lew (03/03/83)
I would like to relate some thoughts I have had as result of my exposure to two sources, relating to the "problem of consciousness". These two sources are a book, "The Self and its Brain" by Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles, and a talk "Universality and Singularity - Phase Transitions and our Understanding of the Physical World" by Michael Fisher of Cornell U. (given at a Bell Labs General Research Colloquium) The idea that unites these is the idea of "emergent properties". Popper uses this term to describe properties or concepts which emerge at different levels of organization. He asserts that these cannot be reduced to lower levels of organization. They may be built upon, or constrained by laws operating at lower levels, but they cannot be predicted from knowledge of those laws. Popper contrasts this view with reductionism, which he describes as the view that all of nature is "contained" in the low level laws. I really agree with Popper I think, but I don't understand why this view should be considered inconsistent with materialism, to which Popper evidently regards himself as opposed. It seems to me that the very term "emergent" places emergent phenomena within the confines of nature and natural law. This is in contradistinction to supernatural concepts of self and consciousness which are not bound by natural law. Popper's view was supported by Michael Fisher in his talk (though not explicitly.) He waxed philosophical at one point and described how the work he was discussing differed in view from the traditional reductionist view. He was describing universal characteristics of critical point phenomena. The characteristic he discussed was the variation of the "order parameter" with temperature near the critical point. The point was that this variation showed a universal shape which didn't depend at all on the detailed properties of the material showing the phase transition. It was the same for magnetic transitions in metals, the liquid-gas transition in CO2, and the superfluid transition in Helium. I think it is fair to cite this characteristic as an emergent property of the systems. It evidently can't be contained in the low level laws of behavior, since it is common to different laws and even to grossly simplified models. If it is a property of anything it is a property of nature itself. Perhaps what reductionism neglects is the context in which the detailed interactions take place. This context is not a "blank slate" but does play a large role in the nature of emerging properties. This idea is elaborated from a scientific viewpoint by Ilya Prigogine in "From Being to Becoming". Eccles, on the other hand, is a radical dualist. He unabashedly embraces the self as a separate and controlling reality. He is left with the dualist's problem of the interaction between mind and brain. He poses this as a general program of brain research, in preference to trying to explicate consciousness in terms of physical phenomena. Eccles ideas are "disprovable" in that they predict the brain functions are externally driven by the mind, albeit in very subtle fashion. I can't fault his proposal to pursue this line, but I feel confident that it will be shown wrong. I have confidence that the control of the brain can be characterized in terms of brain functions. The perennial failure to achieve this goal is cited by Eccles as a point in his favor. I think that the dualist position is nothing more than a codification of our ignorance of brain function. Lew Mammel, Jr. ihuxr!lew