Emergent Causal Laws and Physical Laws

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (5):622-635 (2020)
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Abstract

Contrasting accounts of physicalism and strong emergentism face two problems. According to the neutrality problem, contrasting supervenience-based formulations of these positions cannot be neutral with respect to certain unrelated metaphysical commitments. According to the collapse problem, emergent properties can be accounted for using an appropriately expansive physical ontology, rendering strong emergentism metaphysically suspect. I argue that both these problems can be solved with a principled distinction between emergent causal laws and physical laws. I propose such a distinction based on a finite discontinuity in the behavior of fundamental physical constituents as a function of complexity.

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Ranpal Dosanjh
Iowa State University

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References found in this work

Physicalism, or Something near Enough.Jaegwon Kim - 2006 - Philosophical Quarterly 56 (223):306-310.
Metaphysical emergence: Weak and Strong.Jessica Wilson - 2015 - In Tomasz Bigaj & Christian Wüthrich (eds.), Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. pp. 251-306.
The Mind and its place in nature.C. D. Broad - 1925 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 103:145-146.
Quiddistic Knowledge.Jonathan Schaffer - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 123 (1):1-32.
Varieties of Necessity.Kit Fine - 2002 - In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility. Oxford Up. pp. 253-281.

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