This week's reading is Mark Bedau's "Downward Casaton and Autonomy in Weak
Emergence" "Weak" emrgence, Bedau makes clear in a footnote, is the only
emergence worth having. It stands betwqeen "nomical emergence" (emergence in
name only), which arises because the terms by which tha whole is described are
incommensurate with the terms by which its parts are described, and "strong
emergence", which is said to have irreducible causal powers but which Bedau
thinks is "scientifically irrelevant". A property of a whole is weakly
emergent if it cannot be derived from the properties of the parts except by
simulation. For Friam list members, Bedau's chapter may be the most
interesting so far because it makes extensive use of examples from the
complexity literature. One problem we readers will have is deciding whether
the designation "weak" refers to some distinct kinds of events in the world
(and is therefore ontological) or whether it refers to the state of our
explanatory skills (in which case it is epistemological). The distinction is
important because we might expect ontological distinctions to survive
indefinitely, whereas epistemological ones should be eliminated with the
progress of science. Bedau seems to think his distinction is ontological, but
his argument for that position seems a bit shabby.
As before, we invite Friam readers to read along with us and to comment on this
thread only if they have done the reading mentioned in the subject heading.
Take care, everybody,
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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