Emergence and Causality

1
Emergence and Causality

• Mark H. Bickhard
• Lehigh University
• mark_at_bickhard.name
• http//bickhard.ws/

2
Process and Emergence

• Parmenides
• Empedocles, Democritus, Aristotle
• Hume
• Kim
• Process gt 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 Noethers 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