295 | Solo: Emergence and Layers of Reality
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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
1h 38m
3 speakers
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Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Longtime Mindscape listeners know that the idea of emergence emerges over and over again. And in various contexts, for example, you might hear someone claim that consciousness is not a new fundamental category, but rather an emergent category from underlying physics. And This is a useful idea of emergence in the sense that we're talking about it here. It's talked about a lot both in science context and in philosophy context. But it's also a little frustrating. It's frustratingly vague about what exactly is meant. Part of this is because different people use it to mean different things. Part of it is because different people want it to mean different things.
And part of it is because people are not clear about what it is that they actually are meaning. In particular, the thing that gets me is I just really would like clarity when some people talk about higher-level emergent things about whether or not they are imagining that the existence of these higher-level emergent things— violates or demands a modification of the lower level laws of physics. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But I do think that as a respectable thinker about these things, we should be clear about what exactly is going on. And so I'm not interested so much in policing the definition. I'm not here to say what the right definition of emergence is. But I do think that it's important to clarify all the possible ways in which we might profitably talk about something being emergent without first judging what exactly is going on. And indeed, this is a longstanding ambition of mine. I finally got a chance to write a paper about it with Achuth Parola, who's a student here at Johns Hopkins. We wrote a paper called What Emergence Can Possibly Mean.
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