Emergence
Two of humanities greatest and seemingly eternal enigma's, life and consciousness have no solid scientific explanations yet. I like to put emphasis on the "yet" in that sentence because science never stands still and human curiosity knows no bounds.
image by ElisaRiva - source: Pixabay
In this post I'd like to briefly discuss the term "emergence" as it's understood in science:
emergence occurs when "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts," meaning the whole has properties its parts do not have. These properties come about because of interactions among the parts.
source: Wikipedia
For example, the three phases of water are seen as "emergent properties" of its molecules: a single molecule cannot be seen as a liquid, gas or solid, and only when truly large numbers of these molecules interact with each other, these properties come into existence. The solidity of ice is an emergent property of water-molecules.
Emergence usually only occurs with extremely large numbers of individual parts and is therefore strongly associated with so called complex systems. A while back I wrote about The Mystery Of Life, where we discussed the cell as biology's smallest "unit" of life, as well as being a complex system all by itself. Where "life" used to be explained as some sort of mysterious, as of yet undetected substance, a "life-essence", so to speak, scientists now mostly agree that life is an emergent phenomenon or property of the many individual chemical components that make up the cell's complex system of interacting parts.
Ice crystals at window - source: Wikimedia Commons
In the same manner consciousness or mind is explained as an emergent phenomenon caused by the complex electrochemical interactions of neurons and chemicals in the brain. Different thoughts or states of mind can be explained by the changing emergent properties of said complex cerebral system, just like the many beautiful and diverse ice-crystals seen on windows in winters all around the world, are different emergent structures of the complex interactions of water-molecules. Different physical characteristics of the many diverse life-forms could be seen as different emergent forms of the interactions in a complex system of cells with different functions.
Many physicists, chemists, biologists and other scientists now subscribe to this idea of emergence to begin to try to explain our greatest mysteries, being life and consciousness, and how they began to exist. I also lean toward this train of thought, as it's the best we can hope for using only the scientific method, which in my opinion is the best method to describe the best approximation of reality as we experience it. Still... There's this nagging feeling that this somehow is a cop-out. It "feels" like saying that we don't really understand what we're talking about and explain it away by saying: it's just the result of simple parts spontaneously forming ever more complex structured wholes...
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this subject, especially if you've got experience with a study that touches these complex systems and emergence. But I'm grateful for you visiting my blog in any case :-) Thanks again for reading and I hope you'll stay curious and steeming until we meet back here tomorrow!
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I'm of opinion that genetic code and DNA is also related to the subject of emergence. There are some fascinating facts and researches done with animals that expand the mistery even more. There is plenty to be known and to understand the human consciousness, and I feel we have to understand other, more simple forms of life (such as animals) first. Animals also have behaviors that was not just taught but is built in them, for example "a feeling" for hierarchy and fair play.
All of that is too extensive for me to comprehend, I'm just a regular teacher, but as you pointed out we as humankind are still trying to get a grasp of it. I don't think we'll be able to process that much information and that some future AI will do it for us. Anyway a great and mind-boggling article!
Thanks so much for this response @astrodreamteam, and thanks for that informative link :-) And I believe you just might be right that eventually developments in A.I. will bring us to a next level of understanding these emergent properties.
Hope to welcome you back in the future!
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STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!