The Search for Ontological Emergence

Silberstein, Michael; McGeever, John

doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00136

Cited by 224 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Silberstein and McGeever (1999) argue that the maximally entangled state of two spatially separated EPR correlated particles is a paradigm case of strong emergence. Silberstein andMcGreever follow Humpreys (1997), Healy (1994), and Teller (1986) in suggesting that the appropriate ontology of entangled states is to regard the particle pairs as forming a spatially extended whole. It is then not so much that one particle influences the other, rather that with respect to certain properties there are no separate particles at all.…”

Section: The Fqhe and E3: Failure Of Mereological Superveniencementioning

confidence: 99%

Reduction and emergence in the fractional quantum Hall state

Lancaster

Pexton

2015

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in

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Section: The Fqhe and E3: Failure Of Mereological Superveniencementioning

confidence: 99%

Reduction and emergence in the fractional quantum Hall state

Lancaster

Pexton

2015

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in

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“…Yet, while arguments of 'inaccessibility' have already been formulated in physics (Silberstein & McGeever, 1999), this is not the case in biology 26 The third strategy is heuristic. There are in fact many cases, especially in complex systems, in which the available description of the configurational properties is insufficient to adequately determine the behaviour of the whole system.…”

Section: Why We Might Need After All Nested Causation In Biologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergence, Closure and Inter-level Causation in Biological Systems

Mossio

Bich

Moreno

2013

Erkenn

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In this paper, we advocate the idea that an adequate explanation of biological systems requires appealing to organisational closure as an emergent causal regime. We first develop a theoretical justification of emergence in terms of relatedness, by arguing that configurations, because of the relatedness among their constituents, possess ontologically irreducible properties, providing them with distinctive causal powers. We then focus on those emergent causal powers exerted as constraints, and we claim that biological systems crucially differ from other natural systems in that they realise a closure of constraints, i.e. a higher-level emergent regime of causation such that the constituents, each of them acting as a constraint, realise a mutual dependence among them, and are collectively able to self-maintain. Lastly, we claim that closure can be justifiably taken as an emergent regime of causation, without admitting that it inherently involves whole-parts causation, which would require committing to stronger ontological and epistemological assumptions.

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“…The different levels, in fact, are not built on one another, but rather all of them depend primarily on the observer's operations. Secondly, the classical distinction between an ontological kind of emergence, which relies on the properties of an objective reality, and an epistemological one, which depends on the limits of the observer (Silberstein and McGeever 1999), loses its meaning inside this framework. In fact we are dealing here with relations between descriptions.…”

Section: Relatednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complex emergence and the living organization: an epistemological framework for biology

Bich

2010

Synthese

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In this article an epistemological framework is proposed in order to integrate the emergentist thought with systemic studies on biological autonomy, which are focused on the role of organization. Particular attention will be paid to the role of the observer's activity, especially: (a) the different operations he performs in order to identify the pertinent elements at each descriptive level, and (b) the relationships between the different models he builds from them. According to the approach sustained here, organization will be considered as the result of a specific operation of identification of the relational properties of the functional components of a system, which do not necessarily coincide with the intrinsic properties of its structural constituents. Also, an epistemological notion of emergence-that of "complex emergence"-will be introduced, which can be defined as the insufficiency, even in principle, of a single descriptive modality to provide a complete description of certain classes of systems.This integrative framework will allow us to deal with two issues in biological and emergentist studies: (1) distinguishing the autonomy proper of living systems from some physical processes like those of structural stability and pattern generation, and (2) 2 reconsidering the notion of downward causation not as a direct or indirect influence of the whole on its parts, but instead as an epistemological problem of interaction between descriptive domains in which the concept of organization proposed and the observational operations related to it play a crucial role.Keywords: autopoiesis; biological autonomy; complex emergence; downward causation; organization; pattern generation. "We are inheritors of categorized knowledge; therefore we inherit a world view that consists of parts strung together, rather than of wholes regarded through different sets of filters" (S. Beer, 1980) IntroductionThe biological processes of realization of a living unity that exhibits a certain degree of autonomy with respect to its environment are characterized by the production of a stableshape. An operation of self-distinction from the medium due to the generation of a physical boundary (Varela et al. 1974;Maturana and Varela, 1980) gives rise to a separation between the internal and the external environment of the organism.These, however, do not constitute the only phenomena of production of higher-level patterns-stable in time and with respect to external perturbations-that we can identify in the natural world. Similar properties are also exhibited by some physico-chemical systems like the processes of molecular self-assembly, Benard's cells and chemical clocks, explained by the thermodynamics of dissipative structures (Nicolis and Prigogine 1977;Prigogine and Stengers 1979). Similar results can be obtained also in the computational domain through appropriate simulations. For this reason, the very notions of pattern and of structural stability, although they constitute a relevant aspect 3 of the biological phenomenology, cannot ...

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The Search for Ontological Emergence

Cited by 224 publications

References 17 publications

Reduction and emergence in the fractional quantum Hall state

Reduction and emergence in the fractional quantum Hall state

Emergence, Closure and Inter-level Causation in Biological Systems

Complex emergence and the living organization: an epistemological framework for biology

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