Minds and Machines

, Volume 18, Issue 4, pp 431–442 | Cite as

Synchronic and Diachronic Emergence

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Abstract

I discuss here a number of different kinds of diachronic emergence, noting that they differ in important ways from synchronic conceptions. I argue that Bedau’s weak emergence has an essentially historical aspect, in that there can be two indistinguishable states, one of which is weakly emergent, the other of which is not. As a consequence, weak emergence is about tokens, not types, of states. I conclude by examining the question of whether the concept of weak emergence is too weak and note that there is at present no unifying account of diachronic and synchronic concepts of emergence.

Keywords

Weak emergence Supervenience Pattern emergence Cellular automaton Randomness 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Anouk Barberousse, Mark Bedau, Jean-Paul Delahaye, Jacques Dubucs, Serge Galam, Philippe Huneman, Cyrille Imbert, and Sara Franceschelli for helpful discussions on this topic. Thanks also to audiences at the June 2004 IHPST conference on the dynamics of emergence, Yale University, the April 2005 Rutgers philosophy of physics conference, and the 2005 APA Central Division meetings for pushing me to present some of the points more clearly.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of PhilosophyUniversity of VirginiaCharlottesvilleUSA

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