Emergence Is Substance; Entanglement Is Substance: Science Is Healing

There is an idea taking shape, vague but gaining strength, that good things are coming to Science. Science, I say, not academia. Only a cleansing fire will save academia. One of the good things is a reorientation, an apt word, to an old and more powerful philosophy of Nature, that from Aristotle. We need to understand it.

Some say Aristotle’s philosophy of Nature was tossed because it was discovered he was wrong about certain contingent physical facts, like saying the number of teeth in women was greater than the number men possess. Speaking for myself, I think this is an easy mistake to make, and can’t hold it against the old boy.

Yet it is excessive abandoning an entire philosophy because of an extra incisor or two. And, we shall see, if there was ever a baby-bathwater situation, it was this.

Since science had to (and has to) have some philosophy of Nature, after they jettisoned Aristotle, what took its place, though offering wide vistas for a time, turned into an ever-narrowing hallway. Despite its many successess, Science has become myopic. Inward- and not outward-looking. The only fix is a reorientation with the world. Aristotle’s philosophy is, I say, and so say many, the correct way to understand Nature. We need, therefore, to understand it.

Here, in the briefest treatment you can find anywhere, is Aristotle’s philosophy of hylemorphism. (The best single book is Ed Feser’s Aristotle’s Revenge.)

Science is the seeking of how the world works. The world is made of stuff, substances. All substances are made of matter and form; hence substance is called substantial form. Formless matter is a limit, and called prime matter, which takes shape, and can only take shape, by some form. Some say energy is, or is as close as you can get, to prime matter. After all, E = mc^2. You cannot have matter in the world without form.

This applies not just to creations, like machines, but to all things, whether they’re electrons or elephants. The parts of form plus matter which are necessary are called its essence, the essence defines a substance. A substance is a whole, an irreducible whole, says (among others) Wolfgang Smith. A substance cannot be subtracted from, or added to: it is not made of parts. What can be pasted on to essence, so to speak, are accidents, which are aspects that can change without adding or subtracting from a substance. Dye your hair shocking blue and you’re still human, a substance, even if you say you’re a dog, an entirely difference substance.

Substance can be destroyed. You are not what you eat, but what you eat is what you are. Substance can be created, as when sperm meets egg. Or even when, say, hydrogen meets oxygen.

Substance is not comprised of parts. When H and O become one flesh, the H and O are no longer there, except virtually. But water is there, wholly and in Reality. The aspects of water, the powers flowing from its essence, cannot be predicted by knowing all there is to know of hydrogen and all there is to know of oxygen. What comes from the marriage is entirely different. Water is not a machine.

Feser (ROA p 25): “The basic idea is that it seems to be essential to a thing’s having a substantial form that it has properties and causal powers that are irreducible to those of its parts”.

Machines are made of parts, and the behavior of a machine can be understood, in principle, by understanding its parts and how they fit together. Machines have only accidental form, and are not substances. Nature is not a machine.

Machine as a metaphor for all Nature has been very useful in science in attempting to understand how the world works, and will continue to provide fruits in various ways. But it breaks down, it fails eventually, because its goal is not final or causal, but instrumental, understanding. You do not have to wholly understand how a thing works to make it work. (A person ignorant of internal combustion engines can drive a car.) You can make a machine-metaphor model that tells something about water from its components, and as useful as that model might be in certain applications, it fails in defining the essence of water. The model from parts to whole cannot be realized.

Computer code is a machine. Thus AI is a machine. Thus AI is not a substance. AI will not become a god.

Now in Science there is a thing in quantum mechanics called “entanglement“. It is when singular components becomes one. Because physicists looked askance at Heisenberg’s suggestion to reanimate Aristotle’s rashly murdered philosophy, and instead opted for keeping the machine metaphor of Nature, there has been deep confusion about what entanglement is or means. It is substance. This is why, as Bell has shown, two entangled particles can no longer be treated like a machine, where it would be sufficient (in principle, anyway) to know all about each particle separately, and that we must instead treat the “entangled” particles as a single new entity—a substance, where its behavior is its own. Robert Koons speaks of this.

This was all brought to mind as I was reading the paper “What Emergence Can Possibly Mean” by Sean Carroll and Achyuth Parola. The pair (as we do) struggle to understand this baffling phenomenon. They make suggestions about machine-like unpredictability, but fail ultimately at explaining entanglement, or substance, because of their commitment to the machine metaphor of Nature.

Emergence is with respect to understanding or in things, and the two are intimately related. In understanding, it is behavior predicted, or more usually unpredicted to some or all extent, in a machine (which includes code), or in substances treated as an approximation to a machine. In things, it is the creation of patterns and combinations of components, but only of machines, or the creation of something greater than its parts, the creation of a substance. Unpredictability arises because of ignorance or misunderstanding of the interaction of all the machine’s parts (“Look at that interesting pattern I didn’t know would arise!”), or in failing to appreciate a substance is not a machine, and not composed of parts.

From another and more fascinating angle, the creation of substances is unpredictable. Perhaps, then, a better way to state it is this: emergence is of the patterns of parts or in the creation of substance.

Unpredictability is (and I have a whole Class on it), the unpredictability from parts to substance, is what fascinates. You will recall that something can be predictable and we can still be ignorant of cause.

Carroll and Parola attempt categories of emergence. Their “Type-0” and “Type-1” emergence are roughly our emergence of pattern from parts. Their “Type-2” (“the macro theory does not respect the notion of locality inherited from the micro theory”) and “Type-3” emergence (“The whole is truly different than the sum of its parts.”) is more like our emergence of substance, but where they cannot wholly escape the machine metaphor (my emphasis):

If a higher-level system is a collection of lower-level parts, and we have a dynamical micro theory that accurately describes how those parts behave, then that micro theory will make specific predictions about how the collection will behave. Such predictions are either going to be correct, or incorrect. If they are incorrect, it makes sense to say that the micro theory was just wrong from the start; if they are correct, any macro behaviors should in principle be reducible to the predictions of the micro theory

They say things like this (for other Types): “In a ferromagnet, for example, there can be nonlocal-seeming behavior, when interactions between spins lead to an overall direction of magnetization that is shared throughout the material. This is an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking, where individual solutions to the equations do not respect the full set of symmetries of the equations themselves.” And “In order to predict the motion of the Earth around the Sun, we needn’t know the state of every particle constituting the Earth; we need only know the center of-mass coordinates and momenta of the Earth and other solar system bodies.”

The latter depends on whether you consider the earth a machine or a substance. The former brings a question: why should Nature choose to obey, or respect, symmetries in equations? Here, in a useful description, is what Wokepedia says about spontaneous symmetry breaking:

By definition, spontaneous symmetry breaking requires the existence of physical laws which are invariant under a symmetry transformation (such as translation or rotation), so that any pair of outcomes differing only by that transformation have the same probability distribution. For example if measurements of an observable at any two different positions have the same probability distribution, the observable has translational symmetry.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs when this relation breaks down, while the underlying physical laws remain symmetrical.

Perhaps it’s hard to see, at first, but this has it backwards. Nature does not have to obey physicists’ models. The symmetry that is “broken” is the failure of the model to appreciate substance, and its impossibility of doing so. Since substances are form plus matter, that form has to come from somewhere. It’s not that the form itself, or at least its quantifiable aspects, cannot to described. But that the model of the form’s origin won’t lie in models of its (former) constituents.

For instance, “in what we are calling Type-2 emergence, it could indeed be true that electrons behave differently inside a human brain than would be predicted by quantum field theory as we know it.” Indeed, because those electrons are no longer there as electrons, they are there only virtually. The brain is there instead; the mind arises from its own form, and is not a brain-machine. Again, this is not to say that machine models of the brain won’t be useful, and that the brain can sometimes “act like” the electrons are there, to some approximation. It’s that the brain itself is more than the sum of its parts, and the mind even more so. A wholly different model must therefore be used rather than a model of electron (or other particle) behavior.

As we saw in Nancy Cartwright’s phrase The Laws of Physics Lie (blog/Substack), the machine metaphor has the whole thing upside down. Things don’t obey the laws of Nature, which do not exist, but things work by the law of natures, which is to say, of essences of substances. Form exists, matter exists. Physicists keep looking lower and smaller, hoping to find an equation that shows how all the pieces fit together and work—like a machine. (Ask as European physicists how American string theory is going.) The better way is to look is higher, toward essence and causal powers.

There are some trying to enact change, like Rupert Sheldrake. He understands the idea of form, and posits a field that governs (or describes) how form functions, in the same way fields function in other ways (electromagnetic, etc.). Sheldrake frightens some physicists away because he examines forbidden topics, like whether if people can feel others staring at them behind their back. This is not a crazy idea if the mind is not wholly material. Anyway, it sounds too much like woo for many. But Sheldrake insists he is not trying to remove the behavior of things away from physics, but that he was to “physicalize” form. I think we owe it to Shelldrake to look into his ideas more deeply in the future.

Now this brief (it only seemed long!) article is not nearly sufficient to convince anyone of Aristotle’s philosophy of Nature. I gave only the crudest, incomplete account. Yet if you think you have thought up the killer objection, then go and read the linked sources (and also Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics) and see if you really have. In any case, we’ll be doing all this in the Class at a more in-depth level.

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