Emergence is a conceptual phenomenon, not physical

[vandermude]

I have had the concept of Emergence on my mind for a long time. Since a lot has been written about the concept, it will take a long time to do it justice in the sense that I correctly cite people who have made meaningful contributions to our understanding of emergence. So, the following is a necessarily slipshod job. But since the topic has come up in a couple of Religious Naturalist contexts lately, I want to put a few ideas out so as to start a dialog.

Emergence is sometimes considered to be "Something more from nothing but", to quote Ursula Goodenough and Terry Deacon in their 2008 article "The Scared Emergence of Nature". Another way of putting it is that "The whole is more than the sum of its parts".
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/v ... io_facpubs

Another way of putting it is ontologically, as a form of existence, like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2020 article on Emergence by Timothy O'Comner: "Accounts of emergence of both strong and weak varieties typically suppose that emergents modally depend on their physical bases, such that it is necessary that if an emergent occurs, some or other physical basis occurs, and it is further necessary that if that basis occurs the emergent occurs."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent

I am going to focus on these two articles. Note that the second article uses a lot of technical terms from the philosophical literature, such as supervenience.

I start having problems with the notion of emergence analyzed from a purely physical standpoint once we get deeper into the analysis. Here are some examples:

"Whereas reductionism has yielded splendid results in science, there is an important sense in which it is artificial, and in this sense false. By starting from wholes and moving ‘down’ into parts, one is moving in the opposite direction from the way matters arise. To grasp how matters arise, one must run the muscle movie backwards, from the subatom to the atom to the amino acid to the protein to the polymer to the cell to the muscle to the contraction. To make such a movie, it is essential to begin with reductionist understandings—otherwise, there is no way to know what to put in the movie. But once the cast of characters is identified—once it is understood how proteins fold and myosin hydrolyses ATP and so on—it is possible to narrate such understandings in the correct temporal and spatial sequence, moving ‘upwards’ from one level to the next." [Goodenough and Deacon, 2008]

"The key concept: if one starts with something like a water molecule, it is nothing but two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, but each molecule has something-else properties that cannot be ascribed to hydrogen alone nor to oxygen alone. The interaction between the three atoms entails a reconfiguration of electron orbitals and generates a trapezoid-shaped entity that is more electrically positive on one facet and more negative on the opposite facet. Compared with hydrogen and oxygen atoms, a water molecule has unprecedented attributes, because the joining of these atoms has distorted the shapes of each and produced a composite shape with its own intrinsic properties. In chemistry, shape matters." [Goodenough and Deacon, 2008]

"Special sciences describe non-ubiquitous, structured phenomena (e.g., plate tectonics, molecular interactions, cellular repair, and organismic development) and successfully predict their behavior through higher-level laws. Weak emergentists take the existence of such stable and distinctive phenomena, amenable to high-level but not low-level explanation, as reason to accept the taxonomic categories of the special sciences into our ontology of the natural world, no less real than the categories of a final, completed physics. On this view, there are molecules, cells, organisms, and minded creatures, and they do not reduce to—are not identical to—complex combinations of basic physical entities or features. Correspondingly, explanations adverting to special science laws are to some extent autonomous from the explanations adverting to laws of lower-level physical theories." [O'conner 2020].

"Strong emergentists maintain that at least some higher-level phenomena exhibit a weaker dependence/stronger autonomy than weak emergence permits. This often takes the form of rejecting physical realization, affirming fundamental higher-level causal powers, or both...Perhaps the most commonly cited phenomena offered as requiring strong emergentist treatment have to do with the nature and capacities of the conscious mind in relation to its neural substrate. Other non-mental, scientific phenomena also have been advanced as possibly or plausibly requiring treatment in strong emergentist terms. ... In a series of articles culminating in a 2016 book, Carl Gillett advances a distinctive account of strong emergence rooted in a hierarchy-of-mechanism picture of complex systems that, he maintains, is strongly supported by a range of sciences. Gillett invokes considerable conceptual machinery in developing his view; making substitutions in linked definitions, we arrive at the following compact statement: A property is strongly emergent just in case it is a property of a composed individual that is realized and that (in addition to having same-level effects) non-productively determines the individual’s parts to have powers that they would not have given only the laws/principles of composition manifested in simpler collectives." [O'Conner 2020]

The problem is that emergence cannot just be considered as the opposite of reduction. This is what happens when you focus on the physical world.

Actually, O'Conner phrases the problem very nicely:

Emergentists of all varieties standardly are physical substance monists about the natural world: all worldly (natural or artifactual) entities are composed or otherwise “made of” entities that would be described in a completed fundamental physics, whether physical particles, fields, strings, or something else. This view is common enough among emergentists that some influential theorists took it to be a defining element of the doctrine. One might maintain, consistent with substance monism, that wholes exhibiting strongly emergent, efficacious properties are fundamental, albeit composite objects or systems, on the grounds that quantification over them is required for a minimally adequate account of the world’s dynamics. This might also give rise to an objective basis for identity through time, even for organisms undergoing constant change of parts (see O’Connor & Jacobs 2003). ... But one can argue that strong emergentism, at least with respect to some or all mental states, in fact requires a form of substance dualism. On a biological view of emergent thinkers, the micro-physical boundaries of such thinkers may inevitably be vague, for empirical reasons. But it is perhaps doubtful that fundamental causal laws associated with strongly emergent properties would reference vague conditions. The sole apparent alternative is that the properties are instantiated in a distinct, non-vague object instead, as a non-physical mind would be. [O'Conner 2020]

This gets to the very heart of the problem. A purely substance monist view of reality cannot describe the real world, because it cannot describe the nature of emergence.

Put another way, emergence arises out of the nature of information and ontologically abstract objects (facts, observations, ideas and theories). Emergence is not inherent in the physical world.

For example, here is where a purely physical notion of emergence gets into trouble:

"The important concept to grasp here is that the genome in no way represents a ‘blueprint’ for a multicellular organism—there exists no top-down design entity that can be analogized to an architect’s blueprint. Nor is the organism assembled from pre-existing ‘parts’, like a house or a car. Rather, the organism literally builds itself, bottom-up, assembling tiny parts that modulate the assembly of the next set of tiny parts, where the same old protein families are used in novel combinatorial patterns along the way, all under the aegis of initial conditions and boundary conditions established and maintained by the information encoded in housekeeping genes. Thermodynamics, morphodynamics, and teleodynamics set up the constraints and possibilities, but organisms are not predetermined—even if they come into being in remarkably predictable ways. Their features predictably emerge because these emergent features are made almost inevitable by the hierarchy of biases of lower-order emergent features... Particularly ‘underdetermined’ is the process of mammalian brain formation, albeit, again, features emerge in a predictable fashion—all gorilla brains, for example, are far more similar to one another than they are similar to the brains of any other species. While genes again switch on and oV in various cell lineages at critical junctures during brain development, most of the action entails cell–cell interactions via protein receptors and hormones as the neurons move up into the cranium and establish connections with one other. Moreover, most of these hormones and receptors are not brain-specific: again they’re the some old protein families put to use in a neurogenesis context. When one absorbs the fact that a mature mammalian brain may contain 100 billion neurons, each in synaptic communication with some 1,000 other neurons, all put together under the watch of a genome with some 20,000 genes, one comes to understand why it is so inaccurate to speak of a gene as being ‘for’ a particular mental capacity. True, a mutant gene encoding an aberrant protein may in some cases generate an aberrant brain function outcome, but this is not because that gene encodes that outcome; it’s because the aberrant protein is defective in pointing neurogenesis in a particular emergent direction. Embryogenesis occurs in environmental contexts—soils, ponds, nests, the uterus—and all brains, even clam brains, are capable of learning from experience. More generally, all creatures come into being and make a living in environmental contexts, where each ecosystem represents a rich interdigitation of the organic and inorganic, of organisms and planet. Genomes are transmitted to offspring when, and only when, all of this comes together. Life is not about survival of the fittest; it’s about fitting in." [Goodenough and Deacon, 2008]

The problem with this description is that there is no explanation or description of how embryogenesis occurs. As far as this discussion goes, it happens almost magically. It emerges, but there is no mechanism for the emergence. The same problem comes in a discussion of how purpose or teleology arises out of living things. And yet again, there is no purely physical explanation for consciousness.

This is a problem that has held back biology and genomics for twenty years. At the time of the Human Genome Project, they identified about 20,000 or so genes as making up the genome. The rest of it was considered "Junk DNA". Well, no. The structure of plants and animals is specified to excruciating detail in the genome. The basic machines - the proteins - that make the cells of our body run and hold them together is about 2% of the genome. The other 98% is composed of detailed body plans. including the structures that make up the nervous system.

To repeat my observation above, the fundamental problem is that the physical world just is what it is, regardless of how you view emergence. Emergence is a concept. It must be considered ontologically not as a property of physical things, but as the relationship between abstract things. Because emergence is considered just physically, it is claimed that it emerges "naturally", which begs the question of what part of nature the emergence resides.

To come up with a coherent theory of emergence, you have to have some concept of dualism. Besides the purely physical world, there is also the world of ideas. This does not imply a separate "spiritual" world, though, which is termed "substance dualism". Instead, you can consider an intermediate notion of "property dualism". This is a version of substance monism - the world is one substance (there is no spiritual realm), but you have to consider the informational properties of the real world along with the physical. Emergence arises out of the nature of information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_dualism

The attempt to come up with a purely physical definition of emergence usually involves either a reference to thermodynamics and entropy or to Shannon's theories, which are based on entropy also. This is a common mistake. Thermodynamics, considered as a form of statistical mechanics, is driven by random chance, which is a poor basis to describe the structure of information. And Shannon's theories are not about information qua information, despite what is normally thought of. Shannon, in his original article "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" explicitly says his theory is not about information. It is about the physical transfer of information, which is something totally different.

If you want to delve into the theory of what information is, it can be expressed either through Kolmogorov Complexity or through Vigo's Generalized Representational Information Theory.

As to property dualism, my medium essay "Hylomorphic Functions: Is consciousness quantized?" is a good place to start. This is one possible approach to Property Dualism
https://medium.com/science-and-philosop ... e249aac558

This is enough for now. I offer this summary as a starting point for discussion.

Tony Van der Mude