Thoughts? @seanmcarroll @MGleiser @AdamFrank4
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This seems like an application of, but not a change to, the well-known idea that a quantum wave function is more than just information about its individual components. Entanglement is a kind of global information.
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Replying to @seanmcarroll @evantthompson and
If that's "strong emergence," it's not a very interesting kind. In QM the "reductionist" picture isn't one based on individual subsystems, it's one that takes the quantum state of the whole system as fundamental. And it works perfectly well here.
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Still, this appears to violate mereological reductionism, which is one way of defining strong emergence. "Interesting," however, is an epistemic notion... ;)
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Right. But unless I’m missing something (very possible), mereological reductionism has been known to be violated ever since we knew about entanglement. It’s not the kind of reductionism a good quantum mechanic should be looking for.
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So that means (if I'm not missing something, which is also very possible) that the kind of reductionism you favor is compatible with strong emergence (at least as many philosophers have understood it).
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I don’t think so. I just think the right notion of “the lowest level” is “the wave function,” not “information about each part”. We can (and do!) put the wave function on a computer and simulate anything we want.
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So, you think everything can in principle be derived from QM? (I strongly doubt it, but in any case that strikes me as a different issue.)
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Yes. That would be my form of reductionism. (Although I would say “supervenes on the wave function” rather than “can be derived from QM,” since in practice we’re never going to derive psychology etc. from QM.)
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1/3 OK. This issue is the bigger one of supervenience physicalism vs naturalistic emergentism (both forms of scientific naturalism), not so much mereological reductionism vs mereological emergence. The PNAS article speaks mostly to the latter.
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2/3 There are reasons to think supervenience formulations of physicalism won't work to capture the "nothing over and above the physical" core of physicalism. See Jessica Wilson's work: http://individual.utoronto.ca/jmwilson/Wilson-Supervenience-based-Formulations-of-Physicalism.pdf …
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Replying to @evantthompson @seanmcarroll and
3/3 I'm partial to naturalistic emergentism, but that's a discussion for another day (with some beer).
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