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The Case for Strong Emergence

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What is Fundamental?

Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

Abstract

As everyone knows, physicists have proved that free will doesn’t exist. That’s because we are made of tiny particles which follow strict laws, and human behavior is really just a consequence of these particles’ laws. At least that’s what I used to think. But some years ago I stumbled over a gap in this argument. In this essay I want to tell you what made me rethink and why you should rethink, too.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It may be possible to address this problem by using the the AdS/CFT correspondence which maps the strongly coupled condensed matter system to a weakly coupled gravitational system. So maybe we are not all that far from actually deriving a theory for high temperature superconductivity.

  2. 2.

    It is actually the hypercharge coupling of the electroweak theory that diverges.

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Correspondence to Sabine Hossenfelder .

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Hossenfelder, S. (2019). The Case for Strong Emergence. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) What is Fundamental?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11301-8_9

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