Is Strong Emergence the More Mysterious Idea of Emergence?

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Strong emergence is the more mysterious idea of emergence, where you might have some microscopic property that is not explicable by or reducible to the microscopic components that make it up. It's unclear how it fits into a physicalist picture of the universe and there aren't very many good examples in which this happens. The example i like to use is flocking birds, which really nice computer simulations of birds flocking. Buti see then most evenings here in brighton, over the ruins of one of our old piers, you have these flocks of starlings,. That flock together before roosting for the evening. And the flock really does seem to have a life of its own.

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those laws. To hold such a position in a principled way, it’s important to have a clear understanding of “emergence” and when it happens. Anil Seth is a leading researcher in the neuroscience of consciousness, who has also done foundational work (often in collaboration with Lionel Barnett) on what emergence means. We talk about information theory, entropy, and what they have to do with how things emerge.

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Anil Seth received his D.Phil in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex. He is currently a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at Sussex, as well as co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He has served as the president of the Psychology Section of the British Science Association, and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. His new book is Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

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