The Metaphysics of Emergence

R. Campbell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137502377
• eBook ISBN: 9781137502384
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Logic in Philosophy

This book argues that a plausible account of emergence requires replacing the traditional assumption that what primarily exists are particular entities with generic processes. Traversing contemporary physics and issues of identity over time, it then proceeds to develop a metaphysical taxonomy of emergent entities and of the character of human life.

1

Processes and Entities

1.1 Change and stability

The prevailing cosmological theory today is that everything in the universe has emerged, in some sense, since the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago. This theory is supported by the evidence that the universe is expanding, apparently at an accelerating rate. Thus, it might seem that the ancient dispute between those, such as Aristotle, who argued that the universe could not have had a beginning, and those espousing a Christian view that it occurred ex nihilo, has finally been resolved. But no! There are still others today who argue that the Big Bang was a ‘singularity’ produced by some pre-existing situation. Either way, that the phenomena which constitute our current universe have emerged over time, beginning with a moment of infinite density and extraordinary heat such that the current laws of physics did not obtain, can no longer seriously be gainsaid. As we shall see, shortly after the Big Bang, a crucial event of symmetry-breaking occurred, which made possible the emergence of the world we know today.

Despite this widespread consensus, how the phenomena of emergence are to be understood is still far from clear. In recent times philosophers have been engaged in strenuous debates about how these phenomena are to be understood, and whether emergence in some sense is of fundamental metaphysical significance, or is a mere epiphenomenon. The debates are often confused because, as we shall see, there is not just one concept of emergence, and important distinctions are frequently ignored.

One of the theses of this book is that a coherent and plausible account of the various types of emergence cannot be articulated unless we first engage in a confrontation between two contemporary metaphysical visions. One has deep roots in the Western philosophical tradition; the other has had only a few advocates in that tradition until recently, although, on some readings, similar views can be found in Eastern thought. These two visions offer alternative approaches to explaining the manifest phenomena of change. In a preliminary and simplified way, we can sketch the contrast I have in mind as turning on differing strategies for understanding change and stability.

The first approach has been powerfully dominant throughout Western intellectual history. A simplified formulation is that it assumes that stability is basic, and that change is what requires explanation. The motivating thought seems to have been that if things remain the same, no differences occur to generate puzzlement. Since it appears that nevertheless changes do occur in the world, the challenge for this approach is to work out a fundamental conceptual framework in which the possibility of change can be rendered intelligible.

The other approach is to take observable change and movement as the manifestation of underlying processes. That processes are necessarily temporal and internally dynamic is not seen as problematic. Rather, for those who take this approach, given that everything is fundamentally in process, the challenge is to explain the emergence and apparent stability of enduring things.

These opposing challenges raise a number of fundamental questions. How does the phenomenon of change fit into our understanding of the world? Indeed, which is the more fundamental: change or endurance? How is their co-existence to be explained? How are we to understand how enduring things can maintain their identity through changes? And how is it that we humans who theorize about such issues have emerged from the myriad of processes which comprise our world? This book will address these questions.

1.2 The need for a new metaphysics

Amongst the ancient Greeks, the most carefully worked out account of how change is possible was devised by Aristotle, on the foundation of two assumptions: (a) something always remains the same throughout any changes it undergoes; and (b) individual entities, things in the strong sense, are the primary way of being. While eventually many of the Aristotelian principles of explanation were discarded in more recent centuries, rarely did philosophers in this tradition challenge the two metaphysical assumptions which underpinned the system they were rejecting. The point of the narrative I will construct is to show how these assumptions continue to frame one of the prominent debates in contemporary metaphysics.

Rarely have philosophers in this tradition even noticed how questionable are these assumptions. One of the few philosophers who did try to free his thinking from their dominance was Hegel, early in the 19th century. He recognized that the concept of becoming, which incorporates both the concepts of being and its negation, is fundamental to understanding all phenomena (Encyclopaedia Logic, §88). But despite saying that the dynamic presence of reality in itself is “process and result rolled into one” and that “the Idea is essentially process” (Encyclopaedia Logic, §215) so strong was the traditional commitment to substances (= entities, individual things) that even he felt the need to affirm that everything turns on grasping and expressing that the True is both substance and subject (Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface). His way of reconciling this with his emphasis on becoming was to say that the True is the whole, and that “it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself” (11).

The first philosopher in recent times to argue systematically that process, rather than substance, should be taken as the fundamental category was A. N. Whitehead, in his Process and Reality, published in 1929. But he too found it difficult to shake off the influence of the metaphysical tradition, insisting that what is actual is atomic (1929, 53), as we will see.

Those voices dissenting from the tradition have not, however, persuaded many contemporary philosophers to abandon its basic assumptions. After a period in the mid-20th century when those influenced by logical positivism tried (unsuccessfully) to deny any legitimacy to metaphysics, recent decades have seen a revival of interest in metaphysical issues. In particular, towards the end of the 20th century a new orthodoxy arose in Britain, America and Australia amongst those engaging with such questions: physicalism.

This new doctrine presents a reductive micro-physicalist picture which is has been adopted by certain philosophers and by some popular writers alike. Yet it is not so novel; in fact, it is framed in two ways by much older metaphysical theories. Firstly, it continues to accord priority to entities: Things in the strong sense. To cite just two influential examples, Jaegwon Kim has recently asserted that “all the things that exist are physical things – either basic bits of matter or made up of bits of matter” (2002, 640; the same thought is expressed in his 2005, 7). Similarly, in introducing a set of essays on Physicalism and Its Discontents, Barry Loewer has characterized physicalism as claiming that “all facts obtain in virtue of the distribution of the fundamental entities and properties – whatever they turn out to be – of completed fundamental physics” (2001, 37). All that happens in the world is determined ultimately by the behaviour of these ‘basic bits of matter’, the ‘fundamental entities and their properties’, which are assumed to be the basic ingredients which compose the world.

Some philosophers have recognized that contemporary physics challenges this first assumption. The history of scientific theorizing is the story of a long drawn-out intellectual effort to account adequately for the findings of experience in a way not distorted by the two assumptions which the tradition took from Aristotle. Only recently is it becoming clear that the recent advances in physical theory require renouncing both.

As we will see, physics in the 20th century saw the relegation of Newtonian mechanics to the status of a convenient approximation, at best, of the behaviour of middle-sized entities moving at relatively slow speeds. It therefore can no longer serve as a fundamental description of physical reality which philosophers can take as informing their understanding of the world in which we live. Newtonian physics offered a relatively simple and readily comprehensible model of quasi-billiard-balls moving and colliding in absolute space. The geometry of that space was Euclidean. That the microscopic could be understood in terms of the familiar concepts applicable to slow moving, middle-sized entities was in fact legitimized by Euclidean geometry. For that is the only geometry which admits similar but incongruent figures. That is, it is the only geometry in which size has no effect on geometrical properties. The supplanting of such an absolute homogeneous space by the Riemannian geometry of relativity theory is but one of many theoretical advances wrought in the previous century. One consequence is that the microphysical level no longer operates in familiar ways, and that has thrown up a series of conceptual conundrums yet to be fully resolved. Deep theoretical inconsistencies remain.

A number of basic features have, however, already become clear. Space can no longer be taken as absolute, as Newton thought. Rather, the speed of light is the new absolute; its speed is not affected by the movement of its source. The effect of this is that the dimensions of space and time can no longer be taken as independent. Another consequence of special relativity, plus the principle of the conservation of energy, is that it forces a field physics. This is because any transmission of energy from one place to another has to be across some space and will, according to special relativity, take some time. Again, whereas for Newtonian physics, energy is basically kinetic, in relativistic mechanics, this is only a good approximation for velocities much less than the speed of light. And for Einstein, mass is no longer an unchangeable measure of the amount of bodily stuff (= matter?) in an entity. Rather, mass and energy are convertible according to his basic equation: E = mc².

This undermining of Newtonian physics means that the continuing talk of ‘elementary particles’ is seriously misleading. Even at a lay level it can be argued that contemporary physics shows that phenomena at the quantum level can no longer be thought of as micro-entities, miniscule ‘things’. Although the word “particle” continues to have currency in commentary on contemporary physics, it can only be used now in the loosest possible way when one is describing quantum-level phenomena, for these phenomena can no longer be conceptualized as ultimate, indivisible entities: tiny corpuscles.

Light and other electromagnetic waves take the form of quantized, self-propagating oscillatory electromagnetic field disturbances (photons). Because these disturbances are quantized, they are particle-like, but they are not particles, in the philosophically serious sense of ‘basic bits of matter’, fundamental entities. Because there has been this mutual influence between the physical and metaphysical traditions, the revolutionary conceptual changes wrought in contemporary physics call the assumptions of traditional metaphysics seriously into question. If we are to work out an alternative metaphysics adequate to our best scientific theorizing, a radically new approach is required.

1.3 An overview of this project

In the next chapter I will construct a narrative about the Western intellectual tradition demonstrating how some of the metaphysical assumptions propounded in Ancient Greece have persisted, in transmuted forms, until today. It is well known that the new physics of the 17th century abandoned much of the metaphysical machinery which had been developed by the medievals on Aristotelian foundations. Less recognition has been accorded to the fact that this new physics challenged neither of Aristotle’s two basic assumptions; indeed they were entrenched in the ‘corpuscular philosophy’ of Robert Boyle, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and others, which revived ancient atomism in a more robust and scientifically sophisticated form. And, as I have already suggested, those assumptions still hold sway amongst many philosophers today.

I will then present in Chapter 3 a somewhat parallel narrative tracing the evolution and interpretation of physics. There is a sense in which the new ‘corpuscular philosophy’ of the 17th century underpinned the invention of what became a new science. But that atomistic model, as easy to visualize and comprehend as a game of billiards, still holds the imagination of many present-day philosophers in its thrall, despite their giving up explicitly atomistic models. It lives on in the contemporary philosophical view that the world is ultimately composed of ‘basic particulars’, a notion which echoes John Locke’s core commitment to everything being particular. One continuing theme throughout this book will be a consideration of this notion.

Chapter 2 and 3 are scene-setting. Thereafter I will begin exploring the alternative metaphysical vision, the one which takes processes, rather than individual entities, as the primary way of being. In Chapter 4, I will consider the logic of processes in some detail. Then in Chapter 5, I will consider how by taking processes as fundamental it becomes possible to resolve the persistent logical puzzles generated by recognizing that something can remain the same while changing over time.

On the foundation laid in those two chapters I am then in a position to address the challenge of explaining how, if everything is in process, it is possible that enduring things persist as relatively stable. Accordingly, in Chapter 6, I will outline a metaphysical taxonomy of emergent entities, proposing that they emerge in organizations of systems of processes. Some entities emerge as energy wells; they are cohesive and resistant to many kinds of external forces. But there are many other kinds of entities, including all biological organisms, which persist in a far-from-thermodynamic-equilibrium state. That fact poses a genuine puzzle: how is that possible? That issue will be addressed in Chapter 7, which presents an evolutionary taxonomy of life and action. That leads to a discussion of the emergence of modern sapient humans and their social groups and institutions.

The concept of emergence, as foreshadowed, is controversial. Accordingly, Chapter 8 will seek to clarify the various concepts articulated by the word, and will assess objections brought against its coherence. A complementary examination of physicalism is the topic for Chapter 9. Since so much of the current debates around these topics assume that the only alternative to physicalism is some version of Cartesian dualism, Chapter 10 will discuss some of the issues raised by the mental activity of human beings. The book will end with some further reflections on issues underlying the previous presentation.

1.4 A terminological difficulty

Discussing these issues is complicated by the lack of any settled agreement on what English word to use to discuss one of the concepts central to this project. All the available possible words which might be thought relevant have a wide range of meanings. Inevitably, in the interest of clarity and rigour, I must simply choose which word I shall use and prescribe the sense in which I will be using it.

The problem concerns what I have thus far been calling individual entities. Aristotle assigned foundational metaphysical status to the category of these concrete, enduring, particular things. They were for him the primary way of being. He called them ousia, using the abstract noun formed from the Greek verb einai, “to be”. His paradigm examples were human persons and horses. Unfortunately, the medievals interpreted Aristotle’s ousia as meaning ‘substratum’ – a persisting, underlying identity – and so translated ousia into Latin as substantia, and most English translations of Aristotle’s writings echo the Latin, translating it as “substance”. How this came about is that the earliest Latin translations of some of Aristotle’s texts tried out a number of ways of translating ousia, but by the 4th century only two remained in use: essentia and substantia. Augustine preferred the latter, since for him only the Creator possesses the fullness of being which the word essentia suggests. In his commentaries on Aristotle, Boethius adopted Augustine’s usage, and thereafter the medievals followed that unfortunate precedent (Sachs 1999, lviii–lix; Owens 1963, 143). That choice, however, severs the concept...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Processes and Entities
• 2  The Metaphysics of Particular Entities
• 3  Conceptual Shifts in Physics
• 4  The Category of Generic Processes
• 5  Identity through Change
• 6  A Metaphysical Taxonomy of Emergent Entities
• 7  An Evolutionary Taxonomy of Types of Action and Life
• 8  The Concept of Emergence
• 9  The World According to Physicalism
• 10  The Mental Activity of Human Beings
• 11  Further Reflections
• Bibliography
• Index