In philosophy Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument. The word "philosophy" comes from the, systems theory Systems theory is a transdisciplinary approach, which abstracts and considers a system as a set of independent and interacting parts. The main goal is to study general principles of system functioning to be applied for the all types of systems in all fields of research. As a technical and general academic area of study it predominantly refers to, science Science is, in its broadest sense, any systematic knowledge that is capable of resulting in a correct prediction or reliable outcome. In this sense, science may refer to a highly skilled technique, technology, or practice, and art Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects the senses, emotions, and/or intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a, emergence is the way complex systems A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties not obvious from the properties of the individual parts and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels An integrative level, or level of organization, is a set of phenomena emerging on pre-existing phenomena of lower level. Typical examples include life emerging on non-living substances, and consciousness emerging on nervous systems and of complex systems A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties not obvious from the properties of the individual parts.
Definitions
The concept has been in use since at least the time of Aristotle Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most.[1] John Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although[2] and Julian Huxley Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis. He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World[3] are just some of the historic luminaries who have written on the concept.
The term "emergent" was coined by the pioneer psychologist G. H. Lewes George Henry Lewes was an English philosopher and critic of literature and theatre. He became part of the mid-Victorian ferment of ideas which encouraged discussion of Darwinism, positivism, and religious skepticism. However, he is perhaps best known today for having openly lived with George Eliot, a soul-mate whose life and writings were enriched, who wrote:
"Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same -- their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference." (Lewes 1875, p. 412)(Blitz 1992)
Professor Jeffrey Goldstein in the School of Business at Adelphi University Adelphi University is a private, nonsectarian university located in Garden City, in Nassau County, New York. A nationally accredited school, it is the oldest institution of higher learning on Long Island. In 2005 and 2006, the Princeton Review listed Adelphi as one of the Northeast's best universities. In March 2006, the university began provides a current definition of emergence in the journal, Emergence (Goldstein 1999). For Goldstein, emergence can be defined as: "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems" (Corning 2002).
Goldstein's definition can be further elaborated to describe the qualities of this definition in more detail:
"The common characteristics are: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems); (2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time); (3) A global or macro "level" (i.e. there is some property of "wholeness"); (4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); and (5) it is "ostensive" (it can be perceived). For good measure, Goldstein throws in supervenience In philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship, typically held to obtain between sets of properties. According to one standard definition, a set of properties A supervenes on a set of properties B, if and only if any two objects x and y which share all properties in B must also share all properties in A (are "A- -- downward causation." (Corning 2002)
Strong and weak emergence
| It has been suggested that Strong emergence Strong emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents. Some philosophers have proposed that qualia and consciousness demonstrate strong emergence. Strong emergence stands in contrast to weak emergence be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) |
The usage of the notion "emergence" may generally be subdivided into two perspectives, that of "weak emergence" and "strong emergence". Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. Emergence, in this case, is merely part of the language, or model In the most general sense, a model is anything used in any way to represent anything else. Some models are physical objects, for instance, a toy model which may be assembled, and may even be made to work like the object it represents. However a conceptual model, may only be drawn on paper, described in words, or imagined in the mind. They are used that is needed to describe a system's behaviour.
But if, on the other hand, systems can have qualities not directly traceable to the system's components, but rather to how those components interact, and one is willing to accept that a system System is a set of interacting or interdependent entities forming an integrated whole supervenes In philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship, typically held to obtain between sets of properties. According to one standard definition, a set of properties A supervenes on a set of properties B, if and only if any two objects x and y which share all properties in B must also share all properties in A (are "A- on its components, then it is difficult to account for an emergent property's cause. These new qualities are irreducible The principle of Irreducibility, in philosophy, has the sense that a complete account of an entity will not be possible at lower levels of explanation and which has novel properties beyond prediction and explanation. Another way to state this is that Occam's razor requires the elimination of only those entities that are unnecessary, not as many to the system's constituent parts (Laughlin 2005). The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This view of emergence is called strong emergence Strong emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents. Some philosophers have proposed that qualia and consciousness demonstrate strong emergence. Strong emergence stands in contrast to weak emergence. Some fields in which strong emergence Strong emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents. Some philosophers have proposed that qualia and consciousness demonstrate strong emergence. Strong emergence stands in contrast to weak emergence is more widely used include etiology Etiology is the study of causation, or origination. The word is derived from the Greek αἰτιολογία, aitiologia, "giving a reason for" (αἰτία, aitia, "cause"; and -λογία, -logia), epistemology Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions: and ontology Ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: "of being" and -λογία, -logia: science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as.
Regarding strong emergence Strong emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents. Some philosophers have proposed that qualia and consciousness demonstrate strong emergence. Strong emergence stands in contrast to weak emergence, Mark A. Bedau observes:
"Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing."(Bedau 1997)
However, "the debate about whether or not the whole can be predicted from the properties of the parts misses the point. Wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be co-determined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environment(s)." (Corning 2002) Along that same thought, Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler CBE was an author of essays, novels and autobiographies. Koestler was born in Budapest but, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. His early career was in journalism. In 1931 he joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned, he resigned from it in 1938 and in 1940 published a devastating anti- stated, "it is the synergistic The term synergy comes from the ancient Greek word syn-ergos, συνεργός, meaning 'working together'. effects produced by wholes that are the very cause of the evolution of complexity in nature" and used the metaphor of Janus to illustrate how the two perspectives (strong or holistic vs. weak or reductionistic) should be treated as perspectives, not exclusives, and should work together to address the issues of emergence.(Koestler 1969) Further,
"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe..The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts."(Anderson 1972)
Objective or subjective quality
The properties of complexity and organization of any system are considered by Crutchfield to be subjective qualities A quality is an attribute or a property. Attributes are ascribable, by a subject, whereas properties are possessible. Some philosophers assert that a quality cannot be defined. In contemporary philosophy, the idea of qualities and especially how to distinguish certain kinds of qualities from one another remains controversial determined by the observer.
"Defining structure and detecting the emergence of complexity in nature are inherently subjective, though essential, scientific activities. Despite the difficulties, these problems can be analysed in terms of how model-building observers infer from measurements the computational capabilities embedded in non-linear processes. An observer’s notion of what is ordered, what is random, and what is complex in its environment depends directly on its computational resources: the amount of raw measurement data, of memory, and of time available for estimation and inference. The discovery of structure in an environment depends more critically and subtly, though, on how those resources are organized. The descriptive power of the observer’s chosen (or implicit) computational model class, for example, can be an overwhelming determinant in finding regularity in data."(Crutchfield 1994)
On the other hand, Peter Corning Peter Andrew Corning is an American biologist, consultant, and complex systems scientist, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems, in Friday Harbor, Washington, and is known especially for his work on the causal role of synergy in evolution argues "Must the synergies be perceived/observed in order to qualify as emergent effects, as some theorists claim? Most emphatically not. The synergies associated with emergence are real and measurable, even if nobody is there to observe them." (Corning 2002) These are not necessarily incompatible, however, since while an observer is free to choose the definition of order that they wish to take, once it is chosen that definition applies objectively to any system independently of observation.
Emergence in philosophy and religion
Main article: Emergentism In philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and as it contrasts with reductionism. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is more than the sum of the properties of the system's partsIn philosophy, emergence is often understood to be a much stronger claim about the etiology Etiology is the study of causation, or origination. The word is derived from the Greek αἰτιολογία, aitiologia, "giving a reason for" (αἰτία, aitia, "cause"; and -λογία, -logia) of a system's properties. An emergent property of a system, in this context, is one that is not a property of any component of that system, but is still a feature of the system as a whole. Nicolai Hartmann Nicolai Hartmann was a German philosopher, one of the first modern philosophers to write on emergence, termed this categorial novum (new category).
In religion, emergence grounds expressions of religious naturalism Religious naturalism is an approach to spirituality that is devoid of supernaturalism. The focus is on the religious attributes of the universe/Nature, the understanding of it and our response to it . These provide for the development of an eco-morality . Interest is growing in this modern but not well defined movement that has an ancient heritage in which a sense of the sacred Holiness, or sanctity, is in general the state of being holy or sacred (considered worthy of spiritual respect or devotion; or inspiring awe or reverence among believers in a given set of spiritual ideas). In other contexts, objects are often considered 'holy' or 'sacred' if used for spiritual purposes, such as the worship or service of gods is perceived in the workings of entirely naturalistic processes by which more complex In general usage, complexity tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement. The study of these complex linkages is the main goal of network theory and network science. In science there are at this time a number of approaches to characterizing complexity, many of which are reflected in this article. In a forms arise or evolve from simpler forms. Notable examples of a scientific understanding of emergent complexity that lead to a sense of the sacred include a 2006 essay titled 'The Sacred Emergence of Nature' by Ursula Goodenough Ursula W. Goodenough is currently a Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the best selling book Sacred Depths of Nature. She earned her M.A. in zoology from Columbia University and in 1969 she completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University. Goodenough was an assistant and associate professor of biology at Harvard from and Terrence Deacon Terrence Deacon is an American anthropologist . He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley and a 2006 essay titled 'Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred' by Stuart Kauffman Stuart Alan Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher concerning the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for.
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