Thread:Ghelæ/@comment-1073312-20141018015159/@comment-47205-20141018065004

Reading your comments on the pastie, you're quite right that I didn't explain things very clearly even when I said I was going to, possibly because of the time of night that I was writing it. Perhaps a better explanation of my conclusions on strong emergence would be to link in with the idea of reductionism and holism being two sides of the same coin rather than truly distinct philosophies about the world. What I was trying to say is that, despite how it might seem, strong emergence versus new fundamentals is actually an issue of epistemology - do our first principles tell us everything that we need to simulate a system? - rather than ontology. This is connected to the other idea, which was that qualia being fundamentally non-physical rather than merely weak emergence would be comparable to sayng that they're strongly emergent, or equivalently associated with "new fields". There is a slight extra part there relating to the indescribability of qualia, which is where the questions of "do protons feel electric charge?" come from.

As it happens, this whole thing is quite like a thought experiment: if no strongly-emergent phenomena exist, it's practically moot, and I don't think it's directly related to the unpredictability of weakly-emergent systems (which often comes from chaos and nondeterministic wavefunction collapse/decoherence). However, your idea about the connections between physical and abstract objects may indeed be related: mental abstraction can be thought of as abstract objects imperfectly mapping to physical ones, while strong emergence is the reverse, and in which cases the "physical" and "abstract" ones are real or not depends on the situation. But now I think I may be having the opposite problem of waking up too early in the morning. :P