All,
the third meeting of the emergence seminar is tomorrow at 4pm at DS. The
readings are Searle's REDUCTIONISM AND THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
and wimsatt's AGREGATIVITY: REDUCTIVE HEURISTICS FOR FINDING EMERGENCE both
from Bedau and Humphreys, EMERGENCE.
I think the chief challange of our discussions will be trying to figure out the
degree to which the two authors agree. I was startled on second reading at the
degree to which they agree on what constitutes emergence.
SEARLE "...some other system features cannot be figured out just from the
compositoin of the elements and environmental relationws; they have to be
explained in terms of the causal interactions among the elements. Let's call
these 'causally emergent system features.'"
WIMSAT " An emergent property is --roughly-- a system property which is
dependent upon the mode of organization of the system's parts".
These two definitions are by no means the same, but both allow for emergence to
be a common place.
The two seem also to have similar views of what constitutes reduction. Searle
goes to the trouble to explicate five different kinds of reduction, but in the
end, he lights on "causal reduction", in part because it often leads to the
other kinds.
SEARLE : A causal reduction has taken place when "the causal powers of the
reduced entity [i.e., the macro-level entity] are shown to be entirely
explainable in thers of the causal powers of the reducing phenomena [i.e., the
micro-level phenomena]" Odd that he changes from entity to phenomena in mid
definition, but I am supposed to be avoiding editorial comment here.
WIMSAT: .... a reductive explanation of a behavior or a property of a system
is one showing it to be mechanistically explainable in terms of the properties
of and interactions among the parts of the system." A lot would seem to hang
on the word "mechanistically" here, so I looked it up in web dictionary of
philosophical terms. maintained by garth kemerling:
mechanism
Belief that science can explain all natural phenomena in terms of the causal
interactions among material particles, without any reference to intelligent
agency or purpose. As employed by Descartes and Hobbes, mechanism offered an
alternative to the scholastic reliance on explanatory appeals to final causes.
Is there anybody out there who is reading along with us????
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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