Less of source recommendations and more of thoughts on the subject:
I think emergence is an interesting concept, but it seems to me that it does emerge (h’yuck-yuck) from our typical ways of ordering spatial, but more importantly, temporal phenomena. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy identifies two types of emergence:
1) explanatory emergence: the laws of more complex situations of a system are not deducible by way of any composition laws or laws of coexistence from the laws of the simpler or simplest situation(s).
2) descriptive emergence: the thesis that there are properties of “wholes” (or more complex situations) that cannot be defined through the properties of the parts (or simpler situations).
I myself an more interested in the second type of emergence than the first. It seems that we could have the first type of emergence without the second, but not vice-versa. Now to get back to what I was initially saying: with regard to the second type of emergence, the idea is totally dependent upon a foundation of linear time. For example, at t0 we have some system containing some number of atomic bits. As time progresses the relationships amongst those bits give rise to the occurrence of new properties that were not present at t0, but only emerged from the interactions of the atomics over time. Thus, at some future time, we recognize new properties beyond those that were initially present in the atomics. However, if we annul time and examine the system as a four-dimensional structure (where we are taking the fourth dimension to be the system’s extension in time—its “word line”), then there is no emergence whatsoever, but only the entirety of the properties of the system as they are present over the whole of the system’s existence. Put differently, the system becomes the atomic.
I think that emergence is a topic in metaphysical philosophies that are framed within the context of atomics as dispositions. New properties can emerge from the composition of existing dispositions such that none of the dispositions possessed the property previous to their partnering. The emergent property was in no way predictable or recognizable from what was present in the initial dispositions, but it is through their partnering (composition) that the property comes into being. Again, there is something to this, but only as it is tracked over time in a linear fashion. Taken as a singular structure, any complex dispositional system will necessarily have the properties it does and the phenomena of emergence vanishes without reference to dispositional interactions over time.
Can I ask what it is that you are thinking about, Nick? What’s your modus operandi here? |
