Emergence, Reduction and Supervenience: A Varied Landscape

Butterfield, Jeremy

doi:10.1007/s10701-011-9549-0

Cited by 132 publications

(135 citation statements)

References 58 publications

(35 reference statements)

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“…11 The debate is wide-ranging and subtle. The most perspicacious of many noteworthy contributions is Butterfield's (2011b). He argues that emergence, properly understood as novelty and robustness, is compatible with reduction, so that one may have both.…”

Section: Phase Transitions and Finite Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Approximation and Idealization: Why the Difference Matters

2012

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. It is proposed that we use the term "approximation" for inexact description of a target system and "idealization" for another system whose properties also provide an inexact description of the target system. Since systems generated by a limiting process can often have quite unexpected-even inconsistent-properties, familiar limit processes used in statistical physics can fail to provide idealizations but merely provide approximations. The University of Chicago Press and

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Section: Phase Transitions and Finite Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Approximation and Idealization: Why the Difference Matters

2012

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“…I have analysed the relations between reduction, emergence and supervenience, elsewhere [1,2]. In short, I construe these notions as follows.…”

Section: Reductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, I will briefly endorse some views of Sober's about reduction and causation, and List & Menzies' recent defence of top-down causation ( §2.2 and 2.4). My overall views are defended in detail elsewhere [1,2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laws, causation and dynamics at different levels

Butterfield

2011

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I have two main aims. The first is general, and more philosophical (§2). The second is specific, and more closely related to physics (§§3 and 4). The first aim is to state my general views about laws and causation at different ‘levels’. The main task is to understand how the higher levels sustain notions of law and causation that ‘ride free’ of reductions to the lower level or levels. I endeavour to relate my views to those of other symposiasts. The second aim is to give a framework for describing dynamics at different levels, emphasizing how the various levels' dynamics can mesh or fail to mesh. This framework is essentially that of elementary dynamical systems theory. The main idea will be, for simplicity, to work with just two levels, dubbed ‘micro’ and ‘macro’, which are related by coarse-graining. I use this framework to describe, in part, the first four of Ellis' five types of top-down causation.

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“…The corresponding eigenvectors together with the data points belonging to them define the neural state space partition relevant for the identification of mental states [46]. 3 Finally, the result of the partitioning can be inspected in the originally recorded time series to check whether mental states are reliably assigned to the correct episodes in the EEG dynamics. The study by Allefeld et al [23] shows perfect agreement between the distinction of normal and epileptic states and the 2 The reference to phenomenal families à la Chalmers must not be misunderstood to mean that contextual emergence provides an option to derive the appearance of phenomenal experience from brain behaviour.…”

Section: Empirical Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…its qualia character, is not addressed at all. 3 In principle, there are as many partition cells as there are eigenvalues of the Markov matrix. If its spectrum shows time-scale gaps, they may be used to establish a hierarchy of refined partitions.…”

Section: Empirical Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying mental states from neural states under mental constraints

Atmanspacher

2011

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This article emphasizes how the recently proposed interlevel relation of contextual emergence for scientific descriptions combines 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' kinds of influence. As emergent behaviour arises from features pertaining to lower level descriptions, there is a clear bottom-up component. But, in general, this is not sufficient to formulate interlevel relations stringently. Higher level contextual constraints are needed to equip the lower level description with those details appropriate for the desired higher level description to emerge. These contextual constraints yield some kind of 'downward confinement', a term that avoids the sometimes misleading notion of 'downward causation'. This will be illustrated for the example of relations between (lower level) neural states and (higher level) mental states.

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Emergence, Reduction and Supervenience: A Varied Landscape

Abstract: This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between physical theories.

Cited by 132 publications

References 58 publications

Approximation and Idealization: Why the Difference Matters

Approximation and Idealization: Why the Difference Matters

Laws, causation and dynamics at different levels

Identifying mental states from neural states under mental constraints

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