Emergence and Supervenience

Abstract

Weak emergence has been offered as an explicatzon of the ubiquztous notum of emergence used m complexity science After outinung the problem of emergence and comparmg weak emergence with the two other nuun objecuvist approaches to emergence, the paper explams a vetsion of weak emergence and illustrcues at with cellular automata Then it explcans the sart of downward causattan and explanatory auumomy mvolved m weak ernergence The problem of emergenceEmergence is a perenmal plulosophical problem Apparent emergent phenomena are quite common, especially m the subjects treated by biology and psychology, but emergent phenomena also seem metaphysically objectionable Some of these objections can be traced to the autonomy and downward causation that are distinctive of emergent phenomena Emergence is receivmg renewed attennon today, In part because the notion repeatedly anses In certam contemporary approaches to understandmg complex biological and psychological systems, I have m mmd such approaches as neural networks, dynamical systems theory, and agent-based models-what for simphcity I'll call complexity science For anyone mterested m understanding emergence, two tiungs about complexity science are striking First, it auns to expiam exactly those natural phenomena that seem to mvolve emergence, the range of phenomena covered by complexity science are about as broad as the examples of apparent emergence in nature C) Principia, 6(1) (2002), pp 5-50 Published by NEL

It Is Not Possible to Reduce Biological Explanations to Explanations in Chemistry and/or Physics

“…One conception of emergence, championed recently by Mark Bedau (2003), proposes the obstacle to explanation as the lack of a general principle connecting features of 34…”

Downward causation without foundations

“…This may occur whenever the practical limitation in our aptitude to explain macro-behavior is so challenging as to acquire a sort of "in principle" status (Bedau 2008b). This may also occur if many details of the micro-explanations are irrelevant for accounting for the macro-behavior, and if, accordingly, a given macro-explanation can be underpinned by several different microstories (Bedau 20023).…”

“…The initial motivation of the conception of weak emergence was to indicate a middle way between strong emergence with its dualist flavor, and purely nominal emergence in which the higher level is nothing more than an artifact of language. But at the end of the day, according to its best supporter, it appears that "weak emergence is (nothing but) a proper subset of nominal emergence" (Bedau 20023, X11;X ; see Bedau 2008a for a qualification). Weak emergence is the special subset of nominal emergence that corresponds to the case where excessive complexity in practice prevents any detailed micro-explanation of macro-behavior.…”

Causation at different levels: tracking the commitments of mechanistic explanations

“…However, there is a certain sense of mysteriousness associated to the term. Even the question if downward causation is a coherent notion is hotly debated (Bedau 2002;Kim 1999Kim , 2000Stephan 2002;Yates 2009). 3 From our present perspective the problem of downward causation is interesting because if entities at higher levels could exert causal influence on entities at lower levels then that would credit autonomy-in a quite strong sense-to higher levels.…”