Abstract
I offer an improved version of Bedau’s influential (Philos Perspect 11:375–99, 1997) account of weak emergence in light of insights from information theory. Bedau analyzes weak emergence in terms of the non-derivability of a system’s macrostates from its microstates except by simulation. However, non-derivability alone does not guarantee that a system’s macrostates are weakly emergent. Rather, it is non-derivability plus the algorithmic compressibility of the system’s macrostates that makes them weakly emergent. I argue that the resulting information-theoretic picture provides a metaphysical account of weak emergence rather than a merely epistemic one.
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Notes
Of course, there are limits to how far an analogy between the weak emergence demonstrated in a cellular automaton and the relationship between microstates and macrostates of a physical system in the real world can go. As Symons emphasizes, “CA simulations provide qualitative analogies to the natural systems in question rather than measurable quantities. These analogies can be extremely useful and may give us some insight into methods for controlling the phenomenon in question. However, in practice and in application, generalizations that we derive from these models will rest entirely on the analogy between the system under consideration and the simulation. This is one of the reasons that the success of a computational models is generally judged not by its predictive power, but by the degree to which it imitates the known behavior of a target system” (2008, 482). Thus, it is not a foregone conclusion whether the sort of weak emergence that Bedau outlines will have cognates in, for instance, the realm of mental phenomena. That will depend on whether the relevant relationship between the candidate phenomenon and its system’s microstates are present.
Baker (2010, 3) offers another way to understand the notion of non-derivability except by simulation present in Bedau’s work. He suggests that the notion that Bedau is working with involves equating simulation with “’iterating the microdynamic’ of the given system. Thus, a weakly emergent property or behavior in the Game of Life would be one that can be derived only by iterating the update rules time step by time step.
When ‘compressibility’ appears unmodified, take it to be shorthand for ‘algorithmic compressibility’.
One could, of course, draw an arbitrary compressibility threshold higher than the bare minimum that must be met for a system’s states to be counted as weakly emergent. Another option is to simply take weak emergence to be a matter of degree, as Hovda (2008) does.
They reserve commitment to other doctrines, such as causal efficacy, in part because they do not take them to be necessary to make sense of science nor demanded or even warranted by contemporary scientific theory or practice.
For instance, Wilson (2013, 214) initially describes Bedau’s picture as follows: “The absence of analytic or otherwise ‘compressible’ means of predicting the evolution of such systems means that the only way to find out what this behavior will be is by ‘going through the motions’: Set up the system, let it roll, and see what happens. It is this feature—namely, algorithmic incompressibility—that serves as the basis for Bedau’s account of weak emergence.” Wilson takes the account to be one that identifies weak emergence with algorithmic incompressibility. While the notion of algorithmic incompressibility does not explicitly appear in Bedau’s (1997) original account, the fact that Bedau (2013) generally uses ‘incompressible’ interchangeably with the notion of non-derivability except by simulation makes Wilson’s interpretation of Bedau (1997) a plausible one. As I argue, however, such a direct identification of weak emergence with algorithmic incompressibility is too coarse-grained to capture the relationship between these two notions that is needed for a metaphysical account of weak emergence.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the following people for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper: Shamik Dasgupta, Nina Emery, Joshua Watson, Jessica Wilson, and two particularly helpful anonymous reviewers.
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Berenstain, N. Strengthening Weak Emergence. Erkenn 87, 2457–2474 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00312-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00312-6