`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

Under Construction


Science


If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants - Sir Isaac Newton - letter of 1675


Index


  1. Science is Important

  2. Francis Bacon - Scientific Method

  3. Galileo Galilei - Motion and the Telescope

  4. Isaac Newton - Gravity and Light

  5. Thomas Young - Light

  6. Michael Faraday - Fields and Lines of Force

  7. Charles Darwin - Evolution

  8. James Clerk Maxwell - Electromagnetism

  9. Ernst Mach - Inertia

  10. Ludwig Boltzmann - Entropy and the Arrow of Time

  11. Max Planck - The Quantum

  12. Albert Einstein - Relativity

  13. Niels Bohr - Complementarity

  14. Erwin Schrödinger - Wave Mechanics

  15. Emmy Noether - Symmetry and Conservation

  16. Edwin Hubble - Redshift

  17. Georges Lemaître - The Primeval Atom

  18. Werner Heisenberg - Uncertainty

  19. Paul Dirac - Antimatter

  20. David Bohm - Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order

  21. John Stewart Bell - Inequality

  22. Julian Barbour - The End of Time

  23. Carlo Rovelli - Relational Quantum Mechanics

  24. Erik Verlinde - Emergent Gravity

  25. Mistaken Interpretations

Science is Important


Science is an important thing to know at least a bit about, because science is one of the very few general methods that we have, that can tell us something with certainty about the world that we live in; and that is very useful when it comes to having some chance at predicting the future, let alone all the technological benefits. So if science can be brought to bear on philosophical matters, then the sure-footedness it has can be greatly informative. Of course, recruiting such a helpmate does require that we keep a weather eye on their presuppositions and simple opinions, but otherwise science is the most reliable thing that we have.


What exactly are presuppositions and opinions? The axioms of science, whether explicit or not, include some assumptions that are properly speaking philosophical, and cannot properly be called scientific. The foremost among these is Materialism. This is the belief that only material things exist, and it is untestable in science because science only deals with material things. Other assumptions include that the laws of science apply equally to all parts of the Universe. This is an explicit axiom for Einstein, and personally I would concur that the laws are universal, but even so, it is important to realise why we think this.


The following are short introductions to those scientists and their discoveries, who over the centuries have contributed some of the most informative building blocks of knowledge that we have. These are the ideas that I'd suggest are essential reading for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion about anything.


Francis Bacon - Scientific Method


Francis Bacon (b.1561 d.1626) contributed the 'Scientific Method' as a means to know what is. There is really very little difference between a scientist and a philosopher; once upon a time scientists were known as natural philosophers.


Galileo Galilei - Motion and the Telescope


Galileo Galilei (b.1564 d.1642 - the very year Sir Isaac Newton was born) is the other founder of empirical science alongside Bacon, and the more hands-on of the two. He overturned Aristotle on motion, establishing that a body in motion stays in motion unless something impedes it - inertia, before Newton gave it a law - and he saw that uniform motion cannot be felt from within; a sailor below decks cannot tell a smoothly sailing ship from a stationary one. That is Galilean relativity, and it is the first statement of a principle dear to me; that motion is never absolute, only ever relative to other things.


He also turned the new telescope on the sky and found Jupiter's moons and the phases of Venus, which between them sank the Earth-centred cosmos and cost him his freedom. Galileo said the book of nature is written in mathematics - a line I half agree with. Nature is indeed mathematical to its roots; but where Galileo found the maths already written, Virtualism has it emerge. The relativity of motion he discovered, though, runs straight through Mach to my own account, in which a thing moves only with respect to all the other matter there is.


Isaac Newton - Gravity and Light


Sir Isaac Newton (b.1642 d.1726) gave us the mathematical tools to properly start getting to grips with the world around us. This was Rocket Science before rockets. Not only could we calculate gravity and acceleration etc. but he also demonstrated the properties of light, leading to the concept that light was composed of particles.


Thomas Young - Light


Thomas Young (b.1773 d.1829) demonstrated the interference of light, thought to be particles since Newton, and so showing light to be waves, and although the significance of this was not fully grasped for over a century, we now recognise the phenomenon as superposition and wave/particle duality. Richard Feynman famously proclaimed that the double-slit experiment (pioneered by Thomas Young's wave demonstration) contains the 'only mystery' of quantum mechanics. He argued that it is impossible to explain the phenomenon in any classical way, and that understanding its paradoxes is the key to comprehending all of quantum physics.


Michael Faraday - Fields and Lines of Force


Michael Faraday (b.1791 d.1867), a blacksmith's son and largely self-taught, was the greatest experimentalist of his age. He discovered electromagnetic induction - that a changing magnetic field makes an electric current - which is the principle behind every generator and motor running today. But his deepest idea was conceptual; the field. Faraday pictured space between charges and magnets as filled with real 'lines of force', the action happening in the space between things rather than leaping across an empty gap. James Clerk Maxwell took that picture and gave it the equations.


Faraday matters to me because the field is the relation made to look like a thing. His lines of force are the 'between', the structure of relationships populating space - which is precisely how Virtualism reads such things. Where I part from the later field-theorists is in granting the field independent fundamental existence; for me it is emergent, a pattern of relations rather than a stuff in its own right. But Faraday, who reached for the relation before anyone had the mathematics for it, was looking in the right direction.


Charles Darwin - Evolution


Charles Darwin (b.1809 d.1882) was a naturalist, and did much to promote the idea of evolution, adding the mechanism - natural selection, which though independently arrived at by Alfred Russel Wallace, was tremendously important as it undermines claims that there had to be intelligent design behind the complexities of life. Along with Newton and Einstein, Darwin forms the triumvirate of scientific giants. Yes, there were others, but these three gave us the greatest leaps in understanding what Science should be. Not that they had the final word on the matter.


The last great evolutionary event for people in Britain was probably the plague of 1348-1350, that wiped out half the population and left a genetic mark on subsequent generations, due to a mutation that helped some of the survivors not succumb to the illness. Nowadays the evolution of genes by survival of the fittest has slowed, because evolutionary pressures have changed - pretty much everyone survives. Nowadays the evolution that takes place is under the influence of doctors, we are starting to take control of our own genome. The more rapid evolution now is of memes, and we are already in the throes of the next great revolution that is the Internet. Round One of this was the invention of writing, then the invention of the printing press, arguably film and TV, and now all of that has cross-pollinated with the production of more divergent truths than you can shake a stick at.


James Clerk Maxwell - Electromagnetism


James Clerk Maxwell (b.1831 d.1879) unified electricity and magnetism, showing them to be two expressions of a single thing.


But Maxwell's equations did more than tidy up two subjects into one. They predicted waves in the combined electromagnetic field, travelling at a speed his own constants fixed - and that speed was the speed of light. From which Maxwell drew the staggering conclusion that light itself is an electromagnetic wave. At a stroke optics became a branch of electromagnetism, Thomas Young's waves were given a medium and a mechanism, and the stage was set for every quantum puzzle about light that followed. Hertz confirmed the waves within a decade. It is, to my mind, one of the supreme unifications in the history of science.


Ernst Mach - Inertia


Ernst Mach (b.1838 d.1916) is best known for Mach 1 - the speed of sound, and so on, but it is his explanation of inertia, and Sir Isaac Newton's bucket experiment that interests us here. This is where rotating a bucket of water has friction causing the water inside to spin, and then rise up the sides of the bucket, producing the question what is the cause of inertia ? The explanation matters because it tells us something fundamental about the Universe, as well as including a hint about Dark Matter shaping spiral galaxies. Ernst's explanation is that all the matter in the Universe acts gravitationally on all the other matter in the Universe, giving it all inertia, which is generally thought of being a reluctance to move. I should point out that Virtualism, as I have conceived it, has gravity as emergent precisely because of Mach's Principle, but that the reasoning is reversed, i.e. that objects only move because of all the masses in the Universe - really it is more correct to say because of all the energy, but it is easier to think of objects with mass, or to put it another way, to say that mass emerges from energy. Mach's Principle is exactly the thread that Barbour and Verlinde pick up on in our own time.


Ludwig Boltzmann - Entropy and the Arrow of Time


Ludwig Boltzmann (b.1844 d.1906) showed that the large-scale laws of heat are really statistics about countless invisible particles. His insight - carved on his gravestone as S = k log W - is that the entropy of a state is a measure of how many microscopic arrangements would look the same from outside. From this he argued that the famous one-way direction of time, the reason heat flows from hot to cold and never back, is not a fundamental law but a statistical near-certainty; time has an arrow because disordered states vastly outnumber ordered ones.


This is grist to my mill. If the direction of time is statistical rather than built into the fabric of things, then time is not the fundamental, given dimension that physics usually assumes - which is exactly Virtualism's claim, that time is emergent. I ground the arrow differently, in Machian ticks rather than in counting alone, but Boltzmann is the man who first showed that the most time-like thing about time might be a matter of bookkeeping. He was hounded for his atomism and took his own life the year before it was vindicated; a hard reminder that being right is no protection.


Max Planck - The Quantum


Max Planck (b.1858 d.1947) lit the fuse of the whole quantum revolution, and did so reluctantly. To solve the puzzle of how hot bodies radiate - a problem classical physics got catastrophically wrong - he was forced in 1900 to suppose that energy comes not in a smooth continuum but in discrete packets, quanta, each proportional to its frequency. The constant of proportionality, Planck's constant, sets the fundamental grain of the world. He spent years hoping the quantum was a mathematical trick rather than a fact about nature; it was a fact.


For a theory that holds number to be at the root of everything, Planck's discovery is congenial in the extreme. The quantum is the world refusing to be infinitely divisible - energy parcelled into countable units. Where mainstream physics takes the quantum as a brute starting point, Virtualism asks why the world should be granular at all, and answers that countability is what you get when existence is built from number upward.


Albert Einstein - Relativity


Albert Einstein (b.1879 d.1955) probably contributed more to the modern state of science than any other person. Special Relativity and General Relativity, and the Nobel Prize winning Photoelectric Effect, are all fundamental to the way that science looks at the world, and this is despite the fact that science has moved on over the last hundred years. Like Sir Isaac Newton before him, and whom his theories superseded, Albert Einstein was not wrong, it is just that later ideas have proved to be more correct.


As New Scientist stated, 'While one is unlikely to find a single physicist who would claim that the theory of General Relativity is the whole answer to how the universe works, the theory has passed every test to which it has been subjected.'


Niels Bohr - Complementarity


Niels Bohr (b.1885 d.1962) built the first quantum model of the atom and went on to become quantum theory's great interpreter, the architect of the Copenhagen Interpretation view that the page mentions elsewhere. His central idea was complementarity; that a quantum object shows itself as wave or as particle depending on what question you put to it, and that these faces, though mutually exclusive in a single experiment, are both needed for the whole truth. His decades-long debate with Einstein over whether nature is fundamentally chancy - 'God does not play dice' - is one of the great arguments in the history of thought.


Complementarity is closer to Virtualism than it first looks. That a thing presents different faces to different questions is very near my own claim that facts are perspective-relative roles, not fixed absolute properties. Where I go beyond Bohr is that Copenhagen leaves the business of measurement and the lack of a definite value before it as a brute, almost mystical, given; Virtualism supplies the mechanism, reading the unmeasured quantum state as a genuinely under-determined imminent future rather than a paradox to be shrugged at.


Erwin Schrödinger - Wave Mechanics


Erwin Schrödinger (b.1887 d.1961) gave Quantum Mechanics its central equation, the one that governs how the wave function - the mathematical object describing a quantum system's possibilities - evolves in time. He was deeply uneasy about what it meant, and invented his famous cat, suspended between alive and dead, precisely to show how absurd it seemed to scale quantum superposition up to everyday objects. In his later book 'What is Life?' he turned to biology and the puzzle of how living order persists, inspiring a generation of molecular biologists.


The wave function is doing quiet work all through my account of things. Where the textbooks treat it as a physical wave spread through real space, Virtualism reads it as the populating field of genuine possibility - the under-determined imminent future before it is settled, information rather than a thing. Schrödinger's cat is then less a paradox than an honest picture of that under-determination; the trouble only arises if you insist the possibilities are already realities, which is the very assumption Virtualism denies.


Emmy Noether - Symmetry and Conservation


Emmy Noether (b.1882 d.1935) proved one of the deepest results in all of physics, and is far less famous than she should be. Noether's theorem says that every continuous symmetry of a system corresponds to a conserved quantity. Because the laws of physics do not change from moment to moment, energy is conserved; because they do not change from place to place, momentum is conserved; because they do not change with orientation, angular momentum is conserved. The great conservation laws, in other words, are not brute facts but the shadows cast by symmetries.


For Virtualism this is the bridge to the mainstream I most want to build. My account of the closing loop does its own conservation bookkeeping - the place where the change must balance and nothing is created or lost - and Noether tells me what such bookkeeping ultimately *is*; the expression of an underlying symmetry. If Virtualism can show why the relevant symmetries hold, then by Noether it has explained the conservation laws rather than merely asserting them, which is exactly the sort of thing the theory is for. She was denied a salaried post for years on account of her sex; the physics did not care, and neither should we.


Edwin Hubble - Redshift


Edwin Hubble (b.1889 d.1953) built on Vesto Slipher's measured redshifts and Henrietta Leavitt's distance ladder to establish that the further a galaxy, the faster it recedes - the expansion of the Universe - a relation Georges Lemaître had already derived from theory. When extrapolated this led to the idea of the Big Bang.


Georges Lemaître - The Primeval Atom


Georges Lemaître (b.1894 d.1966) was a Belgian priest and physicist, and the true author of the theory the page elsewhere treats sceptically. He derived an expanding universe from General Relativity in 1927, two years before Hubble's paper, and even estimated its rate; in 1931 he proposed that it had begun from a single 'primeval atom', the original of what was later mockingly dubbed the Big Bang. The expansion law now bears his name alongside Hubble's.


Lemaître is worth naming precisely because he was more careful than his theory's later enthusiasts. Priest though he was, he warned expressly against identifying the primeval atom with the metaphysical beginning of all things, or pressing it into the service of theology - the physics, he insisted, said nothing about a Creator. That caution is close kin to my own; Virtualism's quarrel is not with an early dense universe but with the literal singularity, the point of zero size and infinite density where, as I put it elsewhere, the maths goes wrong. Lemaître, I suspect, would have shared the suspicion.


Werner Heisenberg - Uncertainty


Werner Heisenberg (b.1901 d.1976) gave us the principle of Uncertainty, which is a mathematically derived law that tells us tells us that a quantum object has neither a definite position nor a definite momentum until measured, and that the more sharply you fix the one, the more the other blurs. This profound discovery is close to the heart of Quantum Mechanics, and is one of the facts that make it seem so weird.


Paul Dirac - Antimatter


Paul Dirac (b.1902 d.1984) was the man who successfully married quantum mechanics to Special Relativity - special relativity, note, not general - in a single equation for the electron in 1928. The marriage threw out a prediction nobody had asked for; that for every particle there should exist an antiparticle of opposite charge. The positron duly turned up four years later. It is the founding move of quantum field theory, and a standing reminder that QFT weds Quantum Mechanics to special relativity; the union with gravity, with General Relativity, remains the great unsolved problem.


Two things recommend Dirac to a Virtualist. The first is methodological; his equation, as the saying goes, knew more than he did - reason running ahead of observation and being vindicated, exactly the standing I claim for my own theory. The second is antimatter itself; the world insisting on matched, opposite pairs, a duality woven into the fabric at the most basic level, which sits very comfortably with an ontology built on paradox and the balancing of opposites.


David Bohm - Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order


David Bohm (b.1917 d.1992) showed, against the prevailing mood, that a hidden-variable account of Quantum Mechanics was actually possible. His 1952 pilot-wave theory reproduces all the predictions of ordinary quantum mechanics while keeping particles real and definite at all times, guided by a wave - reviving an idea of de Broglie's. It was partly Bohm's revival that prompted John Stewart Bell to ask, in deriving his Inequality, just what such a theory would have to give up - and the answer turned out to be locality.


Bohm's later work pressed further, into the 'implicate order'; a vision of reality as an enfolded wholeness from which the ordinary explicate world of separate things continually unfolds. That holism is congenial to Virtualism's own insistence that the whole is no mere afterthought of its parts. Where Bohm and I differ is that his implicate order is one fundamental whole, given and enfolded from the start, whereas Virtualism's One is generative - it produces the many by paradox-driven subdivision, rather than holding them pre-enfolded within itself.


John Stewart Bell - Inequality


John Stewart Bell (b.1928 d.1990) created the truly elegant Inequality, a mathematical proposition that gave the theoretical possibility to determine whether the universe we inhabit behaves classically, or else in a quantum manner. Bell's 1964 inequality was a direct response to the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen argument and to David Bohm's hidden-variable revival. Later experiments with entangled pairs of particles, and using the Inequality, proved that we do inhabit a quantum universe, and John Bell would have shared the 2022 Nobel Prize for this had he lived. It is really not possible to overestimate just how significant a discovery this was, ranking alongside Einstein's equality of energy = mass.


The Inequality, which could be understood as a distillation of a three way Venn diagram in algebraic form, shows the following [thanks to Canadian physicist John Harrison for the succinct explanation paraphrased here]:
Let us set the following assignments for the three parameters of Bell's inequality:
A: electrons are 'spin-up' for an 'up' being defined as straight up, which we will call an angle of zero degrees.
B: electrons are 'spin-up' for an orientation of 45 degrees.
C: electrons are 'spin-up' for an orientation of 90 degrees.
We made two assumptions to derive Bell's inequality which here become:
1. Logic is valid.
2. Electrons have spin in a given direction even if we do not measure it - Hidden variables.
Now we add a third assumption in order to beat the Uncertainty Principle:
3. No information can travel faster than the speed of light.
We can state these a little more succinctly as:
1. Logic is valid.
2. There is a reality separate from its observation
3. Locality.
Bell had three measurements he could propose re electron spin being a hidden variable, i.e a real thing even when we don't observe. The inequality is that the number (A, not B) + number(B, not C) >= number (A, not C)
If experiment proves this not the case, then we have shown that reality is not classically physical, i.e. either 2 or 3 are false, or that logic itself is false. Experiment did indeed break the inequality, so now we know that one or more of the assumptions of classical physics are incorrect.


Julian Barbour - The End of Time


Julian Barbour (b.1937) is an independent physicist who has spent a lifetime taking Mach's relationalism more seriously than the profession dared. He argues for a physics with no absolute background at all - no container-space, no flowing time - in which all that is real are relative configurations of things. In 'The End of Time' he goes the whole way; time itself is an illusion, and what exists is a vast collection of static 'Nows', each a complete configuration of the universe, with no genuine flow between them.


Barbour is about as close to Virtualism's gravity-and-the-past programme as serious physics comes; the Machian instinct, the refusal of an absolute background, the demotion of time from fundamental to derived. The divergence is instructive. Barbour keeps his timeless configurations as the fundamental furniture, a frozen heap of Nows; Virtualism does not freeze the present but has it genuinely emergent, with the past real no longer but factual still. We agree that time is not a fundamental dimension; we disagree about what is left once you stop pretending it is.


Carlo Rovelli - Relational Quantum Mechanics


Carlo Rovelli (b.1956) is a founder of loop quantum gravity and, more to my purpose, the author of relational quantum mechanics. His claim is that a quantum system has no absolute properties at all; its properties exist only relative to the other systems it interacts with. There is no view from nowhere, no fact of the matter about a particle's state except as it stands to something else. 'The world', he has written, 'is made of relations.' He has also argued, in 'The Order of Time', that time is not fundamental but emerges from deeper, timeless physics.


I can hardly point to a living physicist whose instincts run closer to my own. A world made of relations, with properties that are relational rather than intrinsic, and a time that emerges rather than ticks at the bottom of things - that is Virtualism's territory almost word for word. Where Rovelli stops, and I do not, is at the threshold of a foundation; he is content to have relations all the way down, an austere refusal of any further ground, whereas Virtualism asks where the relations themselves come from and answers with a generative One. He describes the relational world; I try to say why there is one.


Erik Verlinde - Emergent Gravity


Erik Verlinde (b.1962) is a Dutch theoretical physicist who has argued that gravity is not a fundamental force at all, but an emergent, thermodynamic effect - an 'entropic' force arising from the way information is distributed on holographic screens. In later work he has pressed the idea further, suggesting that emergent gravity might account for the galactic motions usually attributed to dark matter, without any dark matter at all.


Verlinde is an ally, and I want to be exact about how far. The conclusion - that gravity is emergent rather than fundamental - is one Virtualism wholeheartedly shares; it is, in a sense, the headline the whole theory is reaching for. But I do not lean on his particular derivation, which draws gravity out of entropy and thermodynamics in a way that strikes me, and sharper critics than me, as quietly assuming what it sets out to prove. Virtualism arrives at emergent gravity by a different, Machian route. Same destination; I prefer my own road to it.


Mistaken Interpretations


Despite Science giving us so much understanding of the Universe, and a shedload of technology, the world that Science describes is very much stranger than many scientists appear to be comfortable with. The following are some of the misguided [IMNSHO] interpretations of the facts as so far discovered by scientists.


The Big Bang

The Adam and Eve of all dodgy scientific theories. The Big Bang is the idea that the Universe commenced with a singularity, a compression of all the energy in the Universe into a space and time that had zero dimension, i.e. infinitely dense energy. This theory came about by extrapolating the expansion of the Universe, as discovered from Redshift, backwards ~13.8 billion years, or so. But just like Adam and Eve, there is no good reason to think that any of it was actually possible. The biggest problem with the concept of the singularity is that it distorts the theories of space and time with infinities. In short the maths goes wrong. The other problem is that we have no means to check that far back.


The Block Universe

Albert Einstein's conception of the Universe as laid out from the beginning of time to the end, just statically there in all its dimensions. This concept was needed to accommodate Spacetime, because in General Relativity every moment in time is just as real as every other moment in time. Unfortunately that leaves no explanation for why we experience time progressing, nor why we are unable to move backwards and forwards through time.


Time and so Spacetime

Hermann Minkowski claimed that 'Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.', back in 1908. But this shows, to my mind anyway, unwarranted faith in General Relativity. In an emergent universe, as claimed by Virtualism, both space and time are emergent things, and what's more, they are such different things that a concept such as Spacetime just cannot survive. In short there is no time travel, so time cannot be like space, they are different things with different causes, so it is misleading to unite them.


Many Worlds

Hugh Everett's idea that all possible worlds actually exist, because at each quantum change that occurs the Universe splits, so that many worlds are created, each with a different version of how the Universe might have turned out. To be fair, there are many different interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, and the Copenhagen Interpretation is probably still the more widely accepted explanation, as far as it goes. But, the long and the short of it is that Quantum Mechanics is problematic in so far as explaining what actually underlies the very well tested and accurate mathematics of it. Within Virtualism the Many Worlds are not considered real, but only probable futures, one of which will become real.


Quantum Fields

Quantum Field Theory is the relativistic form of Quantum Mechanics — it weds Quantum Mechanics to Special Relativity (uniting QM with General Relativity, i.e. gravity, remains unsolved). The thrust of the idea is that space is not just a vacuum, but is permeated by quantum fields that allow the propagation of each kind of quantum wave. No doubt Quantum Field Theory provides a very useful calculational tool, but as a concept it suffers from a lack of explanation of where these fields are supposed to originate, and what they are supposed to be composed of. As with a lot of science over the centuries, the theories go so far and then have to resort to just saying 'Because it is like that', which is no kind of explanation at all.


String Hypothesis

The hypothesis that is commonly called String Theory has not yet attained the status of theory proper, but has gained a lot of purchase in academic circles, largely due to its ability to start to tackle the multitude of dimensions in the Universe. What String Theory does is bundle together some of the numbers of these dimensions as objects called strings, also as objects called branes. This hasn't yet been made to work successfully, leaving the hypothesis somewhat controversial. Be that as it may, at the heart of the theory is the concept that some dimensions, such as those of space, are extended, the way we experience them, whereas some others are 'curled', making some objects appear stringlike. The problem with this is that it only really attempts to get to grips with a part of the question, which is the behaviour of particles, while failing to address what makes dimensions in the first place.


It may be that String Theory has a role to play as part of a greater explanation, in modelling the properties of emergent particles; in showing just how those particles are composed of bundles of numbers. But, if it is to succeed, the theory requires a context in which to exist, and I'd suggest that Virtualism makes a very suitable philosophical context.


Holographic Universe

One of the current explanations of the Universe is that it can be thought of as a hologram. This raises a few philosophical eyebrows, or should. However, the idea is that from a physics perspective, the boundary conditions define the content, but with one less dimension - this is a shortened version of the principle of holograms. But, the problems with this that firstly, there is no explanation for what may be defining those boundaries, so we end up with an endless regress, just as with the homunculus explanation for consciousness, and secondly, when we examine any emergent system, we see that the whole arises as the sum of the parts - a sum that adds nothing to the terms of those parts, but does add the boundaries [the facts of the whole] that then place constraints on those parts.


Bearing in mind that Science does not yet have all the answers in regard to the Universe, and that in an emergent universe there will be an unending stream of new facts and theories to describe all the new things that will be along eventually, we can still gain much by understanding what we can about the things that Science is pretty sure of. Beyond that, we should all speculate as much as we can, because somebody will add some answers, and there is no monopoly rule as to who that will be.



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