Bedau, Mark; Paul Humphreys (eds);
Emergence: contemporary readings in philosophy and science
MIT Press Bradford Books, 2008, 464 pages
ISBN 0262524759, 9780262524759
topics: | philosophy | science | emergence
Are there really beliefs? Or are we learning (from neuroscience and psychology, presumably) that, strictly speaking, beliefs are figments of our imagination, items in a superseded ontology? Are centers of gravity in your ontology? [argument / thought expt from "Intentional Stance"] philosophers feel when it comes to beliefs (and other mental items) one must be either a realist or an eliminative materialist. ... my analogizing beliefs to centers of gravity has been attacked from both sides of the ontological dichotomy, by philosophers who think it is simply obvious that centers of gravity are useful fictions, and by philosophers who think it is simply obvious that centers of gravity are perfectly real: The trouble with these supposed parallels . . . is that they are all strictly speaking false, although they are no doubt useful simplifications for many purposes. It is false, for example, that the gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Moon involves two point masses; but it is a good enough first approximation for many calculations. However, this is not at all what Dennett really wants to say about intentional states. For he insists that to adopt the intentional stance and interpret an agent as acting on certain beliefs and desires is to discern a pattern in his actions which is genuinely there (a pattern which is missed if we instead adopt a scientific stance): Dennett certainly does not hold that the role of intentional ascriptions is merely to give us a useful approximation to a truth that can be more accurately expressed in non-intentional terms.3 Compare this with Fred Dretske’s4 equally confident assertion of realism: I am a realist about centers of gravity. . . . The earth obviously exerts a gravitational attraction on all parts of the moon—not just its center of gravity. The resultant force, a vector sum, acts through a point, but this is something quite different. One should be very clear about what centers of gravity are before deciding whether to be literal about them, before deciding whether or not to be a center-of-gravity realist. (ibid., p. 511) trivial abstract object: Dennett’s lost sock center: the point defined as the center of the smallest sphere that can be inscribed around all the socks I have ever lost in my life. [has] the same metaphysical status as centers of gravity. centers of gravity are real because they are (somehow) good abstract objects. I have claimed that beliefs are best considered to be abstract objects rather like centers of gravity. Dennett's position: a mild and intermediate sort of realism is a positively attractive position, patterns A to F. Are they different or same? Dennett reveals that pattern A to F were Generated by having a program write ten lines, each w ten dots then ten blanks, with noise: A to F: 25% 10% 25% 1% 33% 50%. Chaitin's definition of randomness as incompressibility. How many bits do we need to transmit the image? a. all 900 bits - needed for F b. "ten square patterns", except for dots at 55, 73, etc. - may be smaller for patterns with greater "regularity" - B, D etc. Any shorter description is a description of a real pattern in the data.
Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Sources xiii Introduction 1
Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence 1 The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism 19 Brian P. McLaughlin 2 On the Idea of Emergence 61 Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim 3 Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness 69 John Searle 4 Emergence and Supervenience 81 Brian P. McLaughlin 5 Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence 99 William C. Wimsatt 6 How Properties Emerge 111 Paul Humphreys 7 Making Sense of Emergence 127 Jaegwon Kim 8 Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence 155 Mark A. Bedau 9 Real Patterns 189 Daniel C. Dennett
Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence 10 More Is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science 221 P. W. Anderson 11 Emergence 231 Andrew Assad and Norman H. Packard 12 Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex 235 Thomas Schelling 13 Alternative Views of Complexity 249 Herbert Simon 14 The Theory of Everything 259 Robert B. Laughlin and David Pines 15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence 269 James P. Crutchfield 16 Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence 287 Edmund M. A. Ronald, Moshe Sipper, and Mathieu S. Capcarre`re 17 Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies 305 Steen Rasmussen, Nils A. Baas, Bernd Mayer, and Martin Nillson
Introduction to Background and Polemics 18 Newtonianism, Reductionism, and the Art of Congressional Testimony 345 Stephen Weinberg 19 Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations 359 Ernest Nagel 20 Chaos 375 James P. Crutchfield, J. Doyne Farmer, Norman H. Packard, and Robert S. Shaw 21 Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics 387 Stephen Wolfram 22 Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis) 395 Jerry Fodor 23 Supervenience 411 David Chalmers 24 The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation 427 Jaegwon Kim