Emergence, Explanation and Complexity

Synthese, 2012

Philosophical accounts of emergence have been explicated in terms of logical relationships between statements (derivation) or static properties (function and realization). Jaegwon Kim is a modern proponent. A property is emergent if it is not explainable by (or reducible to) the properties of lower level components. This approach, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence that are widespread in scientific explanations of complex systems. The standard philosophical notion of emergence posits the wrong dichotomies, confuses compositional physicalism with explanatory physicalism, and is unable to represent the type of dynamic processes (self-organizing feedback) that both generate emergent properties and express downward causation. Keywords Emergence • Downward causation • Reduction • Self-organization • Chaos • Feedback 1 A better translation is "the whole is over and above its parts, and not just the sum of them all."

Neuraltherapeutic Medicine, 2026

The sciences of complexity, also known generally as complexity theory, are a wide set of sciences, disciplines, methods and methodologies, approaches, semantics, and logics aimed at studying increasingly complex systems. These are, we would like to highlight, systems phenomena and behaviors that have and gained degrees of freedom. A nonlinear system is one that gains degrees of freedom, although it does not necessarily gain memory. Basically, complexity theory is made up of a twofold dimension; on the one hand a very robust epistemological apparatus that continues to be enlarged and enriched as science and research advance. On the other hand, at the same time, it is also compounded by very sophisticated techniques and rods. According to one of us [1], the sciences of complexity can be safely said to be sciences of life, since by and large the most complex systems ever-whether intuitively or categorically, for instance, are the living beings. Nonetheless, the inverse cannot necessarily be assessed, namely that the sciences of life are sciences of complexity. The focus of this book is hence after life-and the interplay, so to speak, between health and disease; two sides of one and the same token. Distinctively, the study of life, thanks to complexity theory, entails a twofold dimension; thus, life as-we-know-it, as well as life-as-it-could-be-possible.

2011

This position paper has three parts. In the first part, a brief historical background and various modern formulations of the concept of emergence are presented. A number of problems associated with the concept are identified. One outstanding problem involves the incommensurability of secondary qualities (or phenomenal qualia) with materialist (externalist) ontologies. The intractability of this problem with respect to existing scientific approaches is an indicator of ontological category error, in this case, an attempt to subsume subjectivity into objectivity. In the second part, various attempts at solving the mind-body problem (of which the subjectivity-objectivity issue is a modern incarnation) are investigated and shown to be problematic. It is argued that these problems necessitate reconsidering the metaphysical foundations upon which the concept of emergence is grounded. In the third part, the notion of emergence is reconsidered and a new theory grounded in a synthesis of Heideggerian and Whiteheadian metaphysics is outlined. Finally, the implications of this synthesis for artificing (technology) are briefly considered. It is maintained that "strong" artificiality, the artifactual realization of natural phenomena such as life and mind, is impossible and that this result follows from the essence of artificing. Thus, ontology does not entail technology. The earliest articulation of the essence of emergence may well be the ancient Greek maxim 'the whole is more than the sum of the parts' and historical links to the notion of self-organization are traceable to the writings of the pre-Socratics Thales and Anaximander. The first serious attempt at investigating the concept of emergence was not made until the middle of the nineteenth century when G.H.Lewes distinguished between resultants and emergents: in the former, the sequence of steps which produce a phenomenon are traceable while in the latter they are not. Lewes could be interpreted as identifying emergence with the epistemological limitations of an observer. In C.L.Morgan's Emergent Evolution (1923), emergence was identified with novelty while J.C.Smuts', writing in Holism and Evolution (1926) identified it with the generation of stable wholes. Samuel Alexander's Space, Time and Deity (1920), in which emergence is identified with the tendency for things to arrange themselves into new patterns which as organized wholes possess new types of structure and properties, provides the basis for information-theoretic and computationalist interpretations of the concept (Baas,93) (Darley,94). Nagel (1961), following Lewes, defines emergence in epistemological terms. This position is consistent with the adoption of a scientific (materialist) metaphysics and reflected in a commitment to ontological reductionism, the view that emergent phenomena do not contradict physical laws and, moreover, are causally determined by such laws. Non-materialistic theories of emergence are rejected a priori on the grounds that "emergents are regarded as spiritual creations emanating from an unknown shadowy world." (Kenyon,41) However, ontological reductionism does not entail epistemological reductionism: for example, Mayr (1982) defines emergence as the appearance of new characteristics in wholes that cannot be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the parts, taken separately or in other partial combinations.

2022

This summary of the original paradigm of the universal science of complexity starts with the discovered exact origin of the stagnating "end" of conventional, unitary science paradigm and development traditionally presented by its own estimates as the only and the best possible kind of scientific knowledge. Using a transparent generalisation of the exact mathematical formalism of arbitrary interaction process, we show that unitary science approach and description, including its imitations of complexity and chaoticity, correspond to artificial and ultimately strong reduction of the natural plurality of unreduced interaction results called realisations to a single, "average" or "exact", realisation. This severe reduction of the natural world dynamics in unitary science underlies all its unsolvable "mysteries" and "paradoxes", persisting "difficult problems", and finally the modern "end" of the progress of just that, actually very special kind of knowledge, whose irreducible limits lead to the modern deep crisis of the global civilisation development. We show then how the rigorously substantiated restoration of the full richness of real-world dynamics within the intrinsically unified knowledge of the universal science of complexity provides not only the causally complete solution to the old and new problems of unitary science but opens practically unlimited possibilities for the new progress of science and civilisation as a result of this crucial extension, which we call complexity revolution. The unreduced analysis of the universal complexity science shows that at the current critical bifurcation point of development, we have only two incompatible possibilities and emerging tendencies, either the dangerously growing degradation within the dominating unitary science and thinking limits (irrespective of purely empirical technology power becoming even dangerous here) or the new golden age of scientific discoveries and civilisation progress with the qualitatively extended approach and results of unreduced complexity science and the new thinking it implies.