exchemist

This was one of Write4U’s obsessions on the other forum. it isn’t science, though. Whereas weak emergence is.

Hmm, itchy beard time, then. 😉

If there are no known examples, in what sense is strong emergence a real phenomenon?

Well in the examples that spring to my mind at least, emergent properties most certainly can be derived from the behaviour of the small scale entities responsible. That is what statistical thermodynamics is all about, surely? Macroscopic properties of bulk matter are derived, quantitatively, from the statistical behaviour of molecules.

I may be being thick but I don’t understand what is meant in this context by putting the genie back in the bottle. Surely an emergent property is just the consequence, at larger scales, of a sufficiently large aggregate of entities at a smaller scale? Things like the bulk properties of a liquid being due to the aggregate behaviour of large assemblies of constituent molecules. I suppose you can get rid of (“reverse”) the emergent phenomenon by disaggregating them, but that seems a bit obvious. Can you expand a bit?

It was not me that made unprovoked accusations of “slurs” and “dogwhistles”.

My own contribution was simply to observe that, as governments are limited in what they can ask citizens to contribute towards the needy, it is inevitable that there will be those at the tail of the wealth distribution who are not helped to move out of it. It is regrettable but it is a fact. There was no implied moral censure of such people. Nor was there in my reading of other contributions.

As far as I can see, nobody on this thread has suggested any such thing.

What slur?

There was a middle class in the Victorian era. But certainly, most working class people at that time could not be considered “bourgeois”. Whereas now, to a very large extent in western societies, they can, this being thanks to the mixed economy approach that governments found themselves following as the c.20th developed. The Marxist analysis does not hold and did not in the 1970s, when I used to come across such nonsense at university.🙄

The passage you quote seems to think it makes a valid point merely by labelling those it wishes to attack as "bourgeois". But it does not address the key point, which is that human beings will always have a tendency to look after themselves first, and this limits how much altruistic behaviour can be expected. That applies to any peasant or factory worker, just as much as to a "bourgeois" gentleman. (What is particularly poisonous in that passage is the insinuation that even the law is merely the will of the middle class. That is both preposterous and dangerous.)

Arf arf.😆

One of the enduring features of human nature is the struggle between altruism and self interest. Political systems that try to impose altruism (e.g. communism) always fail, because people always want to look after their own interests first. Religions and some political creeds exhort people to altruism but it is always an uphill struggle and only partially successful. Thoughtful politics tries to strike a balance between allowing people to keep the fruits of individual enterprise and taking care of the needy. This is the social bargain that people in western societies accept. That being so, there will always be a tail of the population distribution curve that suffers hardship.

We had the E V Rieu translation read to us when we were kids. But I'm intrigued by the T E Lawrence version. Maybe I should look for it. I did read the 7 Pillars of Wisdom while I was working in the Middle East - thought it would be a good idea to see how an Englishman adapted to the Arab world.

Hey, look over there! A dead cat! [And don’t look at our attempts to undermine the voting system in time for the mid-terms]