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THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

~ Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)

THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

Tag Archives: Emergence

Biggest Mistake

27 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by Gary Herstein in Emergence, Logic, Metaphysics, Process Philosophy

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Emergence, Process Philosophy

“Biggest mistake of my life.”

“Worst mistake I ever made.”

I can’t speak for other cultures, but phrases such as the above and others akin to them are fairly commonplace in American conversation, particularly when the topic involves the foolish choices made when we were young. While often accompanied with an eye roll and a shake of the head in signs of regret, there is just as often a tinge of wistfulness as well, a longing for a return to that kind of vivid recklessness and the electrifying sense of being alive that was at its core.i There is certain legitimacy to that longing – even, and even especially, for the mistakes – at the metaphysical level. For every act of creation is, in an important sense, an error, a mistake, a “failure” to follow the “correct” path. So it is worth a moment to take a look at such things.

Before going any further, I want to dismiss one kind of mistake that is grotesque in its calculated refusal of any possibility of creativity. That is the kind of action “celebrated” by the despicable Jackass films and shows. These aren’t errors of any kind. They are acts of willful stupidity pandering to the lowest element of human character, “entertainment” predicated on laughing derisively at others for pulling absurdist stunts devoid of any talent or art. These programs are simply an extension of the “Good Ol’ Boy’s last words” jokes.ii There is nothing interesting or amusing about such behavior or the people who wallow in it.

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Objective Values

15 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by Gary Herstein in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Objective Morality

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Critical Thinking, Emergence, Ethics, Inquiry, Morality

Are there such things as “objective values”? That is, are there values that have a claim to objective reality in much the same way as the laws of physics? Or are all value claims subjective, nothing more than a matter of personal taste and desire, without any special reference to what is real beyond the fact of the desire?

Caution needs to be exercised here, as the framing of the questions above pose a false dichotomy. In addition, asking about objective values is a different question from that regarding the existence of objective morality. Values can be morally neutral, whereas morals are a very definite sub-collection of values. It is possible that some values might be objectively real (chocolate is objectively yummy not because we like it, but because it is just the best thing in the world), without ever entailing (in the logical sense of formal implication at the deepest levels of meaning) that any objectively real morals exist. Conversely, there can be objectively real moral values which nevertheless offer no further implications to the full range of other values, or even to other putative moral values. The relations involved are not simple ones, and do not involve set-theoretic/mereological containments (A is a smaller part of B) nor any necessarily transitive implications (that is, A implies B, and B implies C, therefore A implies C.) Connections – insofar as they exist at all – are “thin,” and can fade with the (metaphorical) “distance” between acts of evaluations, intentions, meanings, and values themselves.

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(E)merging Traffic

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by Gary Herstein in General Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science

≈ 2 Comments

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Emergence, Philosophy of Mind, Semantics

      What does it mean to say that some thing, quality, relation, or constellation of combinations of any of the above (as well as whatever I might not have mentioned) is “emergent”? What does it mean for something to be genuinely new, for the universe to be genuinely creative?

      One obvious response falls out along the lines that, “Well, something is there now that wasn’t there before.” Despite its initial plausibility, I would suggest that such an account is badly off-base. For one thing, the reliance on a difference over time is quite naïve. The evolution of eukaryotic cells on the primordial Earth took place over time, and in a sense such nucleated cells “emerged” from an earlier situation where they did not exist. But this is a kind of “weak tea” emergence that is easily accounted for within ordinary evolutionary theory. No, when philosophers speak of emergence, they mean something radically new, seemingly unaccountable within the existing scheme of things. In a very real sense, they mean something genuinely creative.

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