"John Wilkins"  wrote in message
news:c7o7jc$2jp9$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> Perplexed in Peoria  wrote:
> > Let us look at John's example of the emergent wetness of water as an
> > example of what I have just expounded.  A reductionist explanation of
> > liquid water might postulate a "fluid mosaic" model,
with small domains
of
> > crystaline water separated by boundary regions of gaseous water.  The
> > dynamics is that water molecules are continually moving from the
> > crystaline phase to the gas phase and back.  That is, we have a
> > three-level description - molecules, crystaline domains, and the liquid
> > system as a whole.  And, there is just no way to collapse this to a
> > two-level description and throw out the properties - emergent and
> > otherwise - of the middle level.  Similarly, it would be impossible to
do
> > a hydrodynamic model of stream flow at the molecular level, because
> > emergent properties of liquid water (viscosity, surface tension, etc.)
> > have been lost.
>
> is the "no way" here a matter of computational limitations, or are you
> claiming that there is no substrate-based explanation of liquidity even
> for God?

In order to answer this question, I am going to have to make
some reductionist assumptions regarding God's mental processes.
I assume from the question that you will not object to my assumption
that God's mind can be modeled as based on mechanisms similar to
that of a human brain or a digital computer, only bigger and faster.

Now, let us imagine a scientist (perhaps another god) examining a
trace of the neural firings of the original God as she computes the
consequences of the interactions of 10^23 water molecules using
brute force epistemology.  This scientist will notice that the same
microcomputation is performed over and over.  Investigating
further, he will see that this happens because certain hydrogen
bonds between molecules are particularly persistent.  In fact, the
set of all hydrogen bond instances in God's computation can be
naturally divided into two subpopulations - the transient ones and
the persistent ones.  Investigating further, the scientist will see that
the persistent hydrogen bonds (that is, the patterns of repeat neuron
firings in God's computation) are caused by the existence of
microcrystaline arrays of molecules in the simulation.

Now I used the word "existence" here, which means that I am
trespassing from my starting domain of epistemology into the
more metaphysical domain of ontology.  Be aware that I am
untrained in philosophy, so my terminology will probably not
be standard.  But it seems to me that if a particular level of
explanation (my microcrystals) arises afresh in the investigations
of any epistemologist, then that level exists ontologically.  And
in my example, I am claiming that they arise even though an
attempt was made to hide them in the traces of a brute force
molecular-level computation that did not make use of that
intermediate level.

So, yes, in the sense I have just explained, there is no way to
remove the middle level, even for God, assuming that God
submits her computations for peer review.  I am claiming that
almost any epistemologist, even a god, will recognize that the
middle level of explanation is "really there" ontologically.
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