Skip to main content

Goedel applied to emergence: Lower-level indeterminism

Goedel's theorum may be good for more than AI-bashing: we may be able to apply it to emergence (understood broadly enough to include my Aristotelian or rather neo-Platonic conception of higher/lower levels of being/operation).

Think of how we can posit a set of mathematical operations and terms and use these operations and terms to formulate rules/algorithms that can be used in term to determine the truth values of the expressions that use those terms. Goedel showed that the set of all possible rules that we might formulate will be able can determine the truth values of SOME BUT NOT ALL of the expressions that could be created using those terms and operations (I'm not sure I said the Goedel thing 100% right but hopefully closely enough)...

If you keep the above in mind, then you might consider how all of that math stuff might have the following analogy in nature: i.e., the laws or properties that attend a lower level of being can somewhat determine many but not all of the possible behaviors/arrangements/interactions at that lower level. These laws of nature attending lower levels of being are like algorithms: they underdetermine the lower level states of affairs in a manner analogous to how the rules/algorithms in a given math system unable to determine the truth values of all of the possible expressions using operations available. In both cases there is something law-like that underdetermines.

Just as mathematical rules within a system can at least exclude some expressions as impossible or false but cannot establish the truth of all equations that could be expressed using those terms, .... so too, lower-level properties exclude certain things as impossible at the lower level but do not comprehend all possible states of affairs. The lower level rules are open ended, open to influence of a possible higher level.

This indetermination is an openness to determination at the higher level.
This indetermination is NOT freedom. But acknowledging that it is there will utterly undercut reductive materialist arguments against the very possibility of freedom.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...