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In Search of Ontological Emergence: Diachronic, But Non-supervenient

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Abstract

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are based on supervenience, with supervenience being an ontologically synchronic relation of determination. This conception of emergence as a relation of supervenience, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence that are widespread in self-organizing and nonlinear dynamical systems, including distributed cognitive systems. In these dynamical systems, an emergent property is ontological (i.e., the causal capacities of P, where P is an emergent feature, are not reducible to causal capacities of the parts, and may exert a top-down causal influence on the parts of the system) and diachronic (i.e., the relata of emergence are temporally extended, and P emerges as a result of some dynamical lower-level processes that unfold in real time).

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Notes

  1. Note that when I use the term “cause” in this paper I use it in the sense of Aristotle’s efficient cause by which Aristotle refers to the entities (broadly construed) responsible (non-intentionally construed) for a quantity of matter coming to be formed, viz., the entities which jointly interact give rise to something else. Unlike Aristotle’s other three notions of ‘cause’—that is, the material cause, the formal cause, and the final cause—all of which are synchronic, the efficient cause is diachronic (thanks to one of the reviewers for suggesting the usefulness of Aristotle in this context (for an overview on the Aristotelian causal categories, see Shields (2008)).

  2. Note that “levels” implies “hierarchies”. In a recent paper, Salthe (2012) distinguishes between two different logical forms of hierarchy. The first he calls for the compositional hierarchy. The second he calls the subsumption hierarchy. In my account of ontological and diachronic emergence, the relation between levels is an example of what Salthe calls the subsumption hierarchy, in the sense that (and in contrast to the compositional hierarchy), this species of hierarchical organization between levels allows for new levels to emerge through diachronic processes (cf. Salthe 2012, p. 359) Indeed, in compositional hierarchies, the levels are dynamically separate due to the fact that their dynamics occur at rates that do not directly interacts. But, in the examples I will consider, there is mutual interactions between levels. As Salthe mentions, the “levels in a subsumption hierarchy have been referred to as ‘integrative levels’ inasmuch as the higher levels […] integrate the lower levels’ properties and dynamics under their own rules” (2012, p. 361).

  3. This would be an example of a compositional hierarchy in the terminology developed by Salthe (2012).

  4. Note that there are individual and global versions of supervenience, and that these can be decomposed further into stronger and weaker varieties. I mention these varieties here for the sake of completeness, nothing else. For instance, Kim (1984, 1987) defines weak and strong individual supervenience as follows:

    “A-properties weakly supervene on B-properties if and only if for any possible world w and any individuals x and y in w, if x and y are B-indiscernible in w, then they are A-indiscernible in w.”

    “A-properties strongly supervene on B-properties if and only if for any possible worlds w 1 and w 2 and any individuals x in w 1 and y in w 2 , if x in w 1 is B-indiscernible from y in w 2 , then x in w 1 is A-indiscernible from -indiscernible from y in w 2 .”

    The difference between these two is that strong supervenience is quantified over possible worlds. The weak version says that if individuals are B-indiscernible, there can be no possible world in which these are A-discernible. The strong formulation stipulates that if B-indiscernible, then it is not possible for two individuals to be A-discernible, whether in the same or different worlds. The basic idea of “global supervenience” is simply to apply the “indiscernibility considerations” globally to “worlds,” rather than to “individuals”. Kim (1987) defines the idea of global supervenience accordingly: “Worlds that are indiscernible in respect to subvenient properties are indiscernible in respect to supervenient properties.” For weak and strong versions of global supervenience, see Bennett (2004), McLaughlin (1997), Sider (1999), and Stalnaker (1996). Note that in the next section I present an argument developed by O’Connor (2000) that rejects both strong and weak formulation of both individual and global supervenience.

  5. See Humphreys’ (1997) “fusion” account of emergence for a different kind of critique of the standard account of emergence, although one the equally builds on the idea that emergence is diachronic and dynamic.

  6. Here it is important to distinguish between two kinds of entropy, that is, we must separate configurational (i.e., informational) entropy from physical entropy production, and vice versa. Generally speaking, information entropy is, as Friston specifies, “the average surprise of outcomes sampled from a probability distributed or density. A density with low entropy means, on average, the outcome is relatively predictable” (2009, p. 293). In terms of predictability (or uncertainty), the informational entropy in the example of convection rolls is low. Physical entropy, by contrast, refers to the number of degrees of freedom in a physical system, that is, it refers to the total number of states a given system can be in.

  7. Microscopically, no two examples will be exactly alike. It is the “motion” in this example that reflects the physical entropy production (thanks to one of the reviewers for making this clear).

  8. A hexamers is consider to be the smallest drop of water, because it is the smallest cluster of water that is three-dimensional.

  9. “Schewe et al. (2003): A water molecule’s chemical formula is really not H2O, at least not from the perspective of neutrons and electrons interacting with the molecule for only attoseconds (less than 10−15 s).” (Cited in Van Brakel 2010, p. 132; footnote 42).

  10. Note that thus far my discussion of supervenience has taken the relation between A-features and B-features to be one of indiscernibility such that “x and y are A-indiscernible if and only of they are exactly alike with respect to A-properties; similarly for B-indiscernibility.” (McLaughlin and Bennett 2011, p. 14) However, in addition to varieties of individual and global indiscernibility-based supervenience, there are also versions of similarity-based accounts of supervenience, where things “that are very much alike in B-respects must also be very much alike in A-respects. As with indiscernibility-based supervenience, similarity-based supervenience comes in both weak and strong versions:

    “A strongly supervenes sim on B if and only if for any worlds w 1 and w 2, and for any x in w 1 and y in w 2, if x in w 1 is not largely different from y in w 2 with respect to B-properties, then x in w 1 is not largely different from y in w 2 with respect to A-properties” (McLaughlin and Bennett 2011, p. 27; italics in original).

    “A weakly supervenes sim on B if and only if for any world w, and for any x and y in w, if x and y are not largely different with respect to B-properties, then they are not largely different with respect to A-properties.” (McLaughlin and Bennett 2011, p. 27; italics in original)

    I mention this issue here so as not to beg the question against similarity-based supervenience. Nevertheless, the point to note is that it remains an open question whether there are (or has been) any interesting philosophical uses of the idea of similarity-based supervenience (cf. McLaughlin and Bennett 2011, p. 27). Hence, as such it poses no immediate threat to my argument for ontological emergence that is diachronic/dynamic but non-supervenient.

  11. Wilson’s (1994, 2004) account of wide computationalism advances similar claims.

  12. Mereology refers to compositional hierarchies (cf. Salthe 2012).

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    Michael Kirchhoff

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Kirchhoff, M. In Search of Ontological Emergence: Diachronic, But Non-supervenient. Axiomathes 24, 89–116 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-013-9214-7

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