Global or macro level: the coherence, collective, and wholeness ..... in Part 2), Kim's approach to emergence via supervenience is basically a âno-starterâ.
Re-Imagining Emergence: Part 1 E:CO Issue Vol. 15 No. 2 2013 pp. 77-103
Philosophy
Complexity And Philosophy RE-IMAGINING EMERGENCE: PART 1 Jeffrey Goldstein Adelphi University, USA
Para a minha querida Carolina: De toda a correnteza Que tudo vai levar… Rio que vai pro mar (por Bebel Gilberto “Canção Rio”)
______________________________ Certainly, by not using language we could make silence function as a symbol of the non-articulated; but, then the articulated aspect of that non-articulated will totally be lost sight of. Toshihiko Izutsu (1977)
Note to reader: This paper is the first half of a two part project. The second part will be published in the next issue of E:CO. Sometimes reference will be made to later sections, some of which may be found in Part 2. Here is the complete Table of Contents for both Part 1 and Part 2: Part 1 (This Issue) •
Introduction: Imagining and Re-imagining Emergence;
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Imaginability and Possibility;
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From Typologies to Prototypes: Emergents as Natural Complexes, and;
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What Emergents or Emergence are Not.
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Part 2 (Next Issue) •
Chemistry An Inspiration for Re-Imagining Emergence
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Self-Transcending Constructions and a Provisional Black Box Model
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Combinatorics, Multi-foldedness, and Self-Transcendent Novelty
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Emergent Wholes and Downward Causation
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Transcending the Black Box Model
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INTRODUCTION: IMAGINING AND RE-IMAGINING EMERGENCE
s the science of complex systems has rapidly expanded over the past three decades, the study of emergence has dramatically shifted from hovering on the edge of credibility to being embraced by scientists, philosophers, and other disciplines concerned with its findings. Even in the abstruse arena of theoretical physics emergence is now being raised up in an almost frenzy of enthusiasm, wherein space, time, space/time, continuity, discreteness, particulateness, scientific laws, entire theories are now exclaimed to be emergent! Although such sentiments are seen by some as a long-awaited vindication, this wholesale round-up of what was previously enigmatic within the conceptual fence of emergent phenomena has instead greatly amplified the vulnerability of the idea of emergence to misinterpretation. At the same time, we also can discern an unfortunate contamination of how emergence is being conceived, e.g., speculations founded on mathematical, scientific, and philosophical illiteracy, unctuous parades of inflated bombast (“absential”? “ententional”?), and a glaring neglect of basics rules of logical inference. In order to remedy these kinds of miscontruings, this paper is offering new guidelines for how we might re-imagine emergence so as to bring to the fore what I think are the cogent, salient, and substantive implications of emergence. I call this “re-imagining” emergence since the emphasis here will be on clarifying and reinvigorating images and concepts upon which we rely in conceiving emergence. My stress on image and picture follows from a long and proven tradition in how scientists envisage their findings and the theories built from them, as well as in how these theories are interpreted by other commentators. Consider these remarks from the physicist, philosopher, and historian Mario Bunge (2011: 20), an early promoter of emergence in the contemporary period, “But mechanistic philosophers did not invent the theory of change without novelty; mechanism just adopted, reinforced, and rationalized the picture of change as a circulation of a limited stock of forms” (emphasis added). The term “picture” here refers to an understanding couched in terms of visualizable repre78 | Goldstein
sentations, in this case the Anaxagorian tenet of change as a rearrangement of a circumscribed set of seminal forms. One of Bunge’s points was that this rearrangement image of change precludes the possibility of an emergence of genuine novelty since rearrangement, taken in a simple, machine-like way doesn’t add anything new to what is being rearranged. To be sure there is another way to picture rearrangement that does allow for the introduction of novelty, namely, specific recombinatorial operations that will be discussed in Part 2. Viewing scientific and philosophic understandings as images or pictures, according to the eminent philosopher of science Mary Hesse (1966), involves metaphoric re-descriptions or analogical visualizations. For Rom Harre, another philosopher of science, “[scientific explanations]... carry the picture with which everyone, schoolboy, student, engineer, and research worker, operates in dealing with problems in his field”(quoted in I. Barbour, 1974: 44). Even, in highly abstract areas of mathematics relying more on apparently image-less algebras as well as “higher” dimensions thought beyond the reach of visualization, imagery has still been found to be of inestimable importance (see Grossholtz, 2007 and Giaquinto, 2011). I tend to agree with those who interpret some of the growing dissatisfaction with such recondite theories in contemporary theoretical physics as string theory, super-symmetry, eternal inflation and the like as not just due to their purported inability to make testable predictions but also the increasing abstractness of the underlying mathematical formalisms which preclude the kind of imagistic reconstruction capable of satisfying whatever drives explanation in the first place (in a later section of Part 1, we will take a short look at the purported “unimaginability” of quantum mechanics in relation to our project of imagining emergence). Scientific theories often can make or break their case not just because they offer mathematical formulations which can accurately predict outcomes of measurements and experiments but also in large measure by how picturable their stories are of the interrelationships among the various factors, causal sequences, and the like. An example is Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism which provided both a mathematical formalism and a vivid picture of the dynamics of electromagnetic radiation for what Faraday had only observed. Of course, there is a conceptual danger incipient on a reliance on images/pictures when they are taken too literally, something that often happens unconsciously as when a picture is carried over from some direct literal context to situations where the picture obviously does not apply in that same literal sense (with this decontextualization frequently forgotten when the new image appears to offer insight). We come upon just this kind of transition from the literal to the metaphoric in employment of
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the terms “higher”,”lower” and “levels” for describing the emergent versus the substrate scales of emergence. These three words are taken from direct and literal spatial contexts and transferred to a metaphoric application (see Goldstein, 2002). Conceptual exasperations incumbent upon taking images literally when the context has shifted was a point that Wittgenstein (2010: 87) almost obsessively emphasized, as in this passage describing how the term “recognizing” was used in theories of memory: ...as if recognizing always consisted in comparing two impressions with one another...it is as if I carried a picture of an object with me and used it to perform an identification of an object as the one represented by the picture. Our memory seems to us to be the agent of such a comparison, by preserving a picture of what has been seen before, or by allowing us to look into the past (as if down a spy-glass). Even just a small dose of Wittgenstein’s antidote for literalism sounds like good advice we will need to follow in our project of re-imagining emergence.
Trying either to imagine or re-imagine emergence comes up against an additional challenge, what will be termed here the “privation” of imagination found widespread not just in past attempts at conceiving emergence, but continuing to drain imagistic resources away from our current project. I intentionally borrow the term “privation” (“deprive”) from Augustine’s well-known conceptualization of evil as the “privation” of goodness, i.e., a type of deprivation of otherwise abundant divine goodness or mercy at work in the created world (see also, the much later related notions of Aquinas, IbnRush’d, or “Averroes” in Latin, and Maimonides). My claim is that when it comes to emergence, our imaginations have been severely deprived of the requisite resources of image and constructs, e.g., such hoary notions as the ancient Greek idea of synonymy (or strong commensurability) between cause and effect (see, e.g., Annas & Barnes, 1985) and that Medieval tradition which found expression in such dictums as causa aequat effectum (effects equal their causes) still operative in certain contemporary scientific and philosophical frame works even by someone with the mathematical stature of Hamilton with his indispensable Hamiltonian (see Bunge, 2011). Furthermore, it must be kept in mind that the imagery required for emergence must correspond with the higher, macro-emergent level. In this regard, the first wellknown American female philosopher, Suzanne Langer (cited in Taliaferro and Evans, 2010) celebrated for both the rigor and wide-range of her thought, warned that to effectively understand “higher” level dynamics in a system required imagery and constructs and formalisms corresponding to and suitable for this “higher” level and not
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just formal rehashings of “lower” level principles.” And, as Ernan McMullin (1984: 14, 15) pointed out over three decades ago, “If we cannot quite imagine what [the entities of the microworld] are, this is due to the distance of the microworld from the world in which our imaginations were formed, not to the existential shortcomings of electrons ...” In terms of emergence, this translates into the requirement that our re-imagining must proceed by recourse to the specific imagistic resources appropriate to emergence. This doesn’t exclude reductionist strategies when called for, but it does demand that our image-directed inquiry not be limited to what normally passes for reductionist approaches, that is, those “thematas” which historian of science Gerald Holton (cited in Goldstein, 2013) called attention to such as particulate discreteness, isolation, isotropy, homogeneity, and related notions. One of the ways we can transcend the conceptual traps of such “lower” level images is through attention to issues of organization, including constructional activities on the meso-scopic level (to be gone over in Part 2), novelty producing recombination, and new schemes of “logic” more suitable for “higher” emergent level principles about which much more will be said in Part 2. From the perspective of the history of thought, whether of the Occident or the Orient, whether of the North or the South, the conception of emergence is a new occurrence and accordingly new images, pictures, constructs, maps are required to navigate through this new conceptual territory. To be sure, this exploration has already begun and as a result the privation of imagination dogging the study of emergence is starting to be filled-in. In a paper published fifteen years ago, I (Goldstein, 1999) introduced the subject of emergence by describing five necessary characteristics of emergent phenomena which could not only serve to distinguish emergent from other phenomena but also serve, by implication, as pointers toward the kinds of processes/operations/constraints that emergence would need to possess in order to be capable of generating phenomena with just these inimitable properties. The time is right to think again about these properties, emending and adding to them in the light of the great deal of research and thinking that has gone into the concept of emergence since then: •
Radical novelty: this characteristic is meant to capture the various claims made about emergents in relation to the substrates from which they emerge, i.e., their purported unpredictability, non-deducibility, and irreducibility to that substrate. Note that these three aspects of radical novelty are not identical and consequently a fuller treatment of them needs to be done to more finely distinguish their respective implications. I am also now including under radical novelty, the notion E:CO Vol. 15 No. 2 2013 pp. 77-103 | 81
of the explanatory gap of emergence (an idea to be defined later on) since, in my opinion, theorizing about emergence, unlike most other scientific pursuits that I am aware of, needs to work with and not obliterate this explanatory gap. It is the presence of an explanatory gap that underscores the need to shift to discourse whose locus is on the higher macro level, e.g., bringing in order parameters and not just control parameters in the study of critical phenomena or the asymptotic reasoning involved in formulating critical phenomena (see Batterman, 2006; and critiques of his position in Mainwood, 2006; and Knox, 2012). The explanatory gap doesn’t disappear but is rather subsumed into higher level explanatory strategies. This is a crucial aspect of emergence since it can further help distinguish emergent phenomena from other domains where the gap is either stated as an unbridgeable chasm as in David Chalmers so-called “hard problem of consciousness or is believed not to exist at all as in Daniel Dennett’s opposite conclusion that consciousness as such bears no ontological weight. By the way, I am not using “consciousness” here because I think it is an apt candidate for being an emergent phenomena. Actually, as I’ll say more about in the section “What are Not Emergents Nor Emergence”, I will argue that holding that consciousness is emergent expresses a deep misunderstanding of both consciousness and emergent. Also note that the qualification of “radical” is applied to the novelty aspect of emergents, and not to emergence itself as in the expression “radical emergence” that can be found in the works by certain emergentist thinkers, an unfortunate choice of phraseology that I will discuss more fully later on. “Radical novelty” is used to distinguish emergent novelty (its unpredictability and so forth) from ordinary novelty and not to assess the ontological status of emergent phenomena which the term “radical emergent” carries with it. This is a critical difference from the perspective of this paper since one of its objectives is to re-imagine emergent phenomena and emergence without getting bogged down with ontological biases of one sort or another. Again, there will be much more on this issue in the section “From Typologies to Prototypes: Emergents as Natural Complexes” •
Coherence/collective/wholeness: I have changed the terms here due to the many innovative insights into the relation between parts and wholes which the study of emergence has brought forward; moreover, included within this property is the idea of downward causation since it is a feature of wholeness and not some separate element of emergents, a misleading notion that will be explored in Part 2 of this paper when we discuss wholeness. Also, there are important differences between coherence, collective, wholeness and related terms which make each of them more
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or less appropriate in describing different examples of emergence. However, these differences should not be taken as indicating some ontological denigration of “collective” emergent phenomena, say, in comparison to other emergents better depicted as “wholes”. Again, this relates to the issue of ontological bias which I will get to later. •
Global or macro level: the coherence, collective, and wholeness characteristic listed above represents some kind of integration, correlation, or cooperation that spans separate substrate components. The term “level” of course is not to be taken in the literal spatial sense nor even as found in hierarchies (an idea itself in need of reformulation in my opinion), but instead as an indication of the locus of emergent phenomena and where the observation of emergent phenomena can take place. Later on I will distinguish what I mean by level here from misleading alternatives offered such as scope or scale, etc.
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Ostensive: emergents are recognized by showing themselves when they actually appear on the macro-level and not before. This sounds redundant but it drives home the point that because of their radically novel characteristic, emergent phenomena cannot be depicted (deduced) from the point of view of the substrate before they are exhibited. Moreover, because of the nature of complex systems, each ostensive showing of emergent phenomena will be different to some degree from previous ones;
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Dynamical: emergents emerge during emergence as the system evolves over time. This property needs emphasis because it is not uncommon for phenomena that are pre-given, static structures to be classified as emergent whereas there is no sense that they went through process of emergence which occurs dynamically. Also, as a dynamical construct, emergence is associated with the arising of new attractors in dynamical systems (i.e., bifurcation). However, even though, emergents are dynamical, this does not imply that a dynamical systems formulation is sufficient for elucidating them.
I would like to append another characteristic of emergents here in order to further demarcate emergent phenomena from others that might be taken as similar enough to be considered the same even though, strictly speaking, this is a feature more directly about the process of emergence rather than emergent phenomena a such: •
Self-transcending constructions (stc): I had previously proposed (e.g., Goldstein, 2006) understanding emergence along the lines of what I called a self-transcending construction (stc) as a more precise description, which can thereby indicate the specific constructional “logic” at work in the processes/operations of emergence. E:CO Vol. 15 No. 2 2013 pp. 77-103 | 83
Part 2 of this paper will include a section devoted to imagining the action of stc’s through the use of a tentative black box model. I say “tentative” since Part 2 will conclude by arguing that even black box models need to be transcended to appreciate what is going on with emergence. Also I need to emphasize that the term “construction” has nothing whatever to do with the “constructivist” leanings of certain post-modern approaches (but not all) which in my opinion reveal much more about the highly misinformed and erroneous reasoning of their proponents than any cogent insight into how either science or creative philosophy credibly proceeds. Extrapolated into a characteristic of emergent phenomena, self-transcending constructions express the dual nature of emergents: following from, derived from, or continuous with the substrate from which they emerge, also at the same time transcending the forms, dynamics, functionings, laws, and principles operating at the lower substrate level. That this dual nature occurs at the same time indicates in no way that anything mysterious, magical, inexplicable is happening nor does it call for some special kind of logic that would enable the co-presences of seeming oppositions such as found in dialectical logic, paraconsistent or dialethist logics, infinite valued logics, or even polarity logics like found, e.g., in the principle of complementarity in quantum mechanics. I’ll be saying more about the use of such logics in other contexts later on. For now, all that needs stressing is that if emergents don’t display that they both follow from and are discontinuous with the substrates from which they emerge, then they don’t warrant being labeled emergent. These characteristics of emergents can be used for channeling our imagining of emergence away from such novelty-generating operations as randomization. Each succeeding random number in a random series is, on average, certainly unpredictable, novel, and ostensive with respect to what came before or it wouldn’t satisfy the criteria for randomness. Why shouldn’t these processes capable of producing random novelty not be considered emergence since novelty is the same outcome in both? The answer of course is obvious since a random series hardly qualifies as an emergent coherence or a higher macro level. Nor does each new random number possess the characteristic of being a self-transcending construction since it is not at the same time continuous with and transcendent of the previous sequence. Along the same lines, unanticipated drug interactions have sometimes been labeled “emergent effects” precisely because the manner of interaction and its outcome are unpredictable and ostensive (at least the first time they occur). A very dangerous example is taking just an ordinary dose of acetaminophen for a headache when you’ve
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had a few alcoholic drinks. Liver failure might result, a fact that the Big Pharma company (whose name won’t to be mentioned here because of my fear of being sued!) that makes the most popular brand of this pain killer has spent a truly enormous sum of money to keep this fact out of the public’s awareness. Yet, if we apply all the characteristics listed, interaction effects are clearly not emergent since they most likely are not macroscopically coherent phenomena (although there might be cases where chemical reactions do in fact engender such macro-level integrations). Moreover, it is unclear whether such interactions fulfill the property of stc since they appear to be like much more on the side of discontinuity than continuous with. A similar caution distinguishes emergence from causal processes and emergents from merely caused effects. Here what is particularly pertinent is the property of radical novelty including the idea of an explanatory gap. If I need to push my car downhill to get it started when the battery is dead (can we still does this with our modern computerized automobiles?), my exertion against the car does lead to the novel change that my car has moved and hopefully the engine has kicked-in but does it make sense to call this effect an emergent phenomena and the process leading to it emergence? In a similar way that emergents are dynamical in coming about over time yet emergence is not adequately captured by all of the constructs coming out of dynamical systems theory, so emergents are caused yet our customary understanding of causality does not capture what is happening with emergence. Emergence and emergents require something more than causally construed situations. Hence to imagine emergence we need imagistic resources transcending randomness, unpredictability, novelty, causality although obviously all of these constructs can also play a role.
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IMAGINABILITY AND POSSIBILITY
o replenish the privation of imagination in order to proceed in our re-imagining emergence is neither easy nor straightforward. Consider the conceptually thorny relation between possibility and imaginability. At one extreme there is the issue of logical possibility so that to suppose something to be imaginable must hinge on that something being logically possible, or, as the philosopher Steven Yablo (1993) has put it, we cannot imagine tigers whose stripes are made-up of round squares, nor tigers that lick all and only tigers that do not lick themselves (a reference to Russell’s notorious Barber Paradox about set membership), or have more sodium chloride in their stomachs than salt. Round-squares are, of course, contradictory, and thus try-
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ing to imagine them can only lead to at best quite unsatisfactory images of squares superimposed on circles or vice versa, or circles becoming inscribed with shorter and shorter sided equal-sided polygons, or some such similar picture. Moreover, although it was proven that squaring a circle is impossible since the archetypal constant of circles, , is a transcendental number and therefore not perfectly transformable into any mathematical element involving a square, this has not stopped mathematical cranks from continuing in their futile efforts to square the circle (leaving aside those mystical symbolists who may approach squaring the circle from the very different direction of spiritual development). But what about imagining unicorns? Unicorns are clearly not logically impossible since all we need imagine them is a simple experiment in emergent cognition bringing together a cross between a rhino and a buck. Although this direct breeding is not possible across species demarcations, what about breeding bucks with antlers increasingly closer to the center of their foreheads? The point here is that unicorns are clearly and easily susceptible to imagining even if, as yet, the specific genetic combination that would yield such a creature has not occurred according to the fossil record and is not likely to occur because of genetics and related physiological limitations. Thus, unicorns are imaginable since their possibility is something that might possibly be explainable. This point is relevant to what the Canadian philosopher of science W. H. Newton-Smith (1993) remarked about explainability and what we consider possible: we don’t tend to postulate states of affairs of which we cannot explain and we don’t even see what could possibly count as an explanation of. Such seems to have been the scenario in the case of emergence which was not something explainable before the idea was first broached in the mid-nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill and C. H. Lewes. Whether it was considered either logically impossible (e.g., according to some strict logical interpretation of Laplacian determinism based on dynamical functions) or physically impossible since it didn’t appear to follow accepted physical laws and principles of the time, emergence was simply not something imaginable since it was not as yet considered possible. At that time the situation was like the second of the following two project teams composed of futurist-oriented aeronautical and nuclear engineers who are respectively given two, apparently related design challenges. The first group is presented with the challenge of imagining a possibly workable design for a starship drive capable of interstellar travel from earth to the Andromeda Galaxy, one of the nearest galaxies at only a distance of 2.5 million light years, and returning within sixty or seventy years, the presumable amount of years that the crew could effectively function at work 86 | Goldstein
tasks! The other team is given what at a very quick first impression might seem similar, namely, to imagine the design for a starship drive for traveling from earth to Valhalla (i.e., the dwelling place of the Norse deities in Asgard). The first group might immediately and enthusiastically engage in the project, their brainstorming not sounding much different perhaps from a discussion held at a string theory conference where the ideas of wormholes, folded space, multiverses, quantum entanglement as a means toward faster than light communication or motion. The second group would probably just become befuddled and or maybe laugh at the absurdity of the challenge. In regard to emergence, I think that there must still be some hard core ontological level monist reductionists left who would hold that the whole attempt to imagine emergence to be quite similar to the task for the second team. But we don’t need to worry about them since they are a dying breed. The task to re-imagine emergence is much closer to the first team’s project in that to do it requires constructs that must originate in principles that transcend the current resources. Perhaps some elements of the nature of this task can be gleaned from imagining what’s going on in quantum mechanics, something that has been labeled impossible ever since Niels Bohr had famously warned against trying to imagine how such strange occurrences as waveparticle duality could come about, and instead, rely on the mathematical formalism of Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Schrödinger’s wave function. Feynman called the wave-particle finding of the double slit experiment as the only real mystery of Quantum Mechanics (qm) and supposedly uttered in the face of it: “just shut up and calculate” (Mermin, 2004; by the way Mermin concluded that it was probably him, i.e., Mermin, who said those exact words under the influence of Feynman). Remember, though, that despite Bohr’s warning, he went on to add his own imaginative conjectures such as the Principle of Complementarity to aid in imagining how qm could deal with the apparently contradiction between particles and waves. Interestingly enough, wave particle duality has been found to exist even at the scale of large molecules like C60 Buckminsterfullerene (Arndt et al., 1999). Moreover, there have been a legion of attempts since Bohr to try imagining what’s happening in qm. These imaginings of qm must all face the conceptually challenging fact that the images themselves rest on other concepts and images which in some ways are also unimaginable such as complex numbers. The famous Born rule in qm expresses what happens in terms of “the square of a probability amplitude”, which comes down to the amplitude times its own complex conjugate, bringing to the fore the “impossibility” of imaginary numbers. But even though such numbers are “impossible”, there are many E:CO Vol. 15 No. 2 2013 pp. 77-103 | 87
ways to imagine them such as the Argand plane, polar coordinates, Euler’s famous formula linking, i, e, , 1, and 0!
A
FROM TYPOLOGIES TO PROTOTYPES: EMERGENTS AS NATURAL COMPLEXES
telling indication of growing maturity and sophistication in a field of study is the arrival of classifications, typologies, taxonomies, and similar schemes for categorizing the phenomena under scrutiny. Through establishing these finer differentiations, theorizing can then become more focused, in turn leading to more probitive research, in turn leading to..., and so forth. We can observe this happening in the recent study of emergence with such categories as: radical vs ordinary; weak vs strong vs maximally strong; diachronic vs synchronic; ontological vs epistemological; and more (see, e.g., Assad & Packard, 1992; Bedau, 1997, Seager, 2012; Silberstein & McGeever, 1999; Stephan, 1999; van Gulick, 2001). The most elaborate of classificatory proposals for emergent phenomena is no doubt the one offered by Jochen Fromm (2005) which breaks emergent phenomena down into no less than four main types and six subtypes! Although each typing approach might be said to add something of interest to our understanding of emergence, I have also detected in them an “ontological” appraisal about how “real” or “genuine” this or that type or class of emergent phenomena is. Three factors appear relevant to this appraisal: how and what degree of unpredictability emergents possess; whether they possess the property of downward causation; and an obsession with epistemology that has acted like a dark cloud occluding what is really going on in emergence. Nonlinear dynamical systems theory (nds) has shown that the unpredictability of complex systems can be a tricky issue. For example, specific states of the weather such as temperature or barometric pressure cannot be accurately forecast more than a few days in advance, yet the climate which possesses more over-arching stability limits the degree of unpredictability of the states. Somehow erroneous beliefs about unpredictability in nds and related formalisms have led to the misleading supposition that emergent phenomena are more deserving of the appellation of emergent the more unpredictable they are so that strong, radical or maximally strong types of emergents are somehow more genuinely emergent and thereby more genuinely real. Yet, the very nebulousness of many contentions about unpredictability of emergents are simply not warranted. Here I think a little bit more knowledge of science and math might go a long way! 88 | Goldstein
The second factor at play in ontological assessments of emergent phenomena, the nature of downward causation is something that will be discussed in detail in Part 2. The third factor is the one which has impeded theorizing about emergence by being mired down in the same epistemological versus ontological obsession that has plagued philosophy and science since the start of the scientific age (on this epistemic mania, see Corneanu, 2012; and Livingston, 1998). What I am trying to get at here regarding ontological bias can be illustrated by a similar conceptually troubling ontological valuation found in the emergence-based metaphysical system developed by Alfred North Whitehead, an ontological bias which had attention called to it by the grossly under-appreciated American philosopher Justus Buchler who also indicated a remedy for it which we will adopt. Whitehead (1927) imagined reality as composed of ontologically fundamental “actual entities” or “actual occasions” emerging from an experiential- process of “prehension” (from “comprehension”, “apprehension”, “prehensile”). “Actual” was used in order to emphasize an ontological priority given to his emergent units in contrast to what must have seemed less real potentialities, possibilities, and other epistemic “challenged” ideas. Buchler (1969) questioned Whitehead’s granting of exclusive ontological status to supposedly “actual” entities as opposed to a whole universe filled with not so “real” things such as memories of lyrical passages in poetry, fictional characters, modal possibilities, semiotic constructs like signs and symbols, etc., indeed all the host of other things that philosophers like Meinong had gnashed much of their teeth over. Instead of “actual” events or occasions, Buchler (1990) imagined that whatever is actual, phantasmagoric, illusionary, dreamed-up, ethereal, concrete, abstract might constitute a natural complex with its own formative contours, saliences, horizons of perceptibility and applicability, in other words an ontologically neutral fundamental unit characterized by ontological parity (not priority). What I am suggesting here is that instead of spending our time devising new and improved classes of ontologically tinged categories, it can be much more helpful to consider examples or prototypes of emergence as instances of natural complexes, whether a dissipative structure of liquid convection cells, a beam of laser light, a skin cell, a biological species, a superconducting cuprate, a project team, a community based social enterprise, the price structure of a futures option, all are as real and actual and ontological as each other. Partaking of ontological parity does not, of course, exclude the need to distinguish “dreams” of swimming from “actual” swimming in the ocean, fictional characters like Sydney Carton from real life people like Cyd Charisse, E:CO Vol. 15 No. 2 2013 pp. 77-103 | 89
sexual fantasies from sexual congress, and so forth. But these distinctions would not thereby serve to somehow diminish the ontological status of any natural complex. If we assume all types and classes and prototypes of emergents are natural complexes first and only later be assigned to a category according to some scheme of classification (but not a scheme based on degrees of realness), we are thereby opened to a more perspicacious perspective on what is going on. Indeed, what takes precedence are actual cases of emergence generated emergent phenomena falling together under the rubric of different prototypes and not classes of emergents. And by managing to step around the by now stupefyingly redundant discussions of epistemology against ontology, we can proceed empirically and delve deeper into the emergent phenomena as they present themselves without worrying too much about their weakness, strength, radicalness, diachronicity, etc.
WHAT ARE NOT EMERGENTS NOR EMERGENCE
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espite the jump in sophistication within the study of emergence, one can still find a widespread use of “emergent” to describe certain properties whose only reason for being called emergent is they are found on the ensemble level and not on the level of the parts composing the ensemble. The most frequent case is when physicists consider temperature an emergent property only measurable on an ensemble, say, of gas molecules but not on the level of individual molecules. The ensembles referred to here are not to be conflated with the coherent “collective excitations” found in superconductivity, superfluidity, ferromagnetism, and other “critical” phenomena studied intensively in condensed matter or solid state physics. In, Part 2, there will be an entire section devoted to how these collective states do indeed warrant the appellation of “emergent” as well as their coming into being by “emergence”. In the case of temperature as emergent, while it is true temperature can be explained as a result of the kinetic motion of molecules, this kinetic motion is not the kind of operation or process typically seen as process of emergence, for example, there is no presence of an explanatory gap, there is no call for new higher level constructs to explain how a radically novel feature comes into being, putting aside the much-remarked-upon supposed explanatory replacement of statistical mechanics for thermodynamics. Rather, temperature is merely a function of measuring on a macro or global scale, a change of perspective on the part of those observing and measuring the system, an arbitrarily designated scale at which to measure, and not the singular or privileged “level” of emergents (Goldstein, 2002).
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An analogy would be a consideration of the form, functionality, and aesthetics of an entire building, say, Frank Gehry’s startling Guggenheim Art Museum in Bilbao, Spain. The edifice as a whole comprises a set of features not surveyable from the perspective of the steel girders and concrete blocks with which the building is composed. Nor do those lower level building blocks have much to do, except through their color multiplied to a macro-scale, with the incredible color shifts the museum undergoes due to the time of day and weather conditions. Perhaps one could imagine the dynamical process of designing and constructing the building an example of emergence but the completed building as a static entity is not an emergent simply because the features of the whole differ from the features of the parts. Hence, in imagining emergence, although a global or macro-level feature is a crucial aspect of what comes into being, this feature is clear not enough to warrant the term “emergent”. Another example of a misleading application of emergent to global phenomena unobservable from a local perspective is Alex Ryan’s (2006) point that “scope”, as he defines this term, is “coupled” to emergent since it points to features only accessible for observation from a global perspective. Ryan gives the example of the twist feature of a Möbius strip, a property not able to be recognized from just a local standpoint on the strip:
Figure 1: Möbius Strip (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:M%C3%B6bius_strip.jpg) Not only is the global twist not perceptible from the local level, say, of an ant walking along the strip who could never even realize there was a twist at all, the eminent mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose (1995) sees this as an example of the irreducibility of certain mathematical objects’ twists, its non-orientability is not reducible to even an expanded view originating just from the local perspective. Thus, a question such as where exactly the twist is along the strip simply doesn’t make sense from the local vantage point. Penrose’s famous “impossible triangle” is similarly ir-
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reducible since its impossible structure cannot be reduced to a structure coincident from just truncated slices of three corners. Penrose interprets such irreducible objects as illustrations of a co-homology by offering a way of “measuring” the degree of its impossibility, which for Penrose makes such mathematically structures “holistic” (his word). Although I personally am intrigued by Ryan’s and Penrose’s fascinating explorations of these kinds of topological objects where a global perspective reveals a whole other crucial facet of them, there’s only one problem with them regarding the topic of emergence: these are not emergent phenomena. Sure they have radically novel properties on a global scale neither deducible from nor reducible to a local perspective, and sure these properties only emerge ostensively as perspective and scale is enlarged, but these objects do not arise dynamically over time. In other words there is no process of emergence, no self-transcending constructional activity over time, no explanatory gap. If the term “emergent” was warranted in this case, what’s to stop the use of emergent and emergence to any situation where global properties are not surveyable from a local point of view. For example, right now, sitting at my desk looking out the window, I am unable to see the whole house, e.g., the roof, the patio, the deck, the woods behind. Shouldn’t they then be “emergent phenomena” since their “scope” (Ryan’s term) is not observable from my lower local scope of perspective? I’m not just quibbling about the superficial semantics of which term to apply, like being the police of proper discourse, the etiquette of using the right terms. Rather, this gets to the substantive issue of what emergence all about. One could of course make Mobius Strips and Impossible Triangles into dynamical systems, e.g., considering the emergence of long twisting molecules like DNA coming into existence during the course of evolution over time. That would be a different case entirely. Similarly, we might turn an analogous situation into a dynamical system also, namely, that of Penrose non-periodic tiles being used to tile a plane, an inspiration for the discovery of quasi-crystals for which the Nobel Prize was awarded to Dan Schechtman in 2011. Because of the non-perodicity of the tilings, tiling to fill out a plane must occur nonlocally since there is no “local” algorithm possible to survey the completion of the tiling (see the brilliant master’s thesis on this by Ross, 2005; if the quality of her later work is any way predictable from this gem, there’s no doubt that she will be one of the major mathematicians of the twenty-first century).
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Emergence Is Not Supervenience The Emergent Evolutionist pioneer C. L. Morgan (1927) had used the term “supervenience” to conceive of the way in which novel emergent properties emerge from or “supervene on” their substrate. What Morgan seems to have had in mind was a rather loose analogy of something laying on or covering something else with the caveat of some sort of conforming of the higher to the lower as well as some sort of distance or discontinuity between the two levels, although it was not entirely clear what Morgan was attempting to emphasize. The term “supervenience” had also been utilized in other contexts as well, e.g., by English philosopher G. E. Moore in his development of a theory of ethics, and in a more closely related fashion by the influential American philosopher Donald Davidson (1980) in his almost emergentist view of “anomalous monism” wherein mind is considered simultaneously identical to the physical yet also “anomalous” in relation to it. The philosopher of mind Jaegon Kim (1997, 2000) glommed onto these earlier notions of supervenience in order to push home his physicialist persuasions in imagining the mind-body relation, particularly in his attempt to refute that any notion of emergence could substantially add anything of importance to the issue. Kim saw emergence as embodying a supervenience relation according to my following rephrasing of his argument (see the excellent discussion and assessment of Kim’s use of supervenience in MacDonald and MacDonald, 2010, from which I derived my take on the idea): Consider any emergent property, “EmerProp” in relation to a substrate property, “SubProp”: then any change in SubProp1 which winds-up being indiscernible with respect to SubProp1 cannot in turn lead to any divergence in the supervenient (or emergent) level from EmerProp1 to some putatively new EmerProp2.
What Kim seems to have been getting at here was that emergent properties are so tightly hinged with substrate properties that any significant change in the latter cannot but exhibit a significant change in the former. But this appears, to me at least, an obvious fact since, despite any claims for some special properties of emergents in relation to their substrates, whoever was supposed to have went on to claim (except perhaps the supra-naturalists among emergence proponents) that emergent phenomena were so removed from their substrate that they became, according to the MacDonalds, “spooky” or “free-floating” properties not grounded in the physical or natural? The MacDonalds further suggest that this utilization of supervenience to characterize the emergence-substrate relation, could E:CO Vol. 15 No. 2 2013 pp. 77-103 | 93
be taken as a way to “ward-off” any kind of dualist implications of emergence. Kim is primarily a philosopher of mind and his approach to emergence must be seen as originating in that context where it had been suggested that mind was emergent with respect to body, and Kim accordingly wanted to insure this would not be taken in a mind/body dualist fashion. To be sure, dualism always remains a temptation when emergence is taken seriously but Kim’s way around it is, in my opinion, a needlessly long-winded argument, rendered obscure by Kim’s symbolic notation, to insure talk of emergence doesn’t stray too far off a naturalist ground. Kim’s longer term objective has been to assault any credibility of the idea of downward causation, a claim about emergent wholes that Kim’s peculiar type of physicalism simply cannot tolerate. I’ll be returning to the issue of downward causation and the nature of emergent wholeness in Part 2 but for now all I want to say is that Kim’s way of imaging downward causation is so replete with erroneous literal mindedness that it is no wonder he would want to attack the idea. In the particularly apt phase of the philosopher of science Margaret Morrison (2011; she has made interesting insights into the use of the construct of emergence in contemporary research in solid state physics, an arena that I will say much more about in Part 2), Kim’s approach to emergence via supervenience is basically a “no-starter” and I might add that the reason for being a “no-starter” has to do with his overweening and insupportable commitment to physicalism, in a manner that I would doubt most actual scientists today would even entertain. As a result, his peculiar take on supervenience, at best, is just a way to emphasize the continuity aspect of emergents and thereby guarantee that they can amount to nothing but the physicality he sees in the substrates. In their trenchant critique of what they call “analytic metaphysics” for not taking into consideration scientific findings, Ladyman and Ross (2009) cite Kim’s understanding of “micro-properties” as “decomposable into non-overlapping proper parts” (an assumption which indeed plays a crucial role in his philosophical conclusions about emergence) to be not only completely devoid of any justification in contemporary physics but also completely misinformed about research and theorizing about mind in contemporary neuroscience. Instead, Kim is committed to what they call “non-science” to ground his physicalist and naturalist assumptions. And, of course, it would be a futile exercise to search within Kim’s work for any substantial reference to current complexity research into emergence; rather his view of emergence is taken from sources nearly a century past. Perhaps even just a little science is too threatening to his prior metaphysical biases. 94 | Goldstein
Self-Organization Is An Analogy Of The “Wrong Size And Momentousness” In complexity studies, it has now become standard to associate emergence with processes of self-organization ever since the seminal research into “dissipative structures” and “partly structured systems” conducted respectively by Prigogine and Haken. I also had emphasized self-organization in the same paper on emergence from 1999 mentioned above. In general, I think it is fair to say that the idea of self-organization possesses explanatory appeal because of its connotations of spontaneity, inner directedness, and a supposed lack of command and control hierarchies in imposing new order onto the systems in question. However, further research, theorizing, and a whole lot of thinking has resulted in the conclusion that much greater caution is needed in too closely identifying emergence with self-organization (see my critiques of certain of the features said to be characteristic of self-organization in Goldstein, 2006, 2011). For one thing, a closer inspection of systems where self-organization was said to be the key to emergence revealed the mandatory presence of a whole host of boundary conditions and containing and constraining factors which are not adequately understood as spontaneous or being without control hierarchies. In addition, in spite of the presence of the term “organization” right inside the phrase “self-organization”, using self-organization to describe processes of emergence has returned shockingly sparse and paltry images involving insight into a complex system’s organization, order, construction, and so forth. Instead, the focus has been on either thermodynamic categories like energy or entropy or dynamical constructs like bifurcation, attractors, phase space, which Boss and Fontana and Boss (1996) among others have compelling shown, miss the boat when it comes to such crucial aspects of emergent phenomena as structure, shape, size, contours, and the like. Furthermore, as I intend to say more about in Part 2, except within special contexts in which energy, entropy, and related thermodynamics constructs and images are directly relevant, in general, appealing to thermodynamics to elucidate emergence is to make what the renowned English philosopher Gilbert Ryle had termed a “category-mistake” since energy and entropy and the like are on much different conceptual level than emergent structures per se. (We’ll return to category mistakes in Part 2). Using the terminology of the eminent philosopher Galen Strawson (2006) who has taken a hard look at emergence for his objective of pressing for a kind of neopanpsychism, we can say that the images and concepts linked with self-organization are analogies which are not of sufficient “size”, “momentousness, “ or explanatory potency or portent to be of much aid in accounting for emergence (I am generaliz-
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ing from Strawson’s particular case of repudiating the weak analogies that have been offered to explain the experiential, first person perspective in terms of third person physicalist ideas). In the case of emergence per se, it can be concluded that we require images more powerful in their capability for depicting processes that can effectuate into phenomena possessing the characteristics of emergents as described above. Consciousness (Whatever It Is) Is Not An Emergent Phenomenon Holding consciousness to be an emergent phenomena is a not uncommon tenet found in neuroscience and philosophy at least since the Nobel Laureate Roger Sperry first proposed it during the nineteen seventies (Stover, 2000; also see Blitz, 1992, Klee, 1984; and Stephan, 1999, 2007). In appealing to emergence, Sperry believed he could develop a plausible theory of mind-brain interactions that was able to get around the conceptual problems plaguing mind/brain dualism, epiphenomenalism, radical behaviorism, reductionism, materialism, identity theory, panpsychism, and Gestaltism. A similar motivation can be discerned as well in more recent interest in emergencebased theories of consciousness (see, e.g., see Freeman, 2001). Sperry theorized that mental states were organized into unified “configurations”, “synthetic wholes”, analogous to an eddy channeling water molecules, which bestowed the property of “downward causation” from higher to lower levels (quoted in Blitz, 1992: 145; See also Sperry, 1980; and Klee, 1984). Sperry’s imagery here was very much akin to the terminology and images utilized much earlier by Emergent Evolutionists, e.g., C. L. Morgan’s “new relatedness” and “new syntheses” and Samuel Alexander’s “new qualities” and “new integrations”. Labeling consciousness as an emergent phenomena is not a surprising theoretical move given two facts. One is the already established tradition among early emergentist thinkers that “mind” was emergent from lower level physicality, “mind” being the word of choice at that time for what today we consider consciousness. The other has to do with the putative sui generis and irreducible nature of consciousness, a point of view which has received a great deal of brouhaha lately. For example, as expressed by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, this has been called the “hard problem of consciousness”, that is, how qualia or “raw feels” (a phrase that always makes me think of boiled shrimp with cocktail sauce when eating at so-called raw bars—I guess the juxtaposition of “feels” with “peels” and “raw”!) are apparently not explicable by appeal to third person, non-experiential constructs, the same perplexity with which Strawson has been wrestling with) (see the incisive critique of Chalmers’ perspective in Lowe, 1995). 96 | Goldstein
The awareness that we are having an experience can strike one with a sense of wonder, perhaps not unlike the sense evoked by the question, “Why is there something and not nothing” (see Jim Holt’s, 2013, great new book on this fascinating question published this year). However, just a little reflection on this matter soon yields to another inescapable quandary, namely, what exactly is consciousness that is being said to be emergent? If we desire to imagine what it means by contending something is emergent, we can only proceed with this endeavor if we have some clear enough conception of what it is that is being labeled emergent. We of course do have some idea of what is being referred to as emergent if we try to imagine laser light as emergent (which the physicist Hermann Haken has argued for), or to imagine the property of low temperature superconductivity as emergent (which the physicist P. W. Anderson and others have argued for), or that certain configurations found in artificial life are emergent (which the physicist James Crutchfield has argued for), or that a particular social collective is emergent (which the social researcher Keith Sawyer has argued for). But when we say that consciousness is emergent, what exactly is it that we are supposed to imagine as being emergent? To be sure, we must possess some common image of consciousness if we use the word in conveying or receiving information about it as we do in our everyday lives. But when we try to move beyond this everyday usage, what is this consciousness that the term “emergent” is being applied to? Perhaps what is being referred to as emergent is just this common image of consciousness. But for me at least this is simply way too nebulous to make much headway in having something to which a label of emergent could be attached. Perhaps instead, consciousness refers to each momentary awareness or each instance of qualia. But some commentators on the nature of consciousness have held the position that consciousness is not just that kind of “bare” awareness of qualia but is more plausibly that awareness which “accompanies” each instance of qualia. However, this way of putting it only serves, at least to me, in rendering things even more obscure for what does “accompanies” signify here, e.g., does it mean there is some ethereal “transcendental ego” hovering over all acts of experience? Or, maybe, consciousness is the sum total of all such states of awareness. But how should this be taken? Are we here talking about the very tricky issue of a continuing sense of personal identity or self which somehow “contains” all the instances of states of consciousness? If we are out paddling a canoe on a beautiful mountain lake, just how different will our state of consciousness be in five minutes from now? Won’t our identity persist while canoeing? Of course, this is none other than the age-old probE:CO Vol. 15 No. 2 2013 pp. 77-103 | 97
lem of identity and difference and do we really want to get enmeshed so far in metaphysical speculation so early in the game of trying to imagine what consciousness being emergent is supposed to mean? Moreover, is what is supposed to be emergent, our sense of self-consciousness, i.e., the awareness we have of being aware when we are experiencing qualia? An awareness of awareness? Or, an awareness of awareness of awareness? (That this kind of recursive “reflexivity” seems to never end was actually used by the great German mathematician Richard Dedekind to illustrate and “prove” a sense of infinity—see Maraldo, 2006). But then what about the “pure consciousness” that meditators claim to experience? (e.g., Forman, 1990; or meditation traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism such as the eight consciousnesses found in the Yogācāra school of Buddhism; or the nature of the true Self, the Atman, as a state or realized quality of “pure consciousness” which is a basic tenet of the Advaita Vedanta School of Hinduism). Is this putative “pure consciousness” what is emergent? But then what does it emerge from? Ordinary consciousness? But what is that, and around and around we go. Notice that so far we haven’t even broached the issue of what “emergent” is supposed to mean in the context of the claim that consciousness is emergent. Let’s just accept that emergent here signifies having the properties of emergent phenomena described above in the “Introduction” and accordingly shift our inquiry to the criteria for deciding whether something is the right kind of thing that can even be said to be emergent or not. It is this query, I think, which, coming from a different conceptual direction than the question of what consciousness is supposed to refer, reveals what may be the most troublesome aspect of the thesis that consciousness is emergent. So, is consciousness, whatever it is, even the kind of thing that it makes sense to say is emergent? I don’t think it is because whatever consciousness may be taken as being, isn’t it just too encompassing, too ubiquitous in scope in the sense of always being present when I or you are experiencing, thinking, whatever, that the label of emergent or non-emergent just don’t seem appropriate? For if we grant that consciousness is emergent, why should we also at the same time not claim that being, or “being-itself” (a phrase apparently much preferred by existentialists, along with Medieval Scholastic metaphysicians, but which I personally don’t see how adding “itself” as a suffix helps in any way for illuminating what being is supposed to be) is emergent? But why stop there? Maybe it is elucidating to say that time is emergent, space is emergent, space-time is emergent, gravity is emergent, entropy is emergent, physi-
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cal laws are emergent, discreteness and particulateness are emergent, continuity is emergent, .... Indeed, lately certain theoretical physicists are claiming just these sorts of things, notably, that time, space, and space-time are all emergent. Emergent from what though? And how exactly does this type of emergence proceed? I think we can interpret this kind of talk about all such pervasive “things” as emergent only in the much attenuated form of being synonymous with “not primary”, “secondary to some deeper foundation,” “a derivation from,” “a coming out of something else”. For these physicists the candidates for what space or time or space-time emerge from range from some higher dimensional mathematical structure, or some hypothesized quantummechanical field, or some other more fundamental bedrock set of principles or laws or forces or entities. In Part 2, I will explore this particular meaning of emergent in more depth. Furthermore, couldn’t consciousness not only not be emergent in the sense of the above paragraph, couldn’t it also be the kind of thing that is somehow foundational in nature and the cosmos. Perhaps it is the fundamental foundation in a mystical/theological/metaphysical sense of Ultimate Reality. Some trends in Hinduism say just that, namely, that consciousness is one of the three tripartite features of the ultimate: Sat-Chit-Ananda, or Being-Consciousness-Joy. If consciousness is foundational in this sense, then how can it be considered emergent? As far as I can tell, all the talk about consciousness being emergent is just another symptom of the epistemological obsession characterizing much of modern thought (e.g., see Corneanu, 2012; Livingston, 1998). I believe that the issue of whether consciousness is emergent is another unanswerable question not because its purported profundity confounds our merely mortal minds but instead because it includes terms, relations between terms, and assumptions that are simply too riddled with logical fallacies of diverse form as to render it a futile exercise. That is why ultimately I take the position that the way forward in better understanding emergence and emergent phenomena lies in both more empirical research into prototypes of emergence, that is, actual occurrences of emergence, and the resulting clearer theoretical constructs that we can develop from this research. That will be the task of Part 2.
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Assad, A.M., and Packard, N.H. (1992). “Emergent colonization in an artificial ecology,” in F.J. Varela and P. Bourgine (eds.), Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings 1st European Conference on Artificial Life, ISBN 9780262720199, pp. 142-152. Barbour, I. (1974). Myths, Models, and Paradigms, ISBN 9780060603885. Batterman, R. (2006). The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction, and Emergence, ISBN 9780195314885. Bedeau, M. (1997) “Weak emergence,” Philosophical Perspectives, ISSN 1520-8583, 11: 375399. Blitz, D. (1992). Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality, ISBN 9780792316589. Buchler, J. (1969). “On a strain of arbitrariness of Whitehead’s system,” Journal of Philosophy, ISSN 0022-362X, 66L: 589-601. Buchler, J. (1990). Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, ISBN 9780791401835. Bunge, M. (2011). Causality and Modern Science, ISBN 9780486237282. Corneanu, S. (2012). Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition, ISBN 9780226116396. Davidson, D. (1970-1980) “Mental events,” in D. Donaldson (ed.), Actions and Events, ISBN 9780199246274. Fontana, W. and Buss, L. (1996). “The Barrier of objects: From dynamical systems to bounded organizations,” in J. Casti and A. Karlqvist (eds.), Boundaries and Barriers: On the Limits to Scientific Knowledge, ISBN 9780201555707. Forman, R. (1990). The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, ISBN 9780195109764. Freeman, A. (2001). The Emergence of Consciousness, ISBN 9780907845188. Fromm, J. (1905). Types and Forms of Emergence, http://arxiv.org/ftp/nlin/ papers/0506/0506028.pdf. Giaquinto, M. (2011). Visual Thinking in Mathematics: An Epistemological Study, ISBN 9780199575534. Goldstein, J. (1999). “Emergence as a construct: History and issues,” Emergence, ISSN 15213250, 1(1): 49-62. Goldstein, J. (2002). “The singular nature of emergent levels: Suggestions for a theory of Emergence,” Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, ISSN 1090-0578, 6(4): 293-309.
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Goldstein, J. (2006). “Emergence, creative process, and self-transcending constructions,” in K.A. Richardson (ed.), Managing Organizational Complexity: Philosophy, Theory, and Application, ISBN 9781593113186, pp. 63-78. Goldstein, J. (2011). “Probing the nature of complex systems: Parameters, modeling, interventions-Part 1,” Emergence: Complexity & Organization, ISSN 1521-3250, 13(3): 94121. Goldstein, J. (2013). “’Themata’ of complex Systems,” in J. Goldstein, K.A. Richardson and P.M. Allen (eds.), Emergence: Complexity & Organization 2011 Annual, Volume 13, Litchfield Pk, AZ: Emergent Publications, due August, 2013. Grossholtz, E.R. (2007). Representation and Productive Ambiguity in Mathematics and the Sciences, ISBN 9780199299737. Hesse, M. (1966). Models and Analogies in Science, ISBN 9780268001827. Holt, J. (2013). Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, ISBN 9780871403599. Kim, J. (1997). “Supervenience, emergence, and realization in the philosophy of mind,” in M. Carrier and P. Machamer (eds.), Mindscapes: Philosophy, Science, and the Mind, ISBN 9780822939863. Kim, J. (2000). Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-body Problem and Mental Causation, ISBN 9780262611534. Klee, R. (1984). “Micro-determinism and concepts of emergence,” Philosophy of Science, ISSN 0031-8248, 51: 44-63. Knox, E. (2012), “Abstraction and its limits: Finding space for novel explanation,” Philosophy of Science Archives, University of Pittsburgh, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9355/. Ladyman, J. and Ross, D. (2009). Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, ISBN 9780199573097. Livingston, D.W. (1998). Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy, ISBN 9780226487175. Lowe, E.J. (1995). “There are no easy problems of consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, ISSN 1355-8250, 2(3): 266-271. Macdonald, C. and Macdonald, G. (2010). “Emergence and downward causation,” in C. Macdonald and G. Macdonald (eds.), Emergence in Mind, ISBN 9780199583621, pp. 139168. Mainwood, P. (2006). Is More Different? Emergent Properties in Physics, D.Phil. dissertation, Oxford University, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8339/. McMullin, E. (1984). “A case for scientific realism,” in J. Leplin (ed.), Scientific Realism, ISBN 9780520051553, pp. 8-40. Mermim, D. (2004). “Could Feynman have said this?” Physics Today, ISSN 0031-9228, 57(5): 10. Morgan, C.L. (1927). Emergent Evolution: The Gifford Lectures, ISBN 9780404604684.
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Morrison, M. (2011). “Why is more different? Emergence and effective field theories,” Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, http://pirsa.org/C11029/2. Newton Smith, W. (1993). “The beginning of time,” in R. Poidevin and M. Macbeath (eds.), The Philosophy of Time, ISBN 9780198239994, pp. 168-182. Penrose, R. (1989). “Tilings and quasicrystals: A non-local growth problem?” in M.V. Jarić (ed.), Introduction to the Mathematics of Quasicrystals: Aperiodicity and Order (Vol. 2), ISBN 9780120406029, pp. 53-80. Penrose, R. (1995). “Must mathematical physics be reductionist?” in J. Cornwell (ed.), Nature’s Imagination, ISBN 9780198517757, pp. 12-26. Ross, E.J. (2005). Non-local Growth of Penrose Tilings, http://www.math.yorku.ca/~ejross/ math/thesis.pdf. Ryan, A. (2006). “Emergence is coupled to scope, not level,” http://arxiv.org/abs/ nlin/0609011v1. Seager, W. (2012). Natural Fabrications: Science, Emergence, and Consciousness, ISBN 9783642295980. Silberstein, M. and McGeever, J. (1999). “The search for ontological emergence,” The Philosophical Quarterly, ISSN 0031-8094, 49: 182-200. Sperry, R.W. (1980). “Mind-brain Interaction: Mentalism, yes; Dualism, no,” Neuroscience, ISSN 0306-4522, l5: 195-206. Stephan, A. (1999). “Varieties of emergentism,” Evolution and Cognition, ISSN 0938-2623, 5: 49-59. Stephan, S. (2007). Emergenz. Von der Unvorhersagbarkeit zur Selbstorganisation, ISBN 9783897854390. Stover, D. (2000). Human Values in the Brain-Mind Science of Roger Sperry, ISBN 9780595160372. Strawson, G. (2006). Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? ISBN 9781845400590. Taliaferro, C. and Evans, J. (2010). The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination, ISBN 9781847064820. Van Gulick, R. (2001). “Reduction, emergence and other recent options on the mind/body problem: A philosophic overview,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, ISSN 1355-8250, 8 (9-10): 1-34. Whitehead, A.N. (1927-1979). Process and Reality: Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28, ISBN 9780029345702. Wittgenstein, L. (2005). Philosophical Investigations, ISBN 9780024288103. Yablo, S. (1993). “Is conceivability a guide to possibility?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, ISSN 0031-8205, 53(1): 1-42.
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Jeffrey A. Goldstein is Full Professor, Decision Sciences, Robert B. Willumstad School of Business, Adelphi University; Author/editor of numerous books including: Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership: Leveraging Nonlinear Science to Create Ecologies of Innovation; Complexity Science and Social Entrepreneurship: Adding Social Value through Systems Thinking; Complex Systems Leadership Theory; Classic Complexity; Annual Volumes of Emergence: Complexity and Organization; and The Unshackled Organization; Co-editor-in-chief of Emergence: Complexity and Organization (since 2004); Member of Board of Trustees of the journal Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and the Life Sciences; Author of hundreds of publications and presentations/papers; Lecturing at eminent universities throughout the world (most recently at Fundação Dom Cabral, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland); Consultant to many public and private organizations.
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