Well, I agree that that fake explanation is used too often, and that it only gets any cred because it’s from the right literature genre. But I don’t think the whole of work in emergence can really be reduced to a mystery to worship. Certainly “emergence” is a stupid noun, just like “Red-hood” is a stupid noun. And that’s a wonderful exercise to shut up the anti-reductionist movement based around emergence.
But “emergently arising” and “arising” can be given useful different meanings without stretching things too far, specially if “emergent” is contrasted with “resultant”.
The origin of the modern concept of emergence can be traced to the middle of the nineteenth century when realist philosophers first began pondering the deep dissimilarities between causality in the fields of physics and chemistry. The classical example of causality in physics is a collision between two molecules or other rigid objects. Even in the case of several colliding molecules the overall effect is a simple addition. If, for example, one molecule is hit by a second one in one direction and by a third one in a different direction the composite effect will be the same as the sum of the two separate effects: the first molecule will end up in the same final position if the other two hit it simultaneously or if one collision happens before the other. In short, in these causal interactions there are no surprises, nothing is produced over and above what is already there. But when two molecules interact chemically an entirely new entity may emerge, as when hydrogen and oxygen interact to form water. Water has properties that are not possessed by its component parts: oxygen and hydrogen are gases at room temperature while water is liquid. And water has capacities distinct from those of its parts: adding oxygen or hydrogen to a fire fuels it while adding water extinguishes it.
-- Manuel Delanda
Delanda is one of those anti-reductionists that I was talking about, but nonetheless I still think he gives useful and viable meanings to “emergent” and “resultant” here , though I think his arguments against reductionism are just plain silly. They leave room for reducing any “emergent property” of a whole to the interactions of its parts, so as far as I can tell his arguments leave plenty of room for reductionism.
Well, I agree that that fake explanation is used too often, and that it only gets any cred because it’s from the right literature genre. But I don’t think the whole of work in emergence can really be reduced to a mystery to worship. Certainly “emergence” is a stupid noun, just like “Red-hood” is a stupid noun. And that’s a wonderful exercise to shut up the anti-reductionist movement based around emergence.
But “emergently arising” and “arising” can be given useful different meanings without stretching things too far, specially if “emergent” is contrasted with “resultant”.
-- Manuel Delanda
Delanda is one of those anti-reductionists that I was talking about, but nonetheless I still think he gives useful and viable meanings to “emergent” and “resultant” here , though I think his arguments against reductionism are just plain silly. They leave room for reducing any “emergent property” of a whole to the interactions of its parts, so as far as I can tell his arguments leave plenty of room for reductionism.