I don't see why the standard model couldn't in principle explain chemistry and biology in term of reducibility (causal and ontological) to fundamental particles and forces.I'm not a physicist, but I don't think the standard model of physics is "too crude". However, it's not a theory of everything physical—e.g. it doesn't include and explain gravity—, let alone a theory of everything, in the sense that all chemical, biological, psychological, and sociological conceptions, descriptions, and explanations can be reductively replaced with or translated into microphysical ones based on the standard model.Gertie wrote: ↑Today, 4:16 pmRight. So how can this be squared with Physicalism. And specifically conscious experience as an emergent property of physical brain processes.
The link mentions various ideas to do with uncertainty, complexity, the limits of our precision, and chaos. I think basically saying the Standard Model as it stands is too crude, and will miss certain 'outlier' outcomes, which we currently attribute to 'emergence'.
Have I got that right?
That's hard for me to judge, or know how mainstream physicists think about this. But regardless, it's not obvious to me how randomness/uncertainty or the other ideas would lead to complex brains in motion somehow manifesting the property of conscious experiencing. Do you know if anyone has tried to make that specific case? If it's a physicalist foundation for experience as emergent property dualism then I'd imagine it's been tried? Is this the hypothesis what Orch Or is working on for example?
Psychology and sociology, as well as abstract concepts, epistemology, meaning, value and suchlike only come into play once conscious entities arrive on the scene. If/when we understand the mind-body relationship, we might have a way of reducing psychology and sociology to standard model physics - or we might find the model is incomplete/flawed or not fundamental. You're right gravity hasn't been integrated into the model, and neither have whatever dark matter and energy are. This is recognised. But theere is no place holder like 'dark matter' for experience, it's simply not there, because of its peculiar non-physical properties.
Maybe, but the model claims to describe the entirety of the universe in terms of its fundamental stuff and the way those particles interact in terms of forces, with the exceptions you noted which they are working on. The universe being unimaginably complex hasn't prevented the creation of this 'in principle' model, while not claiming to be able to give detailed explanations for every complex phenomenon.However, even if the sciences "above" physics turn out to be theoretically, semantically, and epistemically irreducible to or irreplaceable by (micro)physics—(micro)physical terms, theories, knowledge—, ontological reductionism about their respective subject matters isn't thereby refuted, because it doesn't follow that the irreducibility of the higher-level sciences to the base-level science is due to cases of ontological emergence. There may be other reasons—such as representational or computational supercomplexity that can make it impossible for scientists to describe and explain e.g. neural networks and human societies on the microphysical level in terms of single elementary particles and their interactions.
Emergence is a concept which might enable experience to find a place in the physicalist model. We agree that experience as an ontologically irreducibile emergent property looks very problematic, and you think emergence which is ontologically reducible to brain stuff in motion, which in turn is reducible to particles and forces, is probably correct. And gave me the link as a way this could be true.
My reading of the link is it's considering Emergence as a result of randomness, complexity, chaos and/or limited observation/measurement as the factors behind emergent properties manifesting. As I understood it anyway - have I misunderstood? I didn't find it easy to see exactly what the claim was or how it could be applied to conscious experience. Orch Or came to mind because it's looking at a 'heirarchy interface', which doesn't exclude quantum randomness, or the causality associated with classical physics. I could vaguely see that as a potential way of testing one of the ideas thrown out in the link.
What does epistemological phenonemon mean? (Google wasn't helpful)When quantum physics enters the stage, things get very complicated and obscure (not mathematically, but metaphysically). For example, is quantum randomness an ontological phenomenon or just an epistemological one? (According to Bohmian mechanics, a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, it's not ontological.)
The sort of physical processes involved in genetic copying imperfections which result in new traits has no obvious link to how physical processes can in principle manifest experiential properties, that's the issue.(Speaking of randomness, consciousness appeared in the high-level biological context of animal evolution through natural selection, where we find randomness on the genetic level. But whether or not an individual organism with its randomly or nonrandomly determined traits survives in its natural habitat and succeeds in producing offspring is not a matter of randomness.)
I don't understand quantum theory either, but this looks like a sensible line of enquiry, and the three frameworks outlined here make sense to me. Note 2 and 3 aren't an obvious fit with experiencing being an emergent property of brain stuff in motion."It is widely accepted that consciousness or, more generally, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the material brain. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness. Several approaches answering this question affirmatively, proposed in recent decades, will be surveyed. There are three basic types of corresponding approaches: (1) consciousness is a manifestation of quantum processes in the brain, (2) quantum concepts are used to understand consciousness without referring to brain activity, and (3) matter and consciousness are regarded as dual aspects of one underlying reality."
Hmmm. My understanding is physicists went looking for the Higgs bosun to make the model work because they realised something was missing. They predicted it must exist, then set about finding it and incorporated it into the model. They have nothing which predicts experience should exist, that's the point. So there is the possibility the standard model is flawed, incomplete or not fundamental. On the other hand experience might be an emergent property, which is what we're discussing."Even though the Standard Model is currently the best description there is of the subatomic world, it does not explain the complete picture. The theory incorporates only three out of the four fundamental forces, omitting gravity. There are also important questions that it does not answer, such as “What is dark matter?”, or “What happened to the antimatter after the big bang?”, “Why are there three generations of quarks and leptons with such a different mass scale?” and more. Last but not least is a particle called the Higgs boson, an essential component of the Standard Model.
On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 126 GeV. This particle is consistent with the Higgs boson but it will take further work to determine whether or not it is the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. The Higgs boson, as proposed within the Standard Model, is the simplest manifestation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Other types of Higgs bosons are predicted by other theories that go beyond the Standard Model.