Is There a Connection Between Coarse Grinding and Emergence?

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There is at least a very cheap and obvious connection between this discussion and the emergence discussion. Almost all of our experience and understanding of reality comes on the basis of very, very tiny amounts of data compared to the whole thing that is out there. And in both this idea ofa that the brain is an inference engine and predictive processing and so forth, and the idea of emergence in higher level descriptions,. we are thinking, or discovering ways to say sensible, useful things about the world by saying a very, very small fraction of everything there is to be.

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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