Qualitative diversity out of qualitative monotony... how?

How do we get so much qualitative diversity in a universe that ultimately rest on qualitative monotony?

Where is this qualitative diversity, you ask? Look around you. The world is full of colors, sounds, pains and pleasures, cold and hot, light and darkness. There is a whole diversity of life forms on this Earth–different kinds of animals, different kinds of plants, even bacteria and viruses–there are a range of different elements, each with their own unique properties–there are a whole plathora of different worlds, different planets, and they too each have their own unique properties.

Where is the qualitative monotony, you ask? Everything is reducible to particles. There are only so many fundamental kinds. They essentially do one of two things: come towards or move away. Particles either attract each other or repel each other. How is it that from these limited building blocks of the universe that do only a limited number of things we get so much qualitative diversity on higher scales?

Well, maybe the qualities we see in the world ought to be understood as phenomena–that is, as perceptual, as mental–and that in reality, all there really is is fundamental particles pulling each other together or pushing each other apart. But then the same question arises–it arises with even more force–how do you get a quality, like red, even if it exists only in perception, out of something as monotonous as particles attracting or repelling? ← This is really the hard problem of consciousness, is it not?

Now, some of you might know me as a pantheist or a subjectivist. Well, that doesn’t help here either. The only kind of experience I see fit to attribute to particles attracting or repelling each other would be pain or pleasure, desire or aversion. Yet the same question can be asked: how do you get the perception of red out of pains and pleasure, or desires and aversions?

We live in a universe in which obviously something new can, and often does, come about from something old. Something that didn’t exist before seems capable of emerging ex nihilo–well, not ex nihilo, but out of things that don’t even seem like they have the ingredients to create the new thing. How is this possible?

Fascinating and well put.

Let me jump in simply , maybe too simply for Your taste.
The tiniest particle is reducible to near absolute non matter the same way as the discussion is held that .999999999 never reaches 1. But does it not?

Well that’s another matter and being as it may, at those tumultuous times , most everything is energy in one form or another. Those various forms embody potentially all that ever was , is , and will be.

That’s not saying much or maybe its saying too much. Regardless that tumult or rush of energy compresses or releases the infinite or near indefinitely various kinds of things imminently and not transcendentaly. Its all here and creates shadows, bubbles or whatever eternally, not then or now or sometimes in the future far far away.

Only a god can create this you say? But why does energy need to be created?

Is not the Void just as problematic as existence? I would say. just as , or even more problematic why can’t creation and destruction mean the same thing in a higher dictionary ?

Maybe there hides Your riddle somehow…

Because complexity facilitates entropy or breakdown of general ordering, and as all things still operate on laws of physics, it is a natural consequence of decay of energy. Diversity does not imply that it has more energy than monotony, it only uses it to disperse (or transfer) it more efficiently.

i think particles have things like density and momentum

i don’t know why the distribution of particles in the universe is not more uniform. perhaps they will be some day with a big freeze

Do you mean to say that fundamental particles are so close to be non-existent (i.e. non-matter) in terms of their size that they are like an infinitesimal quantity compared to absolute zero?

Translation: energy always contains the potential to become, or to make the things they act upon to become, absolutely anything. This may be, but still, if we are speaking in a physicalist context, how is this so? How are we to conceptualize energy such that it has the potential to become anything, even new qualities that didn’t before exist?

Hmm, but it still seems limited–too limited to account for the kinds of qualities I’m interested in. Let’s take the taste of pineapple for example. A quick study of physiology will tell us that the taste of pineapple is the result of sugar molecules in the pineapple binding to neural receptors in the taste buds, which triggers an electric signal to travel down the nerves and enter the brain, whereupon we (presumably) taste pineapple. So sure, I suppose the energy released when sugar molecules bind to taste receptors relinquishes a bit of the “infinite,” and in this case in particular, the taste of pineapple, but how, in a physicalist context, does the infinite contain the taste of pineapple. I know that the concept of the infinite should contain the taste of pineapple, along with pretty much everything–infinite implies no limits, no limits that is of what might come out of it, which there is no reason to assume excludes the taste of pineapple, but that’s not the same as answering the question of how: how does the potential inherent in an energy source achieve the infinite if the infinite includes that which doesn’t seem can come out of energy, at least energy as we are conceptualizing it?

Translation: maybe I’m asking the wrong question. Maybe the question isn’t: how does a quality like red come out of something completely lacking in that quality? Maybe the question ought to be: how did the lack of red ever exist in the first place. Maybe it’s just as valid to think of the presence of red as the default–thereby not requiring an answer to the question: how did it come to be–but then the question is simply moved to that which is no longer the default: how did the lack-of-red or absence-of-red come to be. We can longer say, in this context, that that’s the way things begin because, if the presence of red is the default, then that more or less entails that the lack-of-red must have come out of the presence-of-red. It is to say that the full diversities of qualities we see today is how things always were, and how they had to be on a fundamental level, and the question now is: why do we find that the universe can be reduced to such qualitative monotony?

That’s true of physical/spatial diversity (in the sense of concentrated centers of matter/energy dispersing itself in space to take on more diverse locations in space), but in terms of qualities, I would think the opposite is true. Highly complicated structures that manifest an organized order tend to bear more qualitative diversity than simple structures with little order.

Cumulus clouds for example, which bear very interesting and unique formations, tend to undergo entropy and become bland and dull stratus clouds.

Am I misunderstanding your point?

I often ask the same question: how are particules (or at least atoms and molecules) typically found with other particles of the same kind? Why is dirt often found with more dirt? Why air with more air? Why water with more water? What is it about atoms and molecules that cause them to be lumped together with other atoms and molecules that are exactly the same?

In fear of being far to succinct, to answer your first question:
How many binary numbers can be formed from merely the monotonous group of 1 and 0?

To answer your next:
Why should any regional cause limit itself to merely one individual item of effect?

An infinite amount.

Or maybe just 4.

Depends on what you mean.

But still… how do you get red out of that?

I didn’t ask a second question James!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIBw10VUcNQ[/youtube]

The universe isn’t governed by a mechanism. In other words, the events that happen and that we observe are not a product of some underlying, hidden, mechanism. Rather, they simply happen. The universe is more like a mass of particulars rather than a mechanism that generates, determines, causes, compels or forces these particulars to happen. If we knew everything about the universe none of us would describe it in terms of a theory. Rather, we would describe it in terms of a mass of particulars i.e. events happening one after another. Theories and mechanisms only emerge thanks to our ignorance. Their purpose is to allow us to make an assumption regarding the unknown. That’s all they are. So, it is not that colors arise out of some particles interacting with each other. Rather, it is us observing that the manner in which particles interact is correlated with colors.

So what you’re saying is: red didn’t come out of anything, it just happened, that we shouldn’t look for a cause of red, just accept that the universe so happen to turn out that way.

That question is asking: why is there one individual item of effect in the first place? I’m not asking why don’t water molecules stop attracting other water molecules after a certain critical mass; I’m asking, why does a single water molecule attract another single water molecule in the first place. And I think I remember an answer to this in high school chemistry, but it isn’t the same for other kinds of molecules and elements. But it’s true, isn’t it? Don’t molecules and atoms, not matter what kind, seem to always come together with other molecules and atoms of the same kind–even at the level seen with the naked eye?

Don’t confabulate an answer just because you think you can.

I already answered your second question (the actual one that you asked). But as I said, “too succinct”.

Whatever causes one water molecule is almost never going to be such a specific situation that it causes only one. And because many are created in the same location, whatever bonding or concentrating characteristics they have, there will be relatively nothing interfering with it, thus it will be. Entropy of the gathering takes time and circumstance. Time is still occurring, circumstances are on their way.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t look for that which causes the experience of redness. That’s a very useful thing. It is what allows us to predict the experience of redness. It is a very useful thing to know, for example, that whenever we close our eyes we have no experience of colors. This allows us to predict that every time we close our eyes we will experience no colors.

What I am saying is that the universe isn’t governed by a mechanism. Rather, we invent these mechanisms, based on the evidence that we have, with the aim to generate predictions. For example, we have observed in the past that each time we close our eyes we see no colors and that each time we open our eyes we see colors in, say, 70 out of 100 cases. Based on this experience alone, we can build a very simple mechanism that goes something like this: eyes closed → no experience of colors, eyes open → 70 out of 100 times an experience of colors. Very simple stuff.

Yes, learning about the correlations that exist in our world is very useful. But you don’t think we can go further and say that some of these correlations are causal, and that we can even know the direction of the cause? For example, eyes closed → no color. We know it doesn’t always work the other way around: no color → eyes closed. So we can say eyes closed causes no color.

Are you arguing something similar to Hume? Hume showed that we can’t really prove or “discover” cause out in the real world, so it must be an invention in our heads (doesn’t mean causation doesn’t exist, just that we can’t prove it). It’s a very useful invention. Like you said, it helps us to predict correlations and even the direction of the correlation.

What is a cause?

A cause is an event that forces a subsequent event to occur. Hume thought this could never be demonstrated. Is that what you’re saying?

I cannot agree or disagree with a statement the meaning of which I do not fully understand. This is why I ask you to define what a cause is. It is a very tricky concept to understand thoroughly, isn’t it? Let\s focus on how you define the concept of cause instead. This should be an easier task. What does it mean for an event to force a subsequent event to occur? What does it mean for a light switch to force a light bulb to shine? What does it mean for an event X to force an event Y to occur? Does it mean anything other than that the history of the two category of events is such that whenever event X occured event Y followed? I think that’s what Hume is saying. But I am not a Hume scholar. And I agree with that. That’s all the word “force” means. If you want to describe an aspect of reality in the best possible way you have no choice but to do so in terms of a mass of particulars (i.e. facts, events, etc.) The concept of causality does not even enter the picture at this point. It is only when you decide to make a guess regarding some unknown particular, which requires that you extrapolate from what you know, that a need arises to think in terms of causality.

I’ll try to break this down further. By “force” I mean to “necessitate”. I mean that when event X happens, that makes event Y necessary. Event Y can’t not happen if X has just happened. Beyond this, I’m not sure how else to break it down.

I don’t recall the exact structure of Hume’s argument–whether that ‘cause’ means experiences constantly conjoined or just that the idea of ‘cause’ is the result of experiences constantly conjoined–the first says this is what we mean by cause, the second only that we can only arrive at the idea of ‘cause’ if we go through this psychological process of experiencing events being constantly conjoined first. I agree with the latter interpretation. The brain has to have some algorithm for figuring out whether it is dealing with a cause or not. But I don’t think that this is just what ‘cause’ means–otherwise we’d be saying cause=correlation and we’d have no use, or ability, to distinguish them.

I would agree, with the caveat that by ‘guess’ we’re talking about an unconscious or automatic process. When I kick a ball and I see it fly through the air, I don’t feel like I’m ‘guessing’ that my foot striking the ball is the cause of the balling flying through the air, I feel like I know. But because no cause can ever be proven, it is on an unconscious level ‘guessing’ (inferring, projecting, intuiting, etc.).

Note that such a guess isn’t necessarily wrong. There may be causation in the universe after all; it’s just that we can’t prove it.

Also note that if there is only ever correlation, then if that correlation is perfection (i.e. it never breaks), then that means there is some forcing going on, some necessitating; if event Y occurs every time event X occurs, then event Y is forced to occur whenever X occurs. ← That starts to sound like my definition of ‘cause’. On the other hand, the key thing to note about correlations is that we are never sure which is the cause and which is the effect. For example, it might be that God is the one who ensures that event Y occurs every time he makes event X occur, which means that event X is not the cause of event Y, God is cause of both. But perfect correlations do imply causation somewhere. The only way out of this is to say the correlation isn’t perfect (in which case you’d still have to explain the high probability of the correlation) or to say that the correlation holds by sheer coincidence (which would be amazing).

Isn’t that what I am saying? that “event X forces event Y to happen” means “whenever event X happens event Y follows”?

I am not sure I understand the difference between the two types of argument. Care to elaborate?

Given the following sequence of symbols, can we say, based on that sequence alone, that A forces B to happen?

_ _ A B _ _ _ A B _ _ _ A B A B _ A B _ A B _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ A B _ _ _ _ A B A B A B A B _ _ A B _ _ AB _ _ A B

My understanding is that “A forces B to happen” is a class of sequences of symbols where every occurence of A is immediately followed by B. The above sequence is one instance of that class.

Causal forces are deduced to exist through the process of elimination.