The post was probably made by a troll, but the comment section is wise to the issue.
I know we like to mock vibe coder because they can be naive, but many are aware that they are testing a concept and usually a very simple one. Would you rather have them test it with vibe coding or sit you down every afternoon for a week trying to explain how it’s not quite what they wanted?
The horror for me is someone suggesting the universe is made of math. Are we dualists? Idealists? What do we believe in anymore!
Weak emergence has qualities that arise from the fundamental features of the parts and the rules that connect them. For example, the shapes made by flocks of birds can be reduced to simple local interactions among the birds.
Strong emergence has qualities that cannot, even in principle, be reduced to the parts and their rules. These qualities are genuinely novel and bring powers that are not found in the constituents alone.
Strong emergence is like mixing two chemicals in a lab and, instead of producing a new compound, discovering an entirely new fundamental force of nature. Consciousness, in particular, seems to lack any physically grounded ontology. While this is a divisive claim, it is hardly original. Physicalists who appeal to weak emergence have not yet shown—nor may they ever be able to show—that consciousness is physically emergent. If strong emergence is to be taken seriously, it must be framed in a way that avoids looking like something from nothing, which would be indistinguishable from magic.
As of now, the physicalists have to demonstrate weak emergence. Failing that, we cannot dismiss strong emergence so that we don’t close the investigative and theory making space.
It would be strongly emergent then. And strong emergence is basically magic.
Need requires context. “if they don’t have it, they don’t need it to survive”. And survival is conditioned upon the environment. If something emerges that exploited the blindspot, then we’d need it to survive.
What was the evolutionary pressure that caused receptor orientation to be different in cephalopods that vertebral animals didn’t encounter? Or did they encounter it and have other adaptations that allowed it to deal with them.