Emergence in Context

Abstract

This is a book about the multidisciplinary topic of emergence. Science, philosophy of science, and metaphysics have long been concerned with the question of how order, stability, and novelty are possible and how they happen. How can order come out of disorder? We provide a new account of emergence, contextual emergence, that attempts to answer these questions. Contextual emergence is grounded primarily in the sciences, as opposed to logic or metaphysics. It is both an explanatory and ontological account of emergence that gets us beyond the impasse between “weak” and “strong” emergence in the emergence debates. Contextual emergence challenges the “foundationalist” or hierarchical picture of reality. It emphasizes the ontological and explanatory fundamentality of multiscale stability conditions and their contextual constraints, often operating globally over interconnected, interdependent, and interacting entities and their multiscale relations. Contextual emergence focuses on the conditions that make the existence, stability, and persistence of emergent systems and their states and observables possible. These conditions and constraints are irreducibly multiscale relations, so it is not surprising that scientific explanation is often multiscale. Such multiscale conditions act as gatekeepers for systems to access modal possibilities (e.g. reducing or enhancing a system’s degrees of freedom). Using examples from across the sciences ranging from physics to biology to neuroscience and beyond, we demonstrate that there is an empirically well-grounded, viable alternative to ontological reductionism coupled with explanatory antireductionism (weak emergence) and ontological disunity coupled with the impossibility of robust scientific explanation (strong emergence). Central metaphysics of science concerns are also addressed.

Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience

“…Let us now say more about large-scale topological constraints in such multiscale brain networks (see Sporns, 2011;Silberstein & Chemero, 2013;Silberstein, 2021Silberstein, , 2022Pessoa, 2022 for more details). Network analyzes of the brain are based on the thought that brain function is not just relegated to individual regions and connections but emerges instead from the topology of the brain's entire global network, such as the connectome of the brain-as-a-whole.…”

“…The data suggests that such synchrony involving alpha and gamma frequency bands is highly correlated with better performance in the game (Wikstrom et al, 2022). There is an entire discipline called Social Neuroscience devoted to exploring and explaining such cases (Silberstein, 2022) which we will discuss shortly.…”

“…This means new relations/interactions at multiple scales in differing contexts, naturally leads to the emergence of novel entities, properties, laws, etc. In terms of both ontology and explanation, it is best to think of such a world in terms of multiscale contexts and constraints (Bishop et al, 2022). If contextual emergence has a slogan, it is that phenomena at lower levels and smaller scales provides at best a necessary condition for phenomena at higher levels and larger scales.…”

“…The key feature of stability conditions is that they are whatever 'environmental' or contextual features, however concrete or abstract, that we are treating as being outside the system, often at multiple scales, that together make up the full set of conditions for the emergent in question to come into being. That is, stability conditions enable emergence and robustness (Bishop et al, 2022). As discussed in Section 2, we can also treat 'stability conditions' as being a part of the multiscale extended system, as with the case of bio-psycho-social networks.…”

Untitled

“…This implies that the activities at larger scales in the brain are in no way reducible to the behavior of elements at smaller scales, but also that the behavior of elements at smaller scales are in part mutually determined by activities at larger scales. Again, the determination relations in question include a variety of causal relationships, functional relationships, and various constraint-based relations, all of which are context sensitive and interdependent (Silberstein, 2021(Silberstein, , 2022Bishop et al, 2022).…”