Emergence isn’t real
One of the first problems with emergence is that it is often used to describe things that can’t be understood by reductionism. The classic example is that a single water molecule doesn’t have wetness. But the thing is literally everything that humans experience can’t be understood with reductionism. You can’t understand what a bathroom tile is without emergence, you can’t understand what a book case is without it. Pick any noun, adjective or verb in the dictionary and it’s pretty much only understood at the emergent level.
Now, the other issue is that our human brains are incredibly good at noticing similarities between objects, events and whatever else. We can see the similarities between all humans and sort of create an abstract representation of all those people. But what you notice if you think about it is that this abstract object is an illusion.
What if you wanted to draw this abstract representation of a human? You might start out drawing a very simple circle, with two inner circles for eyes, a line for nose and mouth, and call it a day. But this doesn’t really capture everyone. For example what about people who are overweight vs people who are skinny. You’d have to draw one rounder shape for the overweight person and a thinner face for the other person etc. Then you notice well what about different skin colors. You’d have to color them differently. The same for gender. Maybe put long hair one one and shorter hair on the other.
But this is true for all abstract objects the brain creates. A chair, a planet, a book case, whatever. You can draw some abstract representations of it but one abstract representation is just as good as the other. There is no “true” abstract object. You can draw a simple line drawing of a book case where the shelves are farther apart, or closer together, or a book case that’s tall, or short, and every one of them is as “true” as the next.
The reason for this is that abstract objects don’t really exist in reality I would argue. So what is reality actually doing? I would say it is a place of repeating patterns. You might read this and begin to think of Dennet’s “real patterns”, and there are similarities, but there are also differences which I will explain.
Dennet’s basic argument (simplified version) is that a pattern is real if it has predictive power. So for example I predict that this chair is a chair, and I predict that I can sit in it, and I am right, and therefore the pattern of “chair” is a “real pattern”. I can predict all chairs perfectly and therefore it is a real pattern.
But my argument is a little different. For some reason, the universe likes to repeat itself. Humans is a repetitive pattern, grass is, cows are, planets are, basically anything in the universe is probably repeated millions if not billions of times across the planet and across the universe (with exceptions).
What this means is that I think we can call these patterns “real”. I think grass is actually a pattern that exists in the universe, it’s not just an illusion in our minds. The same for all repeating patterns. Repeating patterns are the same as structure, and the same as “emergence” (in fact you don’t need emergence) and when you have these repeating patterns, multiple patterns can come together and create bigger patterns that depend on each other. Like all the organs in the human body create a human.
But here’s the problem with emergence then – no repeating pattern repeats in exactly the same way every time. There is almost infinite variation inside of a range. No human looks exactly alike (twins, and random accidents aside), all humans are just repeating patterns within a range that create similar structures every time. And for this, you don’t need emergence, all of these patterns exist at the lowest level the universe exists at (whatever that is). In theory if you could predict the patterns in the microscopic low level data, you could predict the higher level patterns I think.
And also, the brain creates an illusion of emergence because our brains are exceptionally good at seeing the similarities of things, even when they are different, and this urges us to think of our world view as emergent.