Abstract
The development of a defensible and fecund notion of emergence has been dogged by a number of threshold issues neatly highlighted in a recent paper by Jaegwon Kim. We argue that physicalist assumptions confuse and vitiate the whole project. In particular, his contention that emergence entails supervenience is contradicted by his own argument that the ‘microstructure’ of an object belongs to the whole object, not to its constituents. And his argument against the possibility of downward causation is question-begging and makes false assumptions about causal sufficiency. We argue, on the contrary, for a rejection of the deeply entrenched assumption, shared by physicalists and Cartesians alike, that what basically exists are things (entities, substances). Our best physics tells us that there are no basic particulars, only fields in process. We need an ontology which gives priority to organization, which is inherently relational. Reflection upon the fact that all biological creatures are far-from-equilibrium systems, whose very persistence depend upon their interactions with their environment, reveals incoherence in the notion of an ‘emergence base’.
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Notes
Note that here Kim has avoided his own earlier “causal regularities” argument (Kim 1991) only by ad hoc stipulation in his definition that relations, configurations, are not included in the base.
The caveat about ‘intended interpretations’ is because, given its vagueness, it might be possible to develop a non-intended interpretation of Kim’s first supervenience proposition which could avoid these problems.
Note the essential role in this reasoning of the assumption that the supervenience base does not include the configurational relations among the constituents.
This may be because he is so focused on British emergentism as the only non-physicalist alternative to dualism. That is, the three options he recognizes are either dualism, or British emergentism, or mereological physicalism. But an ontology constituted by levels of organization is different again.
Note how Kim’s use of the letters “M” (for “Mental”) and “P” (for “Physical”), which we have followed here for ease of exposition, illustrates how these debates still proceed within a Cartesian dichotomy.
Note once again the absence of relations.
The term “downward causation” comes from the American psychologist D.T. Campbell (1974).
D. McClelland (1987, pp. 366–368). His research found that the salivary immunoglobulin A levels of subjects were significantly increased when they viewed a film of Mother Teresa designed to arouse affiliative motives.
Systems that are necessarily in open interaction with their environments—that are (e.g., a candle flame) constituted in such interactive flows—pose even deeper problems for supervenience. We will consider these later.
It might be objected to this argument that Newtonian mechanics was not incoherent. But that would be to overlook the fact that Newtonian mechanics is not a purely particle ontology; it admitted forces in addition to the particles, e.g., gravity. With the restriction to a finite speed (the speed of light) and conservation of energy, those forces have to be fields. Take away the forces (forget fields for the moment), it would be logically/mathematically consistent, but nothing would ever happen because points never hit each other. Whether or not a Newtonian system would support the kind of anti-emergence arguments that a pure particle ontology requires would depend on how the metaphysics of those forces is understood. Significantly, it was various non-linear resultants of force relations that generated the first notions of emergence.
That explains why characterizations of physicalism typically omit relations from the physical base.
Except to dualists or British emergentists.
Strictly, quantum field interactions are quantized and usually localized, and those two properties are all that remains of particles.
A more sophisticated and informed version of this claim would acknowledge the forces within the molecule, but give them a particle interpretation. Thus, the proper parts of a molecule of water would be two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, plus the elementary particles whose exchanging holds the molecules together.
For a more detailed elaboration of this model, see Campbell (2009).
Of course, combinations of far-from-equilibrium systems can also manifest aggregative properties, e.g., mass, but they are not what is remarkable about such systems.
Consider a proton at one location and an electron a light year away. The mereological sum of these does not constitute a hydrogen atom.
The example comes from Paul Teller (1992).
The definitive discussion of ‘aggregative properties’ is in William C. Wimsatt (1986) He proposes that different kinds of emergent properties correspond to the failure of different kinds of aggregativity. The only extra feature which a whole could have, over and above those which could result from an aggregation of its parts, is how the parts are organized. So in 1997 he turned this point into a positive definition of the concept of emergence: an emergent property is—roughly—a system property which is dependent upon the mode of organization of the system’s parts.
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Campbell, R.J., Bickhard, M.H. Physicalism, Emergence and Downward Causation. Axiomathes 21, 33–56 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-010-9128-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-010-9128-6