Here are couple of discussion on the excellent Closer To the Truth channel on YouTube run by Robert Kuhn. Below I explain some of the misleading analysis as it relates to strong emergence.
In philosophy there are two kinds of emergence:
weak emergence - which basically is another name for reduction-ism, which says that more complex behavior/function/properties appears at higher levels from the combination and interaction of lower level phenomenon. For example, wetness of water emerges when large number of molecules formed out of 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atoms,come together (primarily in liquid state - but I guess even ice is wet or you can get from mist). And the wetness can be explained based on the physical properties of the water molecule, and those in turn can be explained in terms of properties of hydrogen and oxygen atoms and their charges and valencies etc. I subscribe to reduction-ism and thus weak emergence. No issues.
strong emergence - which basically says that complex behavior/function/properties appears at higher levels which cannot be explained at lower levels. I think this is based on misleading, truncated analysis of the examples that are put forward, for example, by George Ellis. Tim Maudlin gets it right, but still does not clarify the flaws in the arguments of strong emergence proponents. Let me explain...
In the discussions of about emergence and especially so-called strong emergence or top-down emergence there is some confusion as to how far back an analysis needs to be done about a particular topic of discussion. For example, strong emergence proponents say that economic/commercial cause/effects are not to be found in the laws of physics e.g. when the technology improves and the prices of computers fall, more people start buying computers, and they see - prices going down actually made a person buy computers is nowhere in the laws of physics. Checkmate! Not really. For this case one cannot only start arbitrarily at the point where the prices of computers dropped and that affected how many people bought the computer. For this you have to understand how the commerce evolved, how people want to maximize what they have based on the limited money they may earn. And all of this started when humans evolved and started doing barter (first) with exchange of goods, and so on....and before that how they evolved and so on....and ultimately we can go to how the life came about etc. Yes if one insists on physical explanation of some of the higher level concepts, one has to some times go back tracking enough to understand the full phenomenon.
In fact, the above video on CTT channel, with George Ellis, a great scientists, makes a comment (in the episode named "George F. R. Ellis - Metaphysics vs. Materialism?") about computer programs and how they can make thing happen in real word, which he claims is a top-down causation. Really George? And frankly that really surprised me that he is doing such short-sighted argument based on a, what I call, past-truncated analysis. Higher order systems like Economics, have higher order explanations in the lingo/terminology/concepts of that level. If you want to downshift to the lower lever fields, you have to downshift the explanation and sometimes do a longer past duration analysis to find the explanation at the lower levels. For example the behavior of humans at social and economic level can be explained in social and economic terms. But if you want to start going down to biological, chemical, physical level, you have to downshift the explanations to evolution, biochemistry, molecular biology, molecular chemistry, and atomic physics as one descends the levels, and also one has to extends the past time horizon to complete the analysis to boil down to physical explanations. Sara Walker and Lee Cronin's Assembly theory explains this aspect very well.
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