Emergence, largely ignored just thirty years ago,
has become one of the liveliest areas of research in both philosophy and science.
Fueled by advances in complexity theory, artificial life, physics, psychology, sociology, and biology
and by the parallel development of new conceptual tools in philosophy,
the idea of emergence offers a way to understand a wide variety of complex phenomena
in ways that are intriguingly different from more traditional approaches.
This reader collects for the first time in one easily accessible place
classic writings on emergence from contemporary philosophy and science.
The chapters, by such prominent scholars as John Searle, Stephen Weinberg,
William Wimsatt, Thomas Schelling, Jaegwon Kim, Robert Laughlin, Daniel Dennett,
Herbert Simon, Stephen Wolfram, Jerry Fodor, Philip Anderson, and David Chalmers,
cover the major approaches to emergence.
Each of the three sections (“Philosophical Perspectives,” “Scientific Perspectives,”
and “Background and Polemics”) begins with an introduction putting
the chapters into context and posing key questions for further exploration.
A bibliography lists more specialized material.
Contents
- James P. Crutchfield. Is anything ever new? Considering emergence. 1994
- James P. Crutchfield, J. Doyne Farmer, Norman H. Packard, Robert S. Shaw. Chaos. Sci. Am., 254(12), 46-58. 1986
- Philip W. Anderson. More is Different. Science, 177, 393-396. 1972
- Andrew M. Assad, Norman H. Packard. Emergent Colonization in an Artificial Ecology. 1992
- Stephen Wolfram. Undecidability and intractability in theoretical physics. Phys.Rev.Lett 54:735-738. 1985
- Daniel C. Dennett. Real patterns. The Journal of Philosophy 87. 1991
- As Dennett says in the introduction, the ideas here are utterly
central to his thinking. It covers the ontological status of abstract
objects, including patterns, particularly those obscured by more or less
noise. It moves on to patterns in the Game of Life, and a nice
description of his three stances: physical (for describing the
underlying cellular automaton with cells changing state), design
(for describing gliders, glider guns, etc: moving patterns), and intentional
(for describing what a GoL CA emulating a chess playing program is doing
at the level of "wanting to play chess"). This leads to a
discussion of the reality of the intentional patterns. Dennett's
position is somewhere between the (implausible) extremes of Realism and
Instrumentalism.
- Brian P. McLaughlin. The Rise and fall of British Emergentism. From Emergence or Reduction?. 1992
- Carl Hempel, Paul Oppenheim. On the idea of Emergence. From Aspects of Scientific Explanation. 1965
- John R. Searle. Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness. From The Rediscovery of the Mind. 1992
- Brian P. McLaughlin. Emergence and supervenience. Excerpt, Intellectica 25. 1997
- William C. Wimsatt. Aggregativity: reductive heuristics for finding emergence. Philosophy of Science 644. 1997
- Paul Humphreys. How properties emerge. Philosophy of Science 64. 1997
- Jaegwon Kim. Making sense of Emergence. Philosophical Studies 95. 1999
- Mark A. Bedau. Downward causation and autonomy in weak emergence. Principia Revista Internacional de Epistemologica 6. 2003
- Thomas C. Schelling. Micromotives and macrobehaviour. Excerpt. 1978
- Herbert A. Simon. Alternative views of complexity. From The Sciences of the Artificial. 1996
- Robert B. Laughlin, David Pines. The theory of everything. PNAS 97. 2000
- Edmund M. A. Ronald, Moshe Sipper, Mathieu S. Capcarrere. Design, Observation, Surprise! A test of emergence. Artificial Life 5. 1999
- Steen Rasmussen, Nils A. Baas, Bernd Mayer, Martin Nillson. Ansatz for dynamical hierarchies. Artificial Life 7. 2001
- Steven Weinberg. Newtonianism, Reductionism, and the art of Congressional testimony. Nature 330. 1987
- Ernest Nagel. Teleology revisited. Excerpt. 1982
- Jerry A. Fodor. Special sciences, or the disunity of science as a working hypothesis. Synthese 28. 1974
- David Chalmers. Supervenience. Excerpt from The Conscious Mind. 1996
- Jaegwon Kim. The nonreductivist's troubles with mental causation. From Mental Causation. 1993