[Kim_Bruning]

Emergence and Reduction are not all that mysterious

Say you want to see what a car is made of. You can take it apart (reduce it) into parts on the workshop floor. Now you know what it's made of.

But you have to put it back together again before you have something you can start and drive away (emergent properties)

At no point does anything magical happen:

parts x organization_of_the_parts <-> the working car

reduction <- -> emergence

[jqpabc123]

At no point does anything magical happen

Correct.

It is still just a collection of inanimate parts. At no point does it suddenly come to possess any properties that can not be explained as such.

Now, apply the same logic to a computer and explain how AGI will suddenly just "emerge" from a box of inanimate binary switches --- aka a "computer" as we know it.

Regardless of the number of binary switches, how fast they operate or how much power is consumed in it's operation, this inanimate box we call a "computer" will never be anything more than what it was designed to be --- a binary logic playback device.

Thinking otherwise is not based on logic or physics.

[Kim_Bruning]

I think we might be using "emergence" differently, possibly due to different philosophical traditions muddying the waters.

I'm going to stick purely to a workable definition of emergence for now.

Also, let me try a purely empirical approach:

You said the car "never possesses any properties that can't be explained as a collection of parts." But consider: can that pile of parts on the workshop floor transport me over the Autobahn to Munich at 200 km/h?

We can try sitting on top of the pile while holding the loose steering wheel up in the air, making "vroom vroom, beep beep" noises, but I don't think we'll get very far.

On the other hand, once it's put (back) together, the assembled car most certainly can! That's a measurable, testable difference.

That (the ability of the assembled car to move and go places) is what I call an emergent property. Not because it's inexplicable or magical, but simply because it exists at one level of organization and not another. The capability is fully reducible to physics, yet it's not present in the pile.

parts × organization → new properties

That's all I mean by emergence. No magic, no strong metaphysical claims. Just the observation that organization matters and creates new causal powers.

Or, here's another way to see it: Compare Differentiation and Integration. When you differentiate a formula, you lose terms on the right hand side. Integration brings them back in the form of integration constants. No one considers integration constants to be magical. It was merely information that was lost when we differentiated.