Identifying Candidate Weekly Emergent Variables

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The key idea was that a a candidate weekly emergent variable must be whatr we calld, dynamically independent from its a microscopic under pinning. This just means that knowing what's going on at the microscopic level does not help you predict what’s going on in the bottom. And so there is this whole variety of different ctions about how to think about what an emergent property might be. What we're doing in my group at the moment is trying to flash out many of these different directions and figure out how they how they relate. There's not going to be one single answer.

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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