Emergence in Science and Philosophy Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1. Evolution, Rationality and Cognition A Cognitive Science for the Twenty-First Century Edited by António Zilhão 2. Conceptual Systems Harold I. Brown 3. Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science Edited by Stephan Hartmann, Carl Hoefer, and Luc Bovens 4. Fictions in Science Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization Edited by Mauricio Suárez 5. Karl Popper’s Philosophy of Science Rationality without Foundations Stefano Gattei 6. Emergence in Science and Philosophy Edited by Antonella Corradini and Timothy O’Connor Emergence in Science and Philosophy Edited by Antonella Corradini and Timothy O’Connor New York London First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf- ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade- marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emergence in science and philosophy / edited by Antonella Corradini and Timothy O’Connor. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in the philosophy of science ; v. 6) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Emergence (Philosophy) 2. Science—Philosophy. I. Corradini, Antonella. II. O’Connor, Timothy, 1965– Q175.32.E44E445 2010 116—dc22 2009051120 ISBN 0-203-84940-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN13: 978-0-415-80216-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-84940-8 (ebk) Contents List of Figures ix Introduction xi ANTONELLA CORRADINI AND TIMOTHY O’CONNOR PART I Emergence: General Perspectives Part I Introduction 3 ANTONELLA CORRADINI AND TIMOTHY O’CONNOR 1 The Secret Lives of Emergents 7 HONG YU WONG 2 On the Implications of Scientifi c Composition and Completeness: Or, The Troubles, and Troubles, of Non- Reductive Physicalism 25 CARL GILLETT 3 Weak Emergence and Context-Sensitive Reduction 46 MARK A. BEDAU 4 Two Varieties of Causal Emergentism 64 MICHELE DI FRANCESCO 5 The Emergence of Group Cognition 78 GEORG THEINER AND TIMOTHY O’CONNOR vi Contents PART II Self, Agency, and Free Will Part II Introduction 121 ANTONELLA CORRADINI AND TIMOTHY O’CONNOR 6 Why My Body is Not Me: The Unity Argument for Emergentist Self-Body Dualism 127 E. JONATHAN LOWE 7 What About the Emergence of Consciousness Deserves Puzzlement? 149 MARTINE NIDA-RÜMELIN 8 The Emergence of Rational Souls 163 UWE MEIXNER 9 Are Deliberations and Decisions Emergent, if Free? 180 ACHIM STEPHAN 10 Is Emergentism Refuted by the Neurosciences? The Case of Free Will 190 MARIO DE CARO PART III Physics, Mathematics, and the Special Sciences Part III Introduction 207 ANTONELLA CORRADINI AND TIMOTHY O’CONNOR 11 Emergence in Physics 213 PATRICK MCGIVERN AND ALEXANDER RUEGER 12 The Emergence of the Intuition of Truth in Mathematical Thought 233 SERGIO GALVAN Contents vii 13 The Emergence of Mind at the Co-Evolutive Level 251 ARTURO CARSETTI 14 Emerging Mental Phenomena: Implications for Psychological Explanation 266 ALESSANDRO ANTONIETTI 15 How Special Are Special Sciences? 289 ANTONELLA CORRADINI Contributors 305 Index 309 Figures 2.1 An ion channel and its protein sub-units. 28 2.2 Blobs and globules in simple aggregations. 34 2.3 Blobs and globules in complex aggregations. 35 2.4 Diagram of the options as understood by the philosophical critics and illustrating the perceived implications of the Argument from Composition. 41 2.5 Diagram of the main options illuminated by appreciating the implications of the Conditioned view of aggregation and the possibility of Strong emergence. 42 5.1 Opening the “black box” of group cognition. 94 5.2 Phases of the choreographic development of dance material for Red Rain. 99 9.1 Keil’s libertarianism. 184 11.1 Representative phase space trajectories for damped oscillator and undamped oscillator. 217 11.2 Diagram 1. 219 11.3 Diagram 2. 219 11.4 Diagram 3. 227 14.1 A non-emergent phenomenon: Take three separate angles. 271 14.2 A non-emergent phenomenon: Combine three angles. 271 14.3 A non-emergent phenomenon: Obtain a triangle. 271 x Figures 14.4 Another non-emergent phenomenon: Take three round shapes. 271 14.5 Another non-\emergent phenomenon: Obtain a triangle. 272 14.6 An emergent phenomenon: Obtain Kanizsa’s triangle. 272 14.7 Target-source similarity under the conditions of the fi rst experiment concerning on-line rating. 279 14.8 Source-target similarity under the conditions of the third experiment concerning on-line rating. 279 14.9 Percentages of analogical solutions under different conditions in the series of experiments concerning the awareness of source-target correspondence. 280 Introduction Antonella Corradini and Timothy O’Connor The concept of emergence has seen a signifi cant resurgence in philosophy and a number of sciences in the past couple decades. Yet debates between emergentist and reductionist accounts of specifi c phenomena, and of visions of the natural world generally, continue to be hampered by imprecision or outright ambiguity in the use of terms. The term ‘emergence’ is clearly evocative for thinkers across the spectrum of those who theorize about the relationship between ‘high-level’ theories, and the real-world proper- ties and dynamics they seek to describe, and theories and phenomena that pertain to more basic physical systems. Evocative, but extremely vague. Emergent phenomena are said to arise out of and be sustained by more basic phenomena, while at the same time exerting a ‘top-down’ control, constraint or some other sort of infl uence upon those very sustaining processes. To some critics, this has the air of magic, as it seems to suggest a kind of circular causality. (See Kim, 1999, for an argument to this conclusion.) Other critics deem the concept of emer- gence to be objectionably anti-naturalistic, requiring the onset at particular historical junctures of novel properties and behavior that are discontinuous with the world’s fundamental dynamics. Objections such as these have led many thinkers to construe emergent phenomena as complementary to yet harmonious with the behavior of fundamental physical entities supposed to be uniform in every context, including those involving emergent phenomena. On this view, emergent properties and the patterns to which they give rise are explanatorily self- contained. They are embedded in nature at a relatively coarse-grained level of structure while not ‘disrupting’ or ‘violating’ the ordinary dynamics of the fi ner-grained (more fundamental) levels. Nature, on this understanding, has a hierarchical structure, with each level of the hierarchy (corresponding to basic physics, chemistry, various levels of biology, and psychology and other information-based sciences) requiring its own concepts and laws to capture the distinctive behavior it exhibits. However, the preceding attempt at reconciling emergence with a (pre- sumed) pervasive causal continuity at the fundamental level can seem to defl ate emergence of its initially profound signifi cance. It locates the xii Introduction ‘autonomy’ of higher-level sciences in their capacity to describe coarse- grained patterns in the world’s mosaic that, however interesting and useful, do not contribute to driving the world’s evolution. The true causal work, on this objection, is all done at the level of basic physics. On refl ection, higher-level sciences appear as mere shorthand in the business of describing the world’s behavior. As it is often put, such an outlook threatens to turn emergence into an epistemological, rather than metaphysical, concept. (See O’Connor & Wong, 2006.) Proposals and criticisms such as those just gestured at constitute, in skel- etal form, the basic problematic informing modern discussion of the con- cept of emergence. It is mirrored by similar controversy over how best to characterize the opposite systematizing impulse, usually given the equally evocative but vague term, “reductionism.” We have collected the chapters in this volume in the belief that much progress has been made in recent years in clarifying the alternatives and the proper terms in which compet- ing claims of evidential support should be advanced. While it is scarcely credible for a partisan to claim that his or her favored view has been more or less established, inadequacies in some older formulations and arguments have been exposed, narrowing the fi eld a bit. The new essays collected here refl ect that improved perspective and attempt to advance the debate along one or another front. The volume has three parts. We provide a detailed introduction to each part immediately prior to the chapters in that part. Here, we make but short and general remarks. Part I lays a general ontological foundation. In it, six authors consider different accounts of how we might develop an emergentist picture of nature. Most target avowedly metaphysical (and not merely epistemologi- cal) construals of emergence. Collectively, they advance a number of fresh proposals, while being informed by philosophical and scientifi c discus- sion to date. Through these chapters, the reader will get a pretty thorough understanding of the range of highly general alternatives that have been fl oated in recent discussion. In Part II, the authors focus specifi cally on views concerning the status of mind in the physical world.