of which it does operate when it does... for example, being able to see is a characteristic had by the eye/cortex/etc) . In other words, the upper level being of being emerges from the lower level, as does its respective operation(s). The inquiry into the genuineness of the claim that machines are really non-organic perceivers would consist in part in looking at for a law-like relationship between upper and lower levels in emergence, as well as whether there is an obvious reason for that relationship, whereupon we can apply this law to the case of computational machines in order to arrive at a sober judgment as to whether or not its operations are emergent.
[later addition: Perhaps this is a decent example of higher/lower relations as following a law-like pattern: Robert Penrose notes the plasticity of the brain as the substratum of long term memory. I would call this "plant-like," for the brain sorta grows differently on the basis of stored information. He also points out how this plasticity is unlike a machine. Animals have, if you will, a vegetative way of developing. Higher level of being (being able to remember) is embossed upon the lower level (growing differently)]
Note: it seems to me that emergence is just a materialist's way of admitting that Aristotle was right about form while still holding somewhat to a kind of "trickle up" theory of being.
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