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The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion
This volume introduces readers to emergence theory, outlines the major arguments in its defence, and summarizes the most powerful objections against it. It provides the clearest explication yet of this exciting new theory of science, which challenges the reductionist approach by proposing the continuous emergence of novel phenomena.
- GenresPhilosophySciencePhysics
344 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
8 people are currently reading
121 people want to read
About the author
Philip Clayton
58 books30 followersPhilip Clayton is the Dean of Claremont School of Theology and Provost of Claremont Lincoln University.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 15, 2011
The Re-Emergence of Emergence is a collection of thoughtful essays on emergence. I read this initially last year (?) but keep coming back to my favorite essay of the book by Terrence Deacon, Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub. Deacon's thesis is: "emergent phenomena grow out of an amplification dynamic that can spontaneously develop in very large ensembles of interacting elements by virtue of the continuing circulation of interaction constraints and biases, which become expressed as system-wide characteristics. In other words, these emergent forms of causality are to a curious type of circular connectivity of causal dynamics, not a special form or causality." Deacon goes on to make a pretty compelling case.
As one other reviewer noted, there are parts of this books which are pretty technical (for the Deacon essay mentioned above, I liberally used the dictionary and a couple of science reference books in my library)---that said, this volume is worth the price.
Highly recommended.
As one other reviewer noted, there are parts of this books which are pretty technical (for the Deacon essay mentioned above, I liberally used the dictionary and a couple of science reference books in my library)---that said, this volume is worth the price.
Highly recommended.
December 31, 2015
So much writing on emergence is desperately muddled, and a few essays in this volume are true to that form. But there are also clear, strong essays that illuminate interesting problems in the nature of consciousness. Deacon lays out his three levels of emergence more straightforwardly here than in his overly long Incomplete Nature, Peacocke has a fun essay thinking about God by analogy to the emergent human mind (the idea of God as the "mind" of the cosmos gets recharged on this account). Whatever else it does, careful and honest thinking about the nature of emergence makes clear that strict physicalism is as much a declaration of temperament and conviction as it is a rigorous account of the world. There's still a lot of good work to do and a lot of charlatanism enwrapped in scientific terminology (on both sides), but this collected volume houses some important contributions. PS, it's not for the casual reader: the essays are almost uniformly academic/technical.
November 16, 2017
"If the questions raised by the essay sin this volume are not an invitation to philosophy, I don't know what is" (p. 317). Four stars!
"To conclude, then, there are two challenges for the friends of emergence. The first is to show that emergent properties do not succumb to the threat of epiphenomenalism, and that emergent phenomena can have causal powers vis-a-vis physical phenomena" (p. 201). This, like artificial intelligence - once you get it, it is just a program - see the "Chinese Room Experiment" - seems like a chimera.
"This book should therefore be read not as a systematic apologetic for a single theory of emergence, but rather as a source book" it contains the data and theoretical resources necessary for evaluating whether a unified theory of emergence is possible, without actually proving such a theory" (p. 307). Indeed!
An interesting claim appears in Essay 12. As discussed below (p. 265, 271 and 274) this book, published in 2006, has had this most interesting claim vitiated by advances in neurological research. Much of this book has not, in general, stood the test of time: that is, perhaps, the nature of the "long debate."
Essay 13 does much to make this book worth reading.
Preface
"Today we may regard the early speculations of Leucippus and Democritus as the beginning of a two-and-a-half millennium quest to identify the ultimate building blocks of the universe" (p. ix).
1. Conceptual Foundations of Emergence Theory - Philip Clayton
"The first condition does correctly express the anti-dualistic thrust of emergence theories" (p. 2).
"The connection with a theory of substantival entities becomes explicit when Hasker quotes with approval an adaptation of Thomas Aquinas by Brian Leftow: "the human fetus becomes able to host the human soul . . . This happens in so lawlike a way as to count as a form of natural supervenience. So if we leave God out of the picture, the Thomist soul is an "emergent individual." (p. 14).
"For those with interests in philosophy of religion or theology, the light that emergence sheds on religion may represent its most crucial feature" (p. 14).
2. The Physics of Downward Causation - Paul C. Davies
"A survey of the literature shows lots of flabby, vague, qualitative statements about higher-level descriptions and influences springing into play at thresholds of complexity, without one ever being told specifically how these emergent laws affect the individual particle 'on the ground' - the humble foot soldier of physics - in a manner that involves a fundamentally new force or law" (p. 38).
3. The Emergence of Classicality from Quantum Theory - Erich Joos
"In fact, all the 'strange' features of quantum theory originate from this superposition principle" (p. 55).
"If gravity also obeys quantum laws (which consistency seems to demand), the superposition will then allow arbitrarily many different of different gravational fields (different space times)" (p. 69).
4. On the Nature of Emergent Reality - George F. R. Ellis
"The different levels of language are particularly clear in the case of computers and the genetic information coded in DNA" (p. 81).
". . . . by the macro-plans that humans have for what will happen" (p. 92)
I find this essay unconvincing and disappointing. I do not see the argument that any of this is more than the motion of particles. Circular arguments abound.
". . . . . but there is additionally a role of conscious choice in level -4 and level -5 emergence. . . . Thus free will is necessary for scientific activity (or, for that matter, for any decision-making) to occur, and I am assuming that it exists" (p. 101).
It is not at all clear that neurological research supports this. . . . Just plain wrong: computers make decisions.
5. Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub - Terrence W. Deacon
"Perhaps the greatest triumph of this enterprise came with the elucidation of the mechanism of natural selection" (p. 114).
"In this essay, I will argue that we can still understand the emergence of novel forms of causality without attributing it to the introduction of unprecedented physical laws" (p. 122).
"In the last decades of the twentieth century the concept of emergence has taken on a merely descriptive function in in many fields. It is applied to any case o the spontaneous production of complex dynamical patterns from uncorrelated interaction of component parts. This shift from a largely philosophical to this more descriptive usage if the term emergence has been strongly influenced by the increasing use of computational simulations to study complex systems" (p. 122).
Exactly! See, for example, "Complex Adaptive Systems - An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life," by John H. Miller and Scott E. Page.
"It is what makes the study of living forms qualitatively different from other physical sciences. It makes no sense to ask about the function of granite, or the purpose of a galaxy" (p. 139).
"Consciousness is not exactly something from nothing. It merely appears that way because of the misdirection provided by the double-negative logic of the least-dissonant-remainder process involved" (p. 149).
I struggle with this, as I struggled with much of this essay. There seems to be a lack of perspicuousness on Deacon's part, although it may instead be a lack of perspicacity on my part.
6. The Role of Emergence in Biology - Lynn J. Rothschild
This one just misses the mark. A change in environmental fitness due to a sudden change in the environment, such as an asteroid strike, is not "emergent." Etc.
7. Emergence in Social Evolution: A Great Ape Example - Barbara Smuts
This, in general, is a splendidly interesting essay. It makes the book worthwhile.
"Chimpanzee society bears many striking similarities to that of humans: male-male alliances are central; males are extremely status oriented and form hierarchical relationships; males dominate females; and males from one community conduct what has been described as a form of primitive warfare against neighboring communities (Mitani et al., 2002). Thus, the nature of chimpanzee society seemed to confirm the very deep roots - and perhaps even the inevitability - of some of the less appealing aspects of our own social behavior.
But then, as research on wild bonobos grew, it became increasingly clear that their society differs radically from that of chimpanzees. As detailed further below, female bonobos usually dominate males, and, compared with chimpanzee society, bonobo society is more peaceful and less hierarchical (although by no means completely egalitarian). Furthermore, these differences are appear to be the result of female political strategies. Since the two species are equally closely related to humans, these surprising discoveries were of great import. They suggested that very different characteristics might have emerged in human societies if our species had taken an evolutionary path more like the o bonobos than like that of chimpanzees (Wrangham and Peterson, 1986)" (p. 168).
"Since these various hormonal changes would provide no apparent benefits until after bonobo social relationships began to change, they prove a particularly striking example of downward causation" (p. 175).
No: I simply do not see that this cannot be explained as the interaction, of individuals, over time. Very interesting, but I do not find anything here that provides an "emergent" response to physical reductionism (in any meaningful sense).
8. Being Realistic about Emergence - Jaegwon Kim
"For them, the assertion that a given phenomenon, say consciousness, is an emergent phenomenon, or that consciousness emerges from neural processes, is to say something significant and illuminating about consciousness and its relation to neurobiological processes" (p. 190).
"Looking for such connection between mental phenomena and brain processes would be futile" (p. 195).
"To conclude, then, there are two challenges for the friends of emergence. The first is to show that emergent properties do not succumb to the threat of epiphenomenalism, and that emergent phenomena can have causal powers vis-a-vis physical phenomena" (p. 201).
9. In Defense of Ontological Emergence and Mental Causation - Michael Silberstein
It may be the newness of the subject to me, but this essay seem far and away the most polemical I have encounter in this book.
"Cognitive capacities in symbol-using beings such as ourselves are not primarily internal; they are enactive bodily capacities that involve our relations with the world" (p. 209).
"The claim is either a non sequitur or simply false from the enactive perspective" (p. 211). Professor Silberstein (deceased) apparently did not understand interfaces which severely limits his ability to deal with complex systems. It is the enactive perspective that is false.
"As Dennett puts it:" (p. 213).
10. Emergence and Mental Causation - Nancy Murphy
"In one sense the prevalence of downward causation is obvious. It is clearly the case here that many systems are influenced by their environments" (p. 228). This is arrant flapdoodle: if one billiard ball is hit by another billiard ball, and thus "influenced by its environment," is that ontological (causal?) emergence? Of course not. Nothing is being offered here to challenge the thesis that the the environmental influence on any system is anything more than the interaction of particles.
""A common move in current philosophy of mind is to say that mental proprieties or events supervene on physical properties or events. I define 'supervenience' as follows:
Property S supervenes on (/base) property B if and only if e possesses S in virtue of e's possessing B under circumstances c."(p. 230 - 231).
11. Strong and Weak Emergence - David Chalmers
"I think there is exactly one clear case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness" (p. 246).
12. Emergence, Mind, and Divine Action: The Hierarchy of the Sciences in Relation to the Human Mind-Brain-Body - Arthur Peacocke
"Real entities have influence and play irreducible roles I adequate explanations of the world" (p. 265).
"Our experience of willed action supports the postulate that in some way mentally events are indeed casually effective; and this, together with the irreducibility of mental language just mentioned, is a strong pointer to attribution a new level of reality to the mental" (p. 271). Lamentably we now know, from neurological research that our "willed action" is false. The signal to implement the action is sent before the signal to the part of the brain where "the illusion of free will" is formed. It would seem to follow from this that mental states are not "real entities."
"Persons can, moreover report with varying degrees of accuracy to themselves (and by language by others) on aspects of their internal states, and so implicitly on their brain states concomitant with their actions" (p. 274). Again lamentably we know from quite recent neurological research that we know ourselves by watching ourselves, in very much the same sense that we know others by watching them: the traditional philosopher's claim to have special access to their own mind has been falsified.
13. Emergence: What is at Stake for Religious Reflection? - Niels Henrik Gergersen
"The world of nature exhibits many examples of emergence: the crystalline structure of water under low temperature, . . . the reaction of fire and gun powder . . . . formation of flocks . . . . birds; the awakening awareness of embryos; . . ." (p. 279). No: most of these things are not emergent in any meaningful sense. The "awakening awareness of embryos" is certainly interesting, and the best candidate for emergent.
"What needs to be explained, then, is not a new form of causality, but how some systems come to be dominated by their higher-order topical properties so that these appear to 'drag along' component constituent dynamics, envy though, at the same time, these higher-order regularities are also constitute by lower-order interactions . . ." (p. 285). This seems to say that strong (oontological) emergence is really no different than weak (explanatory) emergence. Leaving out life and consciousness, I am inclined to agree. There is a great deal in this section that is very appealing to a systems engineer.
See also:
“Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes...
"One doesn't need to share a religious view in order to understand its formal structure and semantic content" (p. 286). That is how a nonChristian such as myself can understand the Bible well enough to say that no Christian could support President Trump.
"Although God is the creator of a temporal world, God is unimaginatively beyond time and change" (p. 291). I am always curious what it means to spend eternity with a Being for whom time does not pass: Christians exist eternally with the Christian God, before and after their lives. What is like to have a personal relationship with a being who never changes?
"The transformative presence of God must be part of any ultimate explanation of why, finally, the course of evolution is moving upwards in the direction of increased complexity" (p. 299 - 300).
14. Emergence from Quantum Physics to Religion: A Critical Appraisal - Philip Clayton
"Religious naturalism or 'ecstatic naturalism' incorporates the classically religious human responses of awe, wonder, amazement, the appreciation of beauty, and the sense of mystery - all in response to the natural world in the form that the sciences reveal it to us" (p. 318).
"The theistic worldview expressed I all three of the great Abrahamic traditions reflects the conviction that the amazing fecundity of natural evolution in the end expresses the intentional creative structuring of God" (p. 319).
"To conclude, then, there are two challenges for the friends of emergence. The first is to show that emergent properties do not succumb to the threat of epiphenomenalism, and that emergent phenomena can have causal powers vis-a-vis physical phenomena" (p. 201). This, like artificial intelligence - once you get it, it is just a program - see the "Chinese Room Experiment" - seems like a chimera.
"This book should therefore be read not as a systematic apologetic for a single theory of emergence, but rather as a source book" it contains the data and theoretical resources necessary for evaluating whether a unified theory of emergence is possible, without actually proving such a theory" (p. 307). Indeed!
An interesting claim appears in Essay 12. As discussed below (p. 265, 271 and 274) this book, published in 2006, has had this most interesting claim vitiated by advances in neurological research. Much of this book has not, in general, stood the test of time: that is, perhaps, the nature of the "long debate."
Essay 13 does much to make this book worth reading.
Preface
"Today we may regard the early speculations of Leucippus and Democritus as the beginning of a two-and-a-half millennium quest to identify the ultimate building blocks of the universe" (p. ix).
1. Conceptual Foundations of Emergence Theory - Philip Clayton
"The first condition does correctly express the anti-dualistic thrust of emergence theories" (p. 2).
"The connection with a theory of substantival entities becomes explicit when Hasker quotes with approval an adaptation of Thomas Aquinas by Brian Leftow: "the human fetus becomes able to host the human soul . . . This happens in so lawlike a way as to count as a form of natural supervenience. So if we leave God out of the picture, the Thomist soul is an "emergent individual." (p. 14).
"For those with interests in philosophy of religion or theology, the light that emergence sheds on religion may represent its most crucial feature" (p. 14).
2. The Physics of Downward Causation - Paul C. Davies
"A survey of the literature shows lots of flabby, vague, qualitative statements about higher-level descriptions and influences springing into play at thresholds of complexity, without one ever being told specifically how these emergent laws affect the individual particle 'on the ground' - the humble foot soldier of physics - in a manner that involves a fundamentally new force or law" (p. 38).
3. The Emergence of Classicality from Quantum Theory - Erich Joos
"In fact, all the 'strange' features of quantum theory originate from this superposition principle" (p. 55).
"If gravity also obeys quantum laws (which consistency seems to demand), the superposition will then allow arbitrarily many different of different gravational fields (different space times)" (p. 69).
4. On the Nature of Emergent Reality - George F. R. Ellis
"The different levels of language are particularly clear in the case of computers and the genetic information coded in DNA" (p. 81).
". . . . by the macro-plans that humans have for what will happen" (p. 92)
I find this essay unconvincing and disappointing. I do not see the argument that any of this is more than the motion of particles. Circular arguments abound.
". . . . . but there is additionally a role of conscious choice in level -4 and level -5 emergence. . . . Thus free will is necessary for scientific activity (or, for that matter, for any decision-making) to occur, and I am assuming that it exists" (p. 101).
It is not at all clear that neurological research supports this. . . . Just plain wrong: computers make decisions.
5. Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub - Terrence W. Deacon
"Perhaps the greatest triumph of this enterprise came with the elucidation of the mechanism of natural selection" (p. 114).
"In this essay, I will argue that we can still understand the emergence of novel forms of causality without attributing it to the introduction of unprecedented physical laws" (p. 122).
"In the last decades of the twentieth century the concept of emergence has taken on a merely descriptive function in in many fields. It is applied to any case o the spontaneous production of complex dynamical patterns from uncorrelated interaction of component parts. This shift from a largely philosophical to this more descriptive usage if the term emergence has been strongly influenced by the increasing use of computational simulations to study complex systems" (p. 122).
Exactly! See, for example, "Complex Adaptive Systems - An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life," by John H. Miller and Scott E. Page.
"It is what makes the study of living forms qualitatively different from other physical sciences. It makes no sense to ask about the function of granite, or the purpose of a galaxy" (p. 139).
"Consciousness is not exactly something from nothing. It merely appears that way because of the misdirection provided by the double-negative logic of the least-dissonant-remainder process involved" (p. 149).
I struggle with this, as I struggled with much of this essay. There seems to be a lack of perspicuousness on Deacon's part, although it may instead be a lack of perspicacity on my part.
6. The Role of Emergence in Biology - Lynn J. Rothschild
This one just misses the mark. A change in environmental fitness due to a sudden change in the environment, such as an asteroid strike, is not "emergent." Etc.
7. Emergence in Social Evolution: A Great Ape Example - Barbara Smuts
This, in general, is a splendidly interesting essay. It makes the book worthwhile.
"Chimpanzee society bears many striking similarities to that of humans: male-male alliances are central; males are extremely status oriented and form hierarchical relationships; males dominate females; and males from one community conduct what has been described as a form of primitive warfare against neighboring communities (Mitani et al., 2002). Thus, the nature of chimpanzee society seemed to confirm the very deep roots - and perhaps even the inevitability - of some of the less appealing aspects of our own social behavior.
But then, as research on wild bonobos grew, it became increasingly clear that their society differs radically from that of chimpanzees. As detailed further below, female bonobos usually dominate males, and, compared with chimpanzee society, bonobo society is more peaceful and less hierarchical (although by no means completely egalitarian). Furthermore, these differences are appear to be the result of female political strategies. Since the two species are equally closely related to humans, these surprising discoveries were of great import. They suggested that very different characteristics might have emerged in human societies if our species had taken an evolutionary path more like the o bonobos than like that of chimpanzees (Wrangham and Peterson, 1986)" (p. 168).
"Since these various hormonal changes would provide no apparent benefits until after bonobo social relationships began to change, they prove a particularly striking example of downward causation" (p. 175).
No: I simply do not see that this cannot be explained as the interaction, of individuals, over time. Very interesting, but I do not find anything here that provides an "emergent" response to physical reductionism (in any meaningful sense).
8. Being Realistic about Emergence - Jaegwon Kim
"For them, the assertion that a given phenomenon, say consciousness, is an emergent phenomenon, or that consciousness emerges from neural processes, is to say something significant and illuminating about consciousness and its relation to neurobiological processes" (p. 190).
"Looking for such connection between mental phenomena and brain processes would be futile" (p. 195).
"To conclude, then, there are two challenges for the friends of emergence. The first is to show that emergent properties do not succumb to the threat of epiphenomenalism, and that emergent phenomena can have causal powers vis-a-vis physical phenomena" (p. 201).
9. In Defense of Ontological Emergence and Mental Causation - Michael Silberstein
It may be the newness of the subject to me, but this essay seem far and away the most polemical I have encounter in this book.
"Cognitive capacities in symbol-using beings such as ourselves are not primarily internal; they are enactive bodily capacities that involve our relations with the world" (p. 209).
"The claim is either a non sequitur or simply false from the enactive perspective" (p. 211). Professor Silberstein (deceased) apparently did not understand interfaces which severely limits his ability to deal with complex systems. It is the enactive perspective that is false.
"As Dennett puts it:" (p. 213).
10. Emergence and Mental Causation - Nancy Murphy
"In one sense the prevalence of downward causation is obvious. It is clearly the case here that many systems are influenced by their environments" (p. 228). This is arrant flapdoodle: if one billiard ball is hit by another billiard ball, and thus "influenced by its environment," is that ontological (causal?) emergence? Of course not. Nothing is being offered here to challenge the thesis that the the environmental influence on any system is anything more than the interaction of particles.
""A common move in current philosophy of mind is to say that mental proprieties or events supervene on physical properties or events. I define 'supervenience' as follows:
Property S supervenes on (/base) property B if and only if e possesses S in virtue of e's possessing B under circumstances c."(p. 230 - 231).
11. Strong and Weak Emergence - David Chalmers
"I think there is exactly one clear case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness" (p. 246).
12. Emergence, Mind, and Divine Action: The Hierarchy of the Sciences in Relation to the Human Mind-Brain-Body - Arthur Peacocke
"Real entities have influence and play irreducible roles I adequate explanations of the world" (p. 265).
"Our experience of willed action supports the postulate that in some way mentally events are indeed casually effective; and this, together with the irreducibility of mental language just mentioned, is a strong pointer to attribution a new level of reality to the mental" (p. 271). Lamentably we now know, from neurological research that our "willed action" is false. The signal to implement the action is sent before the signal to the part of the brain where "the illusion of free will" is formed. It would seem to follow from this that mental states are not "real entities."
"Persons can, moreover report with varying degrees of accuracy to themselves (and by language by others) on aspects of their internal states, and so implicitly on their brain states concomitant with their actions" (p. 274). Again lamentably we know from quite recent neurological research that we know ourselves by watching ourselves, in very much the same sense that we know others by watching them: the traditional philosopher's claim to have special access to their own mind has been falsified.
13. Emergence: What is at Stake for Religious Reflection? - Niels Henrik Gergersen
"The world of nature exhibits many examples of emergence: the crystalline structure of water under low temperature, . . . the reaction of fire and gun powder . . . . formation of flocks . . . . birds; the awakening awareness of embryos; . . ." (p. 279). No: most of these things are not emergent in any meaningful sense. The "awakening awareness of embryos" is certainly interesting, and the best candidate for emergent.
"What needs to be explained, then, is not a new form of causality, but how some systems come to be dominated by their higher-order topical properties so that these appear to 'drag along' component constituent dynamics, envy though, at the same time, these higher-order regularities are also constitute by lower-order interactions . . ." (p. 285). This seems to say that strong (oontological) emergence is really no different than weak (explanatory) emergence. Leaving out life and consciousness, I am inclined to agree. There is a great deal in this section that is very appealing to a systems engineer.
See also:
“Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes...
"One doesn't need to share a religious view in order to understand its formal structure and semantic content" (p. 286). That is how a nonChristian such as myself can understand the Bible well enough to say that no Christian could support President Trump.
"Although God is the creator of a temporal world, God is unimaginatively beyond time and change" (p. 291). I am always curious what it means to spend eternity with a Being for whom time does not pass: Christians exist eternally with the Christian God, before and after their lives. What is like to have a personal relationship with a being who never changes?
"The transformative presence of God must be part of any ultimate explanation of why, finally, the course of evolution is moving upwards in the direction of increased complexity" (p. 299 - 300).
14. Emergence from Quantum Physics to Religion: A Critical Appraisal - Philip Clayton
"Religious naturalism or 'ecstatic naturalism' incorporates the classically religious human responses of awe, wonder, amazement, the appreciation of beauty, and the sense of mystery - all in response to the natural world in the form that the sciences reveal it to us" (p. 318).
"The theistic worldview expressed I all three of the great Abrahamic traditions reflects the conviction that the amazing fecundity of natural evolution in the end expresses the intentional creative structuring of God" (p. 319).
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews