My dismissive attitude was inspired by your sweeping claim that emergence can be discounted because nothing is truly more than the sum of its parts. This is haplessly uninformed, especially regarding all the literature from the past decade on emergent processes.
The claim that a "sum without all additives identified is missing important elements" isn't a scientific claim, Dak; it relies on no scientific evidence and appeals to no studies. There are books, tomes, written on this subject that describe how emergent phenomena cannot be explained by reducing them to reactions between their component parts. This isn't paradoxical or non-tautological; it's simply an acknowledgement that entities on different scales function differently, and that, just as a human being is an assemblage of cells and tissue and genetics, so a city is an assemblage of human beings (among other things). This is a very intense materialist understanding of how large scale entities can emerge and abide by entirely different laws than their components. We wouldn't have social networks or cities without conscious subjectivity; but social networks and cities can't be mapped linearly or according to personal beliefs, as individual human subjects can. They don't function according to "rational" desires.
Manuel DeLanda offers the best description, in my opinion. Of course, he acknowledges that emergent phenomena wouldn't exist without their component parts; but the material ontology of emergent phenomena - their scientific nature, we could say - engages complex models that draw from but develop upon constituent parts. They cannot simply be viewed as a lump sum.
I asked you to read these books - not all of which are philosophy books (Gould was a scientist, as is Johnson, and DeLanda's philosophical models appeal specifically to scientific terminology) - because they provide the evidence that contradict your anti-emergence claim. Finally, I don't understand how you can agree that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and yet deny the tenets of emergence as such.
As for your other responses: you didn't use fancy words, my apology; you just used
more words. But you ignored the main point, which was that you still simply reiterated exactly what I had already said.
As far as values and considerations go, I'm not going to keep going back and forth over this. I'm not claiming some objective space for my own approaches (emergence, poststructuralism, and anti-subjective theories of consciousness certainly wouldn't have developed if it hadn't been for corresponding developments in science and technology), but I believe theories that reflect the complexity of modernity are more useful than archaic notion of the conscious, rational, economic subject.
And for the morning, here's a bit of craziness from Craig Hickman:
Like infonauts in some mathematical virtual ride we inhabit artificial realms of the infosphere as inforgs – informational organisms – like wind-up toys from some vision of the Jetsons CIRCA. 3232. Those scholars who would bind us to the straightjackets of Marx and Freud, Lacan or Heidegger, or any number of other flavors of the month pomo blather or speculative realism that comes to mind, find themselves in the nostalgic tempo of their philosophical forbears rhythmically wishing that it was all as simple as Marx once said it was: class warfare. But Marx never met a transhumanist, nor his alternate - an AI robot wandering the corporate headquarters of Google, or some Japanese executive’s dreamsuit serving cocktails to the elite oligarchs of a new technocapitalism.
In Spirit and Teeth Nick Land would give us a history of the world left out of your history books. A history that lives below the threshold of all those civilized barbarians that haunt our postmodern landscapes of late capitalism. Instead his history wakens the nightmares, the energies of blood and tribal wisdom, of the mythic underbelly that all those positivist scientists and philosophers tried to escape through their ever so subtle purification of the bittersweet linguistic web of lies that bind us all across the Vulcan codes of our dark arcologies. “The migrant blocks of tension summarized in the Freudian unconscious are much less a matter of Oedipus than of the mongols; of those who feed the world of spirit to their horses as they inundate civilization like a flood. If the unconscious is structured like a language it is only because language has the pattern of a plague.”2 We are the plague, the zombie extinction pact, the apocalyptic core of that inhuman kernel of the code/space that keeps returning from its repressive distance in the living cells of those genetic monstrosities of our becoming futures, our habitations among the feral citizens of some lapidary nightworld.
. But I don't where you can pinpoint the value. It is certainly a kneejerk to a kneejerk. All the anti-consciousness stuff has been entirely built upon a quicksand of instinct preference, without (apparently) to even fully scientifically qualify instinct - merely position it as the opposite of whatever consciousness is perceived to be (without even understand that either).
