Emergence and Causality

1. Emergence and Causality Mark H. Bickhard Lehigh University mark@bickhard.name http://bickhard.ws/

2. Process and Emergence • Parmenides • Empedocles, Democritus, Aristotle • Hume • Kim • Process —> ubiquitous emergence • Downward causation • External • Internal • Internal developmental • Emergent “causation”

3. Hierarchy of Emergents • Emergence is a phenomenon of process organization • New organization yields new properties • Some of these emergent properties can serve to help stabilize the new organization • Thus yielding new stable entities • Which can then participate in higher level organizations

4. Some Lower Levels in the Emergence Hierarchy • Quantum field theory — Noether’s theorem: yields conserved quantities • Fermion relationships yields “valence” • Atoms themselves can be electrically neutral and still have “valence” • Inhomogeneities of neutral molecules yields van der Waals forces in solids • And similar forms of causality that hold solids together

5. Some Intermediate Levels in the Emergence Hierarchy • Processes with independent energy sources influencing each other constitute control relationships • Servomechanisms, computers — note that stability of control organization is usually not due to the control relationships per se • When control relationships do maintain the system (and it can reproduce: a form of maintenance) we have biological autonomous systems • This involves far from equilibrium systems, self maintenance, and recursive self maintenance

6. Some Higher Levels in the Emergence Hierarchy • Modulations among autonomous systems constitutes a form of communication • Yields ecosystems • Modulations among autonomous systems with regard to representations, goals, intentions, constitutes meaningful communication

7. More Higher Levels • When presumptions of such communication constitute situation conventions • Yields relationships and communities • Productive conventional means for meaningful communication that interacts with situation conventions constitutes language

8. Higher Levels III • Social reality emerges as situation conventions among agents • For linguistic agents, these realities can be constituted in large part as potentialities for further “conversation” • Stability of social realities inheres in conventions, both occurrent and institutionalized

9. Persons and Society • Human agents develop as agents within social realities • They become agents in and for those social realities — socio-culturally specialized agents • They become emergent social persons

10. Emergent Culture • Culture induces the developmental emergent “production” of persons who co-constitute that culture • Culture creates its own emergence base by guiding the developmental emergence of its constituent persons • Stabilities depend on communicative influences on processes of developmental emergence

11. Cultural Evolution • Culture, then, becomes a realm of evolution with its own historicities, partially independent of the biological base • A unique realm of evolution

12. Conclusion • “Cause” is a protean word; it has no consistent meaning beyond some kind of determination • There are multifarious emergent forms of determination, of cause, beginning with quantum field theory • And, therefore, multifarious emergent forms of stability of organizations, of emergent entities