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Is all emergence relative? I notice that when a flipbook or a zoetrope gives rise to the perceived motion of still images when they're rapidly changed, that is a result of aliasing on the part of the observer. Is this true in all cases of emergence, perceptual and otherwise..?
Can you say more about what you mean by “relative”? I agree about the flipbook example, but the term “relative” is throwing me off a bit here.
I'm wondering if what is true for the flip book is true for many phenomena, or all. Is the emergence of an autonomous feature always a function of ("relative to") what is observing/explaining/attempting to reproduce the system?
Better example maybe: A whirlpool in water only exists to an observer that can create whirlpools in its VR. If the observer only has molecule-scale abstraction, it cannot coarse-grain, so there are no whirlpools for it, or explanations in terms of them. (Such a system also cannot be a person, because a person can create all possible explanations).
I'm realizing this is very related to Stephen Wolfram's "Observer Theory", which is interesting, but sounds worryingly relativist to me at times. Something like: Different observers will coarse-grain different laws of physics than the ones we have, for the same reason that the flipbook appears to have motion to us, but not to an observer viewing through a high-speed camera. Debating with LLMs about how that seems to violate computational universality has left me frustrated.
The aliasing that happens with the flipbook is a consequence of an imaging system. To suggest that theories/programs/explanations would be subject to aliasing in the same way suggests that they are derived from observation, which is Empiricism (false). They are created from mutation and criticism of existing knowledge, and this process can be performed by all universal computers. Any explanation/rendering/program runnable on one UC is runnable on all, so two observers can always converge to the same laws of physics.
Computational Universality only implies that all computable programs can be run by UCs. But what is relevant here is what programs can be reached by a given program -- synthesized by it. A UC with knowledge that only contains objectively whirlpool-scale conjectures (resulting from external stimulus or not) will not have niches relating to molecule-scale theories. Such theories solve no problems for it. So there will be no selection for those theories, so evolution will not develop them. Molecule-scale theories constitute intractable niches for the whirlpool system. They are still possible to run, if present, but that is not what's at issue. Observer Theory is correct if it is saying that the theories of reality developed by systems will depend on the abstraction level of their knowledge with respect to reality.
Of course it's true that a system confined to a given abstraction will only evolve theories of that scale. But a person can operate at all computable levels of abstraction. The growth of knowledge by people (e.g. Relativity) would only have happened if people can vary their abstractions arbitrarily, because Relativity solves no problems at any one given level of abstraction, but across many. Observer Theory might be right for certain systems, but is wrong for people.