IIWII-UWMWI

I have been thinking (again) how we make up explanations for our experience and then discover that they don't quite work.

While this is on my mind, Ethan Siegel offers a new essay entitled Yes, Reductionism Can Explain Everything In The Whole Universe. He rejects emergence as magic.

I'm guessing that he would reject Bob Doyle's Information Philosophy which explains emergence as new information that appears with the association of objects. For example, a hydrogen atom is, by itself, spherical, while two hydrogen atoms forming a molecule together have new attributes related to their combined shape: direction, vibration, rotation, etc. None of that is magic. The evidence is real and explicable.

However, at the most complex levels of aggregation such as the human body, explanations remain speculative and predictions uncertain. The trillions of cells in a human body generate consciousness, emotion, concepts, values and intention; but the explanation of how that happens is elusive.

New ideas look a bit like magic until the evidence demands we change our thinking. Remember the EPR paradox, objecting that quantum entanglement violates the local realism of causality? Remember Einstein's "spooky action at a distance". Reductionism works because when it doesn't work we change how we are thinking. Our understanding of the universe is emergent.

Knowing how Doyle and Siegel disagree might keep us from getting stuck in one worldview or the other. Hmmm. Emergence can be understood reductively and reductionism works because it is emergent.

I got started on this idea in the previous note.

We belong to a self-organizing system that sees itself through our eyes, understands itself through our thoughts, emerges from our actions.

Too many words. How about this.

We are intentionally active components of a recursively emergent reality.

Big words. Let's get it down to less than three syllables per word.

It is what it is
until we mess with it.

I know, it also messes with us. Recursion changes everything. But it's getting too complicated. That's the best I can do...for now.

It needs a song and a story with talking animals and an acronym for when we type with our thumbs.

IIWII-UWMWI

Not quite there. I will work on it.

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