Q&A: Soft Emergence and the Jewish People as a Collective
Soft Emergence and the Jewish People as a Collective
Question
The Rabbi wrote to me in response to a previous question I sent by email that there is a difference between strong emergence—for example, free will—which is not possible, and soft emergence—for example, the Jewish people as a collective—which is possible. In both discussions I came across (both in Two Carts and in The Science of Freedom), the Rabbi gives the example of liquidity. Both to support the possibility of soft emergence and to reject strong emergence. So I wanted to ask whether the Rabbi could explain, using the example of liquidity, what soft emergence is and how it is possible. Because I very much felt, when I read the Rabbi’s explanation in The Science of Freedom about viewing liquidity as a description of a group of atoms with a field around each one, that this rejects emergence across the board…
Answer
I’m not sure I understood the question. My claim is that strong emergence can never receive scientific support. It is destined to remain a possible hypothesis, but not one that is scientifically more plausible than the alternative. The reason is that once we are talking about strong emergence, then by definition there is no way to ground the phenomenon in the laws of the micro-level, and therefore there is no scientific way to determine that the phenomenon is not based on some additional substance.
So too with liquidity: we know that this is an emergent phenomenon because all of its macro-level manifestations can be explained in terms of the laws of the micro-level. But precisely for that reason, this is not an example of strong emergence.