Year: 2022

LEAD AUTHOR, Pedro A.M. Mediano, Cambridge University. “Coffee-powered beast-machine? Consciousness and Cognition Lab. Partial information decomposition. Can the whole be more than the sum of its parts? Most definitely. Information theory in neuroscience? Do neurons talk if no one’s there to hear them?” https://lnkd.in/e2YDkys8 View in LinkedIn

BROAD APPLICABILITY. “Emergence is a profound subject that straddles many scientific disciplines, including the formation of galaxies and how consciousness arises from the collective activity of neurons. Despite the broad interest that exists on this concept, the study of emergence has suffered from a lack of formalisms that could be used to guide discussions and advance theories.” https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

CONTESTED SUBJECT. “A distinctively controversial topic, research on emergence has been characterised by differing assumptions and positions — explicit and implicit — about its nature and role within science.” https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

REDUCTIONISM. “At one extreme of the spectrum, reductionism claims that all that is ‘real’ can always be explained based on sufficient knowledge of a system’s smallest constituents, and that coarse-grained explanations are mere byproducts of our limited knowledge and/or computational ability.” https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

IRREDUCIBILITY. “At the other extreme, strong forms of emergentism argue for a radical independence between layers of reality, such that some high-level phenomena are in principle irreducible to their low-level constituents.” https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

GLIMMER OF HOPE. “Modern scientific practice is dominated by reductionist assumptions, at least in its overall theoretical and philosophical commitments. At the same time, the hi- erarchical organisation and in-practice relative independence of the domains of different scientific disciplines (e.g. physics, biology) suggests that some form of emergentism remains in play.” https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH. “Riding on a wave of renewed philosophical investigations, recent work is opening a new space of discussion about emergence that is firmly within the realm of empirical scientific investigation.” https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

SCIENTIFIC METHOD. “Moreover, having a formal theory of emergence will allow scientists to formulate rigorous, falsifiable conjectures about emergence in different scenarios and test them on data.” https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

NEW APPROACH. “This article presents an overview of a recently proposed formal theory of causal emergence based on the frame-work of Partial Information Decomposition (PID).” https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

MEREOLOGY. In contrast with other proposals, this approach is primarily mereological: emergence is considered to be a property of part-whole relationships within a system, which depends on the relationship between the dynamics of parts of the system and macroscopic features of interest.” https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn