What your model does not predict - Emergent Properties
Just watched a really good video about the Earth's magnetosphere, linked below. This is from Joe Borovsky, one of the greats of solar wind & magnetosphere research. Borovsky is one of my heroes.
At about 27:00 minutes in, he says that no one could have predicted the Van Allen Belts. The Van Allen belts are shells of alternating positive and negative charges that surround the Earth like fat donuts. The belts are to him an emergent property. "Emergent property" is here a technical term used by scientists to describe a property that their theory did not predict. Complex systems, for example anything living, often show emergent properties, because the current scientific theories of life do not predict many of the properties that we see in living systems. Take the example of the liver. If you believe that cells make up animal bodies, you must call the presence of your Liver an emergent property, because there was nothing in your theory of cells that predicted that all mammals would have a liver.
I believe that if our theory tends to show many "emergent properties", this means that our theory is not very good.
Getting back to the Earth, if we imagine the solar system as a giant body with electrical properties, then the Van Allen Belts are predicted. How are they predicted? Because people have studied electrical systems, we have observed plasma discharge tubes for 100 years, the SAFIRE experiment has put little "planets" into the chamber whose center represents the electric "Sun", and in all these cases, one observes shells of alternating positive and negative charge. I admit that existing physics models are not very good at explaining all the details of how these layers form, but the physicist clearly sees that the layers do form. In an electrical model of the solar system, the Van Allen Belts are predicted.
For the Earth's Van Allen Belts, the only reason one would call them emergent properties is if the model did not predict them. Mainstream models for the solar system are not very good, precisely because they do not predict such large scale electrical structures around planets.
Coming back to the example of the liver, what then should the theory of the mammalian body be, such that the liver is predicted? The current state of science cannot really handle that, because the existing rules for scientific discovery are based upon
1) reductionism
2) only one type of cause
Reductionist thinking sees larger things as completely defined and created by smaller things. When people speak about physics as the queen of the sciences, they are paying homage to this belief in reductionist thinking - if we could just understand everything about the atom, then we could explain how molecules work, and how cells work, and how thoughts are created, ecosystems, planets, stars, etc, etc,.
Reductionist thinking has its place, it is useful for some things, but I find that it falls flat on its face in many areas. I have never subscribed to reductionism, which has caused many difficulties for me trying to get on in the world of science. I am not alone in this. There are many very good scientists who do not believe in reductionism.
What is the alternative to reductionism? I don't know that it has one name. It is the recognition that, in many cases, the smaller things are created and organized by the larger things. In this other way of thinking, the liver actually governs the activity of its cells. If new enzymes are needed, the liver tells the cells, and the cells tell their DNA, "hey, we need some more enzymes." This to me is so screamingly obvious that it really baffles me why the entire scientific research community has been so dead-set against this idea for several hundred years. Occasionally some researcher comes along and shows through simple experiments that causality works both ways - big things can cause small things to happen and small things can cause big things to happen. But invariably these poor researchers are vilified and are either forgotten or they become a sad, snickering footnote as an example of how stupid some people are.
In the previous paragraph I brought in my item 2), type of causation. Reductionist thinkers have so totally taken over science that it is rare these days to find a scientist who can discuss different types of causes. It is springtime, and I see outside my window an example of one type of causality not recognized by reductionists: sparrows building their nest. Little bits of stick and fur end up in the nest because the birds need a place for their babies. The reductionist would say my description is poetic, but very unscientific. The reductionist would say that " what is really causing those bits of sticks & fur to end up in the nest is the atoms. If we only understood the blind force between atoms, then we would understand the blind force between cells, and we would understand the blind forces that make baby birds etc." The reductionist talks this way because she/he knows only one type of cause, blind forces between invisibly small atoms. In case you have not already guessed, this to me is utter hogwash. The bird clearly knows it needs a nest, and is making lots of choices about what bits of stick and fur to bring up. The ability to make decisions is an actual cause, it is a force, it makes things happen. Where this force comes from I do not know any more than I know where the electric force comes from. They are both facts of Nature.
To end this essay, we come back to the Van Allen Belts around the Earth. [Jupiter and Saturn also have their own Van Allen Belts.] The reductionist must call them emergent properties, because the reductionist only believes in the atom. My view is that the Earth needs those shells of alternating charges. Yes, actually needs them, just as the bird needs a nest for its babies, and just as your body needs a liver. These large scale electrical structures around planets are serving very important functions. You and I look at a bird nest and we can easily see its function, and roughly how it is made. In this sense then, we are more intelligent than the bird because the nest is obvious to us. When we look up at the Van Allen Belts, we are beginning to vaguely fathom what they might be for, and how they might form. So in this sense, the Earth is more intelligent than us.