Facebook
Twitter
There was a contentious theory in the 80s. It started in the 70s, but I wasn’t there and can’t speak to its contentiousness at that time. It was called the anthropic principle. It’s attributed to something between cosmology and philosophy, but I suspect it was rubbed out between science fiction and theoretical physicists, because it’s the kind of thing sci-fi writers think about and theoretical physics hasn’t done anything interesting since the bomb.
The anthropic principle states that we see what we see because we are in a universe that can produce things that can observe the universe. It’s an assertion that can fall out of any discussion about fine tuning1[1] or any other statistical or philosophical problem that arises from studying The Universe, because when you’re studying The Universe you only have one data point.
Whether or not science fiction helped birth the notion, once notioned it fed into science fiction to pump some life back into multiverse stories. Now the branching universes produced a subset of self-conscious universes, that birthed other self-conscious universes or whatever the story needed. Those already vulnerable to misunderstandings of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics used this as extra padding for the necessity of consciousness in the universe.
The principle supports none of this. Whatever the intent in its formation, pick it apart with any rigor and it boils down to “we are here taking scientific measurements because we are here taking scientific measurements.” The doctoral program version of “it is what it is.”
This rankled. Pragmatically, its scientific usefulness was, and continues to be, zilch. Philosophically, it was much worse: It was the final dethronement of the human endeavor. Copernicus took us out of the center of the universe, Darwin made us animals, Freud stole our agency, Einstein messed with time, Hubble made our galaxy one among many. The anthropic principle swept the whole edifice of scientific delving off the table. We’re here because we’re here, we see what we see because it’s all we can see.
People who go into science do so because they are unsatisfied with this kind of philosophical dead end, so science went on. But when there are decades between new particles and half the physics crew is tying knots in superstrings, it’s bound to gnaw at the soul.
Thus the stage was set for “emergent” to steal conceptual glory.
For educational reasons, the first time I heard “emergent property” was in reference to consciousness. I thought it was a joke. “Consciousness is an emergent property” struck me as a meaningless sentence, unless emergence means anything besides “something that happens” which, as far as I can tell, it does not. Retrospecting with grace, it does hold consciousness to the known physical sciences, delineating it from theories suggesting consciousness is akin the electromagnetic field, or delivered by deities.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that “emergence” is coming to mean “miraculous.” There are two examples that come up repeatedly in trying to convince people of the obviousness of this miracle.
The first is the wetness argument. There is evidently not enough overlap between science communicators and TikTok, as a cursory browsing of the latter would demonstrate to the former how pointless it is to even talk about what qualifies as wet.2[2] The argument is that a water molecule is three atoms, but if you get a whole bunch of them together, you get water! Which can make you wet!
There are innumerable issues in communicating science to nonscientists. I am not a scientist, and the scientists I consult are familiar with most of these problems. The wetness argument seems like a deeper problem in reporting in general. It’s a factoid lacking fact that gets written down by someone in a hurry: the modern equivalent of the hot-stove-versus-pretty-girl debacle that happened while trying to get the theory of relativity into newspapers.
Wet and wetness are not things or properties that exist outside our relationship with water. They are words we use to describe large amounts of water molecules being on large amounts of non-water molecules. That large amounts of water molecules act in certain ways is interesting, and the purview of sciences only tangentially concerned with the atomic composition of water, but that does not mean there is any property or function that does not arise from water molecules existing en masse. Even dismissing the assumption of human perspective, all of the fun and pretty qualities we attribute to water come from it existing in a gravity well under sufficient pressure and heat. If this is starting to sound anthropic it’s because it is not at all an ontological phase transition. We had the word “wet” before we understood what water is, because it’s occasionally consequential to say things like, “this space station is awfully wet, should we be concerned?”
The next thing that comes up constantly is Conway’s Game of Life, and it’s even worse. The Game of Life has a context and a few rules. The context is it’s a grid where each square can be a thing or be empty. If a thing has two or three things near it, it stays a thing. If it has one or zero neighboring things, it ceases to be a thing. If an empty square has exactly three things around it, it becomes a thing. More than three neighbors, it stops being a thing.
As obvious a metaphor for gentrification as it sounds, it’s not that. It’s a compelling visual that is most people’s introduction to the concept of an algorithm. Because it tends to be a first introduction, and because those basic rules can produce wildly complex, self-sustaining patterns, it gets brought up as an example of emergence: simple rules turned into complex caricatures of real life.
The majority of articles that bring up Conway immediately segue into how life is an emergent property of simple rules because life is categorically different from its component laws, and this is when I smash my face against the nearest collection of non-brittle atomic structures, because they just described a computer simulation where lifelike things are created by component laws. Change one fundamental rule and it falls apart. There’s no emergent property that does not depend entirely, and reductively, on the structure of the game.
Again attempting grace, this is a mix of bad comms across vocations, because in philosophy there are the concepts of weak emergence and strong emergence. Weak emergence is a practical referent for science discussions, because it means “we have to use different math now.” It’s useful to note that large collections of water molecules in a bucket don’t act exactly the same way as individual water molecules under a microscope. But there is no fundamental quality in the bucket that is not under the microscope. Strong emergence claims that there is some feature of many things interacting that physically transcends the quality of the many things, to the point where the strongly emergent phenomenon cannot be deduced from knowing the properties of the components.
This is logical, physical, and philosophical nonsense. Strong emergence has never been shown by anything, except as a weak explanation for the weirder things we don’t understand at all. The difference between “it can’t be done” and “we can’t do it” is a chasm some philosophers are invested in crossing without bothering to build a bridge.
All supposedly emergent properties are things that we experience as humans: life, wetness, pretty pictures, consciousness, self-replicating dots on a computer screen. Proposed as a pseudo-scientific philosophy, emergence wrenches The Big Picture away from anthropic nihilism and embeds it in the patterns we see, claiming those patterns are important things that have burst into being from baser constituents. Emergence is narcissism. It elevates what affects us into vital structure.
We’re only vaguely sure we can locate five percent of the universe’s matter. I submit that in the context of trying to understand what’s really going on, we should not be so bold as to assume what we see is anything worth seeing at all.
The anthropic principle and emergence only made it to magazines in the first place because applied physics hasn’t done anything fun since the moon landing. When science isn’t doing anything fun, the philosophy bleeds out. The anthropic principle said we’re stuck here, ignorant, maybe forever, because reasons. Emergence fights back by saying things matter, because emergence solely exists to validate our perspective.
I’m not saying don’t enjoy the rainbow. I’m not even saying that it’s not good that we can have the rainbow. I will insist that we remember the rainbow does not exist but for us, and do not go looking for gold.
1 Wherein people wonder why certain mathematically deduced values are what they are, since if they were slightly different, atoms wouldn’t form or everything would be black holes or something else less fun.
2 For the record, there are only two reliable answers: Do you need to dry it? Wet. Is it a prop in the Alien franchise? Wet.
