Emergence and Meaning

Emergence and Meaning

Nope (Maybe he knows it and just joking here).

When entities (abstract/real) combine, “Emergence” occurs. An object formed from the combination of entities has a new set of behavior/meaning that the entities themselves do not have on their own.

It’s why Aristotle said ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’.

Take human cells for example, they have no idea that a combination of many of them can form a human being who is conscious, alive, and achieves things that the individual cells could never do.

Rise of Meaning

Simpler organisms like bacteria, plants do not experience much emotions. Simpler animals exhibit more emotions, but still are not as conscious as as. They do experience pain, pleasure. But they do not comprehend concepts that the more complex animals, humans do.

So meaning increases with increase in complexity, due to increase in emergence.

But what about beings even more complex than us?

Fall of Meaning?

With rise in Artificial Intelligence capabilities, computers can now generate masterpiece paintings, award winning photographs/novels/movies, you name it. So whatever human does, is it valuable anymore? Why do anything anyway?

Here’s why, more intelligent beings may or may not mean loss of meaning, even if they are ‘more’ emergent than humans:

They may see meaning, but incomprehensible to us: It’s possible that ‘meaning’ only means to us, and we don’t see much meaning in things that higher organisms do. Look at plants or an animal. They never understand why we use social media or go to the gym.

They may not see meaning after all: Due to higher intelligence, they don’t have the normal feelings as we do. They may see everything without much emotions and hence see it as meaningless.

We may see meaning: Humans always adapt to new things and discover meaning. So its possible we maybe able to see the meaning once we get there.

Isn’t it?

Will AI destroy meaning for us? Or will we discover new meaning and be all okay?