This link has been bookmarked by 22 people . It was first bookmarked on 15 Aug 2012, by Gautam Sen.
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emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them.
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Reduction-minded ‘mechanists’, who supposed that the processes of life were governed wholly by physical-chemical principles, contended with the extreme anti-reductionist ‘vitalists,’ who posited an entelechy, a primitive substance or directing principle embodied in the organism which guided such characteristic vital processes as embryonic development and the regeneration of lost parts.[
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Emergentists sought to develop a middle way, eschewing vital substances but retaining — in some sense — irreducibly vital qualities or processes.
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One might wonder how homopathic and heteropathic laws interact. On Mill's account, higher-level heteropathic laws will supplement but not supplant lower-level laws (whether homopathic or heteropathic).
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both homopathic and heteropathic laws for Mill are causal laws, and homopathic and heteropathic effects are effects of causal interactions.
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Mill's dynamical account of emergence (heteropathic interactions) differs importantly from the synchronic, noncausal covariational account of the relationship of emergent features to the conditions that give rise to them that C. D. Broad was to espouse in Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925).
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there are two types of laws: (1) ‘intra-ordinal’ laws, which relate events within an order,
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‘trans-ordinal’ laws, which characterize the emergence of higher-level properties from lower-level ones.
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Trans-ordinal laws are what we now call ‘emergent laws,’ fundamental, irreducible laws that describe a synchronic, noncausal covariation of an emergent property and its lower-level emergent base.
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05 Jan 14
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30 Nov 12
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The fusion operation is not necessarily causal, but it is a diachronic, dynamic process.[8]
The key feature of a fused event [Pmi*P ni][(xri) + (xsi)](t2) is that it is a unified whole, in the sense that its causal effects cannot be correctly represented in terms of the separate causal effects of its constituents. Moreover, within the fusion the original property instances Pmi(x ri)(t1) and Pni(x si)(t1) no longer exist as separate entities and they do not have all their i-level causal powers available for use at the i+1-level. (But note that the objects themselves will often retain their separate identities, e.g., [(xri) + (xsi)] in the example of fusion above.) Properties that undergo fusion do not realize the i+1 property instance, as supervenient, realized properties would be co-present with subvenient properties. Rather, in the course of fusion the basal conditions become the i+1 property instance. For this reason, supervenience cannot obtain, as the basal conditions do not co-exist with the emergent feature.
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This innovative feature of fusion emergentism — the destruction of the basal property instances once they are fused into the emergent property instance — is what enables the emergent property instances to escape worries about their being causally superfluous (the causal exclusion worry that we will discuss in 3.3.1), since the fused property instances, which are the emergence bases of the emergent property instance resulting from fusion, are no longer present to compete causally with the emergent property instance.
The primary questions for Humphreys's view all concern the distinctive character of fusion: What is the extent of applicability of the fusion model? Do certain consequences of the novelty that fusion emergentism introduces undermine the innovation? Quantum entanglement is held up as an example for fusion. Even if we accept that fusion provides us with a model for quantum entanglement, the question still remains about the plausibility of fusion operation outside cases of quantum entanglement. A more serious worry is whether the novelty of fusion that the base instances are destroyed presents internal problems for the view (Wong 2006). One example is the correlation problem. For the range of special science properties that have empirically established lower-level correlates with which they are copresent, if we are to treat them as fusion emergents, then, as the framework stands, we appear to be committed to denying the copresence of their lower-level correlates, which is empirically implausible. Such worries link back to the issue of the extent of applicability of the view.
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