multilevel selection, and symmetry breaking vs topological order
Just this general idea that maybe emergence of multilevel selection, as well as what is purely symmetry breaking vs actually fundamental and new and what does new mean can all be informed by this notion of the difference between phases of matter which can be distinguished via local order parameters vs those which require global measurements to distinguish.
- E.g. in the case of cognition, perhaps our thoughts and emotions are things which are only detectable by global measurements (and that's part of the reason why it's so hard to decode neural information into "phenotypes.")
- And analogizing this with in the toric code, where to detect the phase, you need this global measurement to determine if there's a loop or not.
- [?] So, is cognition in some sense kind of like these locally indistinguishable phases?
I hypothesize also that we reach this point, similarly to what I was thinking about in what does new mean, when we sort of exhaust all local variation. And so what is "fundamentally new" needs to be things that arise out of global variation. A difference, though, is that I'm additionally imposing that this global variation not even be detectable locally.