Sean Carroll: Emergence and Layers of Reality

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Emergence is a centrally important concept in science and philosophy. Indeed, the existence of higher-level emergent properties helps render the world intelligible to us — we can sensibly understand the macroscopic world around us without a complete microscopic picture. But there are various different ways in which emergence might happen, and a tendency for definitions of emergence to rely on vague or subjective criteria. Recently Achyuth Parola and I wrote a paper trying to clear up some of these issues: What Emergence Can Possibly Mean. In this solo podcast I discuss the way we suggest to think about emergence, with examples from physics and elsewhere.

Transcript here.

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