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

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...

robot/computers, awareness of causality, holism

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature.  But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole.  It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon.   It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).