Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 3:57:10 PM, Bob wrote: > ... But for me the interesting phenomena where the logic of > cause and effect does not hold is the case of emergence and > self-organization. With an emergent system in which the properties > of the system can not be derived from, reduced to or predicted from > the properties of the components the notion of cause and effect does > not hold. The reductionist program of logical thinking does not do > much to understand emergent phenomena. It is not that logic is wrong > it is that it is irrelevant. So if one is an emergentist one cannot > be a mechanist. That is simple logic. ;-)
Don't know if I'm an emergentist or not. On one hand, I do not believe in the "cannot be derived from, reduced to or predicted from" condition because it seems intrinsically subjective, perhaps even circular. But on the other hand I do believe that complex systems are generally just as real and just as significant as their components, higher level explanations being generally just as good as lower level ones, and only the purpose for which the explanation is required determines which level is most appropriate. I also believe that causation can only be considered to occur horizontally, along levels of explanation. That is because causation is inherently temporal, effects following causes, and there is no passage of time in vertical forays into higher or lower levels of description/explanation. There is no vertical causation. However, I do consider myself a mechanist, because as I see it, one high level event can always be decomposed into a number of lower level events, and eventually, if the process is repeated, a level will be reached at which all of the events can be clearly understood as mechanical. The lower level ones do not CAUSE the highest level one, because they are occurring simultaneously, but they COMPOSE it, and there is no mysterious other element to it. Having said which, if the high level event is to be causally explained, other events on the same level will have to be involved in the explanation, a low level story will NOT do the job. So I believe I've reconciled emergence with mechanism, but I suspect that whether you agree with me depends on what you consider to be essential to emergence. Or how strongly you feel about mechanism. Or, of course, maybe I've just made a silly mistake. :) (Some say that levels of description/explanation are not real (Don Ross?), and I don't know whether that's a reasonable thing to say or not, but they're certainly indispensable to us.) -- Robin Faichney <http://www.robinfaichney.org/> _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
