Boss

"It turns out that Newton's laws aren't fundamental, they are emergent; that is, they are what happens when quantum matter aggregates into macroscopic fluids and objects. It is a collective organizational phenomenon. The thing is, you can't predict Newton's laws from observing the behavior of atoms, nor the behavior of atoms from Newton's laws."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 125)

"The key to understanding emergence is to understand that there are different levels of organization. My favorite analogy is that of the car. If you look at an isolated car part, such as a cam shaft, you cannot predict that the freeway will be full of traffic at 5:15 P.M. Monday through Friday. In fact, you could not even predict the phenomenon of traffic would ever occur if you just looked at a brake pad. You cannot analyze traffic at the level of car parts. Did the guy who invented the wheel ever visualize the 405 in Los Angeles on Friday evening? You cannot even analyze traffic at the level of the individual car. When you get a bunch of cars and drivers together, with the variables of location, time, weather, and society, all in the mix, then at that level you can predict traffic. A new set of laws emerge that aren't predicted from the parts alone."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 136)

"…a unique language, which has yet to be developed, is needed to capture the thing that happens when mental processes constrain the brain and vice versa. The action is at the interface of those layers. In one kind of vocabulary it is where downward causation meets upward causation. In another vocabulary it is not there at all but in the space between brains that are interacting with each other. It is what happens at the interface of our layered hierarchical existence that holds the answer to our quest for understanding mind/brain relationships. How are we to describe that? That emergent level has its own time course and is current with the actions taking place. It is that abstraction that makes us current in time, real and responsible. The whole business about the brain doing it before we are conscious of it becomes moot and inconsequential from the vantage point of a different level of operation. Understanding how to develop a vocabulary for those layered interactions, for me, constitutes the scientific problem of this century."—Michael Gazzaniga (page 220)