Complexity and Philosophy: RE-IMAGINING EMERGENCE: PART 1
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1532-7000
Autores Tópico(s)Complex Systems and Decision Making
ResumoPara a minha querida Carolina:De toda a correntezaQue tudo vai levar...Rio que vai pro mar (por Bebel Gilberto Cancao Rio)Certainly, by not using language we could make silence function as a symbol of the non-articulated; but, then the articulated aspect ofthat non-articulated will totally be lost sight of.Toshihiko Izutsu (1977)Note to reader: This paper is the first half of a two part project. The second part will be published in the next issue of E:CO. Sometimes reference will be made to later sections, some of which may be found in Part 2. Here is the complete Table of Contents for both Part 1 and Part 2:Part 1 (This Issue)* Introduction: Imagining and Re-imagining Emergence;* Imaginably and Possibility;* From Typologies to Prototypes: Emergents as Natural Complexes, and;* What Emergents or Emergence are Not.Part 2 (Next Issue)* Chemistry An Inspiration for Re-Imagining Emergence* Self-Transcending Constructions and a Provisional Black Box Model* Combinatorics, Multi-foldedness, and Self-Transcendent Novelty* Emergent Wholes and Downward Causation* Transcending the Black Box ModelINTRODUCTION: IMAGINING AND RE-IMAGINING EMERGENCEAs the science of complex systems has rapidly expanded over the past three decades, the study of emergence has dramatically shifted from hovering on the edge of credibility to being embraced by scientists, philosophers, and other disciplines concerned with its findings. Even in the abstruse arena of theoretical physics emergence is now being raised up in an almost frenzy of enthusiasm, wherein space, time, space/time, continuity, discreteness, particulateness, scientific laws, entire theories are now exclaimed to be emergent! Although such sentiments are seen by some as a long-awaited vindication, this wholesale round-up of what was previously enigmatic within the conceptual fence of emergent phenomena has instead greatly amplified the vulnerability of the idea of emergence to misinterpretation. At the same time, we also can discern an unfortunate contamination of how emergence is being conceived, e.g., speculations founded on mathematical, scientific, and philosophical illiteracy, unctuous parades of inflated bombast (absential? ententional?), and a glaring neglect of basics rules of logical inference.In order to remedy these kinds of miscontruings, this paper is offering new guidelines for how we might re-imagine emergence so as to bring to the fore what I think are the cogent, salient, and substantive implications of emergence. I call this re-imagining emergence since the emphasis here will be on clarifying and reinvigorating images and concepts upon which we rely in conceiving emergence. My stress on image and follows from a long and proven tradition in how scientists envisage their findings and the theories built from them, as well as in how these theories are interpreted by other commentators. Consider these remarks from the physicist, philosopher, and historian Mario Bunge (2011: 20), an early promoter of emergence in the contemporary period, But mechanistic philosophers did not invent the theory of change without novelty; mechanism just adopted, reinforced, and rationalized the of change as a circulation of a limited stock of forms (emphasis added). The term picture here refers to an understanding couched in terms of visualizable repre- sentations, in this case the Anaxagorian tenet of change as a rearrangement of a circumscribed set of seminal forms. One of Bunge's points was that this rearrangement image of change precludes the possibility of an emergence of genuine novelty since rearrangement, taken in a simple, machine-like way doesn't add anything new to what is being rearranged. To be sure there is another way to rearrangement that does allow for the introduction of novelty, namely, specific recombinatorial operations that will be discussed in Part 2. …
Referência(s)