Abstract
The turn of the twenty-first century was a period of intensified research on the description of the world as a complex structure built of dynamical systems occurring at different levels of reality. Such systems can be described as bundles of processes. Therefore, the most empirically adequate ontology turns out to be processualism. In this paper, I describe a contemporary version of processual philosophy, which I refer to as processual (or dynamical) emergentism. Within the proposed position, the classical formulations of processualism and emergentism are revisited. Both elements complement each other – emergence describes constant, radical novelty as the basic feature of nature, while processualism employs the category of a process, which replaces the classically understood substance.
The approach to emergence developed here is ontological and diachronic. I discuss classic determinants of emergence and propose a discussion on the category of supervenience, which in the light of the adopted assumptions turns out to be insufficient to describe the relationship of the dependence of the emergent on its base. Finally, processualism is reconciled with moderate structuralism and strong emergentism.
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Notes
A more complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between emergentism and vitalism can be found in Sartenaer (2018a).
This is a controversial thesis because of the complicated relationship between science and philosophy. I understand the former generally to be a practical-theoretical activity defined according to the modern nomenclature as simply “science” or mathematics and natural sciences. There are more problems with defining philosophy that I do not mention here.
I do not specify here whether I mean features, dispositions, phenomena, new levels of reality or law. I leave open the question of what an emergence unit is.
In A. N. Whitehead’s philosophy, the more general term is “actual occasion,” which, however, has an additional experiential component.
The relationship of everything with everything (symmetry of relations) leads to the inability to distinguish cause–effect relationships.
A borderline case can be the beginning of the world understood as an absolutely first event (the world coming into being pointwise and in an instant).
This does not contradict the adoption of a class of merely imagined or postulated phenomena. On the ground of realism, however, this class is severely limited. We can be reasonably convinced that the existence of stars beyond the reach of our research apparatus is very probable, but postulating a teapot spinning around a distant planet does not meet this requirement. I am not considering the issue of possible worlds here.
I distinguish between objective regularity and its expression in the form of a law of science, and I speak here only of the latter. It would seem that a successful interpretive strategy against my position is available to the proponents of mathematical Platonism. However, I find no convincing argument for adopting extreme conceptual realism. The law of gravity framed by conceptualism loses nothing of its essential characteristics. All scientific laws are idealizations, more or less plausible descriptions of natural phenomena through observed or calculated regularities. In this sense, they never exist by themselves. “Discovering” laws of nature is therefore a metaphorical term, as is the expression that these laws “govern nature.” We discover certain regularities and, after adding various conditions, conceptual clarifications, we propose descriptions in the form of laws. In this sense laws are constructed; however, they are not arbitrary constructs because their basis lies outside us – in nature. I take a stance of critical realism or moderate constructivism toward science. What seems problematic in this context is the nature of mathematical and logical truths, which are paradigmatic examples of a-temporal structures, but they are not empirical truths.
Very generally speaking, I consider as complex those phenomena whose characteristics lie in the narrow band between order and disorder (entropy).
I assume that the function fulfilled by a crystal, resulting from its atomic structure, is, e.g., hardness, manifested in resistance to abrasion. This is also simultaneously its essential characteristic.
Whitehead’s views are sometimes linked to emergentism (McLaughlin 1992, p. 57), but one must be careful here. Whitehead’s creativity (mainly self-creativity) and organismalism may indicate a connection with emergentism, but, at the same time, in his rich and varied work one can find threads that can be reconciled with reductionism. I write about this possible view of processualism in Sect. 4.4.
Just as we do not know what (if anything) existed before the Big Bang, we do not know if there is any ultimate, fundamental level of reality (Schaffer 2003). However, this does not prevent the search for more fundamental levels.
Substance can also be characterized by: (1) individuality, concreteness of entities (Aristotelianism, Reism), (2) unity, identity, and separateness (atoms, monads), (3) uniformity of nature, qualitative sameness (Descartes’ substances).
It should be pointed out, however, that the cited formulation is a rather loose paraphrase of the original concept, the core of which was contained in the claim that all actual entities (“actual occasions” or elsewhere “facts”) constitute their own cause, and that everything has a cause: “This ontological principle means that actual entities are the only reasons; so that to search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities” (Whitehead 1978, p. 24). Rather, the processual interpretation that Kallfelz proposes is due to context. In an earlier text he cites, he himself adds a phrase to the cited definition that complicates such a reading: “They [actual occasions] do not change, for like events they are not the kind of things to which the concept of change could apply, they simply happen” (Kallfelz, 1997, p. 281). Let us only add that this completed definition is closer to Whitehead’s own intention. Bearing this in mind, Robert Hanna’s remark that the Ontological Principle may even be at odds with “creativity” becomes more understandable (Hanna 1983). However, these are side issues for us and I will not develop them further.
There is also the problem of determining the actual beginning and end of a given emergent change, which in many cases is not possible.
Constructivism, thus understood, can be combined with fallibilism, according to which our conceptions of nature are historical, changeable and susceptible to refutation. We can be convinced of the truth of our diagnoses, but at the same time we must be prepared to change them under the pressure of counterarguments. From this point of view, as well as from the perspective of Kant’s critique of metaphysics as a priori knowledge, it may follow that the whole project of philosophy of nature as a set of claims about “the world” or “nature” is called into question. This is the case, however, only if we accept Kantianism with its own metaphysics (division into noumena and phenomena) and very high demands on philosophy itself (absolutely true knowledge). However, both assumptions are not necessary. In other words – ontology (philosophy of nature and philosophy in general) does not give certain knowledge; its limited (relative, historical) reliability is sufficient. In this sense, philosophy comes close to modern science, where fallibilism is a commonly accepted principle.
The author seems to equate ontological determinism with causality, which is debatable unless we regard this position as amounting to the acceptance of a general principle: all phenomena have a cause. The second component of “epistemic determinism” is that the subject can trace causal relations between the states of the system under study. This assumption is also questionable.
In the case of the quantum world and in light of the dominant Copenhagen interpretation, which assumes at least partial indeterminism of this layer of reality, the consensus on unpredictability is greater. Quantum mechanics seems to be an ideal field for developing the concept of dynamic emergence, but it is an area of knowledge extremely difficult to characterize unambiguously. This leads to a polarization of positions. On the one hand, we have authors who precisely there seek evidence for emergence in its strong variety and in its dynamical version (Silberstein and McGeever 1999; Kronz and Tiehen 2002; Gambini, Lewowicz, and Pullin 2015), and on the other those who challenge such findings, like Andreas Hüttemann (2005), who, although accepting some form of emergence of quantum phenomena, insists that despite the collapse of synchronic micro-explanation, diachronic micro-explanation is retained there, thus strongly weakening the initial thesis.
Random events are those that occur with the least frequency but are conditioned (determined). In the case of miracles, we no longer have such certainty.
I omit here the rich discussion of the modal formulations of supervenience, which employ formulations of necessity of varying strength. We can choose between nomological (empirical), logical and indirect – metaphysical – necessity. We can also distinguish local and global versions of supervenience.
In a nutshell, Kim’s argument rests on the assumption that whenever we speak of downward causation, we assume the prior existence of some upward causation that funds the former. Hence, the causal power of downward causation can be called into question. This leads to a paradox: “[H]igher-level properties can serve as causes in downward causal relations only if they are reducible to lower-level properties” (Kim 1999, p. 99). Kim does note that this conclusion can be weakened by a “conceptual interpretation” of downward causation, but this leads de facto to a purely epistemological interpretation.
I will only note that the formulation of physicalism itself is problematic here – the authors tend to identify it with the acceptance of micro-reduction to specific components of matter (generally defined as things – entities, substances). In my view, however, ontological physicalism can be reconciled with the existence of processes, macro-determinism, and holism – what seems more problematic for physicalism, however, is precisely the rejection of supervenience, which is what they seem to suggest (Campbell and Bickhard 2011, p. 42).
For the sake of simplicity, I assume that talking about properties is legitimate.
There is a very rich literature on the grounding relation, and it is difficult to give a satisfactory definition of it. The most common reference is to a relationship between facts to indicate an asymmetric primacy relationship of what grounds something else (priority); this relationship can also be referred to as “non-causal dependence” (Clark and Liggins 2012). A discussion of “grounding” is well beyond our scope and I will not pursue it. The relationship between grounding and supervenience is analyzed by Stephan Leuenberger (2014), who concludes that, despite problems, weak versions of supervenience can be considered complementary to grounding. The complicated relationship between grounding and ontological (metaphysical) dependence is discussed by Henrik Rydéhn (2021).
O’Connor, whom Kirchhoff cites, writes of “identical physical states” (2005, p. 672).
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Dombrowski, M. Processual Emergentism. Erkenn 89, 439–461 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00539-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00539-5