In Search of Ontological Emergence: Diachronic, But Non-supervenient

Abstract

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are based on supervenience, with supervenience being an ontologically synchronic relation of determination. This conception of emergence as a relation of supervenience, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence that are widespread in self-organizing and nonlinear dynamical systems, including distributed cognitive systems. In these dynamical systems, an emergent property is ontological (i.e., the causal capacities of P, where P is an emergent feature, are not reducible to causal capacities of the parts, and may exert a top-down causal influence on the parts of the system) and diachronic (i.e., the relata of emergence are temporally extended, and P emerges as a result of some dynamical lower-level processes that unfold in real time).

Emergence within social systems

“…Similarly, Kirchhoff (2014) delivers a model of diachronic emergence within dynamic systems, in this case where complex interactions cause an emergent process to unfold. Even more radical views of emergence can be found in Humphreys (1996Humphreys ( , 1997, which claim that emergence is a matter of the fusion of the base elements (such that those base elements no longer exist on their own to offer worrying causal competition with the fused product), and in Ganeri (2011), which offers the view (in part on the behalf of ancient Indian philosophers) that the elements of the base transform into the new emergent substance.…”

Embodiment and Emergence: Navigating an Epistemic and Metaphysical Dilemma

“…417-41), that Kim's synchronic conception of emergence may not be the only way to go. See alsoKirchhoff (2014);Humphreys (2016).…”