Emergence

Mariusz Tabaczek

Description

Over the last several decades, the theories of emergence and downward causation have become arguably the most popular conceptual tools in scientific and philosophical attempts to explain the nature and character of global organization observed in various biological phenomena, from individual cell organization to ecological systems. The theory of emergence acknowledges the reality of layered strata or levels of systems, which are consequences of the appearance of an interacting range of novel qualities.

A closer analysis of emergentism, however, reveals a number of philosophical problems facing this theory. In Emergence, Mariusz Tabaczek offers a thorough analysis of these problems and a constructive proposal of a new metaphysical foundation for both the classic downward causation-based and the new dynamical depth accounts of emergence theory, developed by Terrence Deacon. Tabaczek suggests ways in which both theoretical models of emergentism can be grounded in the classical and the new (dispositionalist) versions of Aristotelianism. This book will have an eager audience in metaphysicians working both in the analytic and the Thomistic traditions, as well as philosophers of science and biology interested in emergence theory and causation.

“Are you writing about yourself again? Do you think people have the time or inclination to read about your life?” my associate Scarlett asked today in my study as she took a casual glance at the manuscript I had just handed to her for her critical comments. Scarlett has been at my side for forty years in good times and bad. She is the first person to read my texts, and a severe critic of everything I say, write and do. No one on earth is capable of upsetting me the way she does; no one on earth has been of benefit and assistance to me the way she has. When several of my friends were appointed to high office after 1989, I could see that they desperately needed someone to give them systematic feedback, instead of the yes-men and lickspittles who surrounded them. The mature and good-natured side of myself I owe chiefly to Scarlett. The Bible says that a woman of fortitude is worth more than rubies; it requires a lot of fortitude, patience, and an unflagging hurricane of energy to stand by me. What am I to say in response? I am writing about myself, but also about a half-century of history of a country in the heart of Europe, and particularly about the history of the sorely-tested Czech Catholic church. I’m not a historian, that’s for sure, and my testimony will be a “subjective” one. How else? Naturally I am also writing my story for the readers of my books, and for those who have attended my lectures. When I read a book or listen to someone’s talk I frequently ask myself: How did this person come to the views they expound? Have they derived them mainly from books, from their study of specialist literature, or are their opinions also backed by the gold of their own personal life experience? Has their vision of the world undergone trials and crises? Did they have to revise or radically reassess their former views sometimes? When I know an author’s life story and how their personality and opinions have evolved, their writings become more vivid, meaningful, credible and immediate. My readers and listeners also have the right to know the internal context of my writing, as well as the external one, not just the historical circumstances and the social and cultural context, but also my life story and the drama of spiritual seeking and the process of maturity; should they wish to, they will find here the key to a deeper understanding of what I try to convey to them in my books and lectures. Before describing what one sees, one should declare where one stands, what is one’s standpoint, and why one has adopted it.
“Are you writing about yourself?” I could also reply that I am writing about God. But is it possible to speak about God and not invest one’s life into that account? Were I to speak about God “objectively” without investing myself in it, I would be speaking about a pallid abstraction. Wouldn’t such an “external God” be merely an idol. Conversely, is it possible to speak about oneself and say nothing about God? Were I to speak about myself and said nothing about God, I could attribute to myself what is His and become stuck for eternity in a trap of self-centeredness or drown myself in narcissistic superficiality. When Narcissus leans over the surface of the lake he sees only himself, and his eye remains fixed to the surface and his own image on the surface. This superficiality turns out to be fatal for him. The gaze of the believer must penetrate deeper. Only then will the depth not become a malignant trap. Two realities, crucial for our life, are invisible: our self, and God. We see many manifestations that can be attributed to our self and others to God, but neither our self nor God present themselves to us things that we can point to and which we can localize with certainty. The mystics—and particularly my beloved Meister Eckhart—have asserted one very profound thing that is also extremely dangerous: God and I are one and the same. This position can indeed be dangerous. When, from our standpoint, God has coalesced with our self, in the sense that we have substituted God for our self, then we have lost our soul. When we rigorously separate the two and start to regard God as something entirely external and separate from our soul, we have lost the living God, and all we have left is an idol, something, just “a thing among things.” The abiding task of theology is to point to that dynamic intermingling of immanence and transcendence. Perhaps we could speak about the link between our self and God in the terms used by the Council of Chalcedon to describe the relationship between the human and the divine in Christ: they are inseparable and yet unmixed. If I take seriously the mystery of the Incarnation—the heart of the Christian faith—and comprehend it not as some chance occurrence in the past, but as the key to understanding the entire drama of the history of salvation, the history of the relationship between God and people, then I cannot think of humanity and divinity separately. When I say “I,” I am also saying “God” because the human being without God is not whole. It is only in relation to God that we can start to sense that our self is structured somewhat differently than it seems when viewed with the superficial, naïve gaze of everyday life. Beyond our “ego” we sometimes get a glimpse of something for which the mystics and modern depth psychology strive to find an adequate expression—“the inner man,” the “deep self,” das Selbst... Meister Eckhart used to speak about the “inner God,” the “God beyond God”; some modern and post-modern theologians (and a-theists) speak about “God beyond the God of theism.” Perhaps it is not until we come to see the naïve, objectified understanding of God and the similarly naïve understanding of the “self” as illusions, that we will be capable of grasping Eckhart’s statement: “God and I are one”; we will comprehend that it is neither blasphemous self-deification nor covert impiety. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me, wrote Meister Eckhart. And we find something similar in the writings of St. Augustine: The love with which you love God and the seeking whereby you seek Him, are the love and seeking whereby God seeks and loves you. Augustine wrote countless tracts about God, but what is maybe most inspirational to those who still dare to talk about God is his boldness to present candidly his own life story and say to the reader: Seek, friend. The solution to the puzzle, the key to the meaning of this story is God. You will find God only by knowing yourself; you will only find yourself by seeking God. Augustine thereby invented a new literary genre, and a new way to reflect on faith: autobiography as a framework of philosophical theology. (excerpted from introduction)

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Terrence Deacon
• Analytic
• Aristotelianism
• Metaphysics
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268105006
• Langue: English

Extrait

EMERGENCE
Emergence
Towards a New Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science
MARIUSZ TABACZEK
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tabaczek, Mariusz, 1980–author.
Title: Emergence : towards a new metaphysics and philosophy of science / Mariusz Robert Tabaczek.
Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019011970 (print) | LCCN 2019013532 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104993 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105006 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104979 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104972 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Complexity (Philosophy) | Emergence (Philosophy) | Causation. | Metaphysics. | Science—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC B105.C473 (ebook) | LCC B105.C473 T33 2019 (print) | DDC 110—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011970
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
To Michael J. Dodds, O.P. for all he has taught me
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled, Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head! Philosophy , that lean’d on Heav’n before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense ! See Mystery to Mathematics fly! In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
—Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1743)
Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest. The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
—Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (1733–34)
CONTENTS
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Causation in Philosophy and Scientific Explanation
PART 1 Metaphysical Aspects of Emergence and Downward Causation
CHAPTER 1 The Central Dogma of Emergentism
CHAPTER 2 Metaphysical Challenges for Emergence and Downward Causation
CHAPTER 3 Dynamical Depth and Causal Nonreductionism
PART 2 Dispositions/Powers Metaphysics and Emergence
CHAPTER 4 Theories of Causation in Analytic Metaphysics
CHAPTER 5 Dispositional Metaphysics and the Corresponding View of Causation
CHAPTER 6 From Powers to Forms and Teleology: New Aristotelianism
CHAPTER 7 Dispositional Metaphysics, Downward Causation, and Dynamical Depth
Conclusion
APPENDIX 1 Potency and Act
APPENDIX 2 Process Metaphysics of Emergence
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FIGURES
FIGURE 2.1 An example of the collapse of DC into physical causation, according to Jaegwon Kim
FIGURE 2.2 Examples of feedback causal loops according to Scott
FIGURE 2.3 O’Connor and Wong’s dynamical EM model of the evolution of system S over time
FIGURE 2.4 The final step of Kim’s causal exclusion argument
FIGURE 2.5 Macdonald and Macdonald’s refutation of Kim’s causal exclusion argument
FIGURE 3.1 Two general classes of autocells depicted as geometric constructions
FIGURE 4.1 A neuron-firing network depicting Menzies’s theoretical example of causes decreasing probability
FIGURE 4.2 Lac operon in Escherichia coli as an example of double prevention
FIGURE 4.3 Interactive fork
FIGURE 4.4 Conjunctive fork
FIGURE 5.1 Classification of the major positions among dispositionalists concerning the relation between dispositional and categorical properties
FIGURE 5.2 Neuron causal diagrams
FIGURE 5.3 Vector modeling of causes
FIGURE 5.4 Composition of causes and vectors addition
FIGURE 5.5 Multidimensional causal vector diagrams
FIGURE 6.1 The process of NaCl dissolving in water
FIGURE 7.1 Vector model of the reciprocity and simultaneity of causes in autogenesis
FIGURE 7.2 Vector model depicting “causality of absences”
FIGURE A.1 Various kinds of potency
FIGURE A.2 Various kinds of act
TABLES
TABLE 2.1. Various interpretations of the causal factor in DC grouped in four categories
TABLE 2.2. Various interpretations of the object of DC grouped in four categories
TABLE 4.1. Strengths and weaknesses of the six main views of causation in analytic metaphysics
PREFACE
Emergence is an extended and reconsidered version of the two central parts of a large interdisciplinary research project I pursued during the five years of my doctoral studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California (2011–16). The original project places the metaphysics of emergence and downward causation within a more elaborate and thorough account of the history of causal explanation in philosophy of nature and in natural science, which is only briefly summarized in the introduction. It also explores the panentheistic theory of divine action through emergent processes in nature, offering an alternative theological interpretation of emergence in terms of the new Aristotelianism and the Thomistic concept of the concurrent action of God in the world. This new analysis of the theological implications of emergence is a subject of a separate and upcoming book project of mine.
The theory of emergence in its contemporary version and the concept of downward causation that is related to it were both developed in a very specific context of the recent debate on nonreductionism in metaphysics and philosophy of science. This debate, in turn, is deeply related to the origins of the systems approach to biology, ecology, climatology, psychology, medicine, economy, engineering, and other branches of natural science. Moreover, the theory of downward causation is even more specifically related to the research on the character and typology of cause-effect dependencies in nature. This topic has recently become an object of a hot debate, leading to a number of important publications. Some of them take the interdisciplinary approach, trying to bring metaphysics and philosophy of nature into a conversation with the methodology of natural science and metascientific reflections on the outcomes of empirical research.
As the new approach to the analysis of dynamical systems progressed, it became more and more apparent that the modern general conceptual commitment to explaining causation in terms of mechanistically understood efficient causes alone is inherently limited and insufficient. What is more, Hume’s skepticism about the reality of ontological relations and dependency between causal relata—together with his definition of causation in terms of atomic events conjoined in the mind of the observer—became even more irrelevant in the context of the deep conviction of many contemporary scientists about the intrinsic and multi-level interrelatedness of parts building dynamical nonliving and living wholes. In addition to the analysis of the emergence of those wholes, contemporary scientists are also investigating ways in which the participant mereological substrates of wholes are changed due to their participation in larger dynamical systems.
The acknowledgment of the need to extend our notion of causation leaves contemporary scientists and philosophers of science with the question concerning the most suitable way of proceeding in such revision. Many of them think that what we need is a plurality of ways and approaches that will jointly contribute to a reductionist account of ontologically real situations of multifaceted causal dependencies in nature. In the context of numerous difficulties challenging all causal theories proposed within this project—pursued in analytic metaphysics—it has been suggested that we should return to Aristotle’s fourfold division of causes as the most fitting metaphysical response and background of the new science of complex systems. This is the argument brought up by Claus Emmeche, Simo Køppe, and Frederic Stjernfelt; Michael Silberstein; Charbel Niño El-Hani and Antonio Marcos Pereira; Alvaro Moreno and Jon Umerez; and others, which we will discuss in the main text. As we shall see, their suggestion finds a response in analytic metaphysics, as one of its branches of research rediscovers the importance of the distinction between potentiality and actuality, expressed in the realization of dispositions (powers) of entities (causal relata) to act and react in a specific way. The main goal of this book is to proceed from the preliminary suggestion of the thinkers mentioned here and offer a constructive proposal of the reinterpretation of emergence in terms of both the old and the new (analytic) versions of Aristotelianism.
Having specified the goal of Emergence , I must briefly describe some aspects of its content and structure. The story about the origin of Aristotle’s metaphysics and the history of its reception, and the history of his theory of four causes in particular, are both long and complicated. I cannot offer a complete and comprehensive critical account of their development here. At the same time, my analysis of the metaphysical aspects of emergentism and of the reinterpretation of emergentism in terms of the old and the new Aristotelianism would be lacking if it failed to refer to, or to try to place them within, the context of the whole history of causation in philosophy and scientific explanation. In an attempt to forge a middle way, I will offer in the extended introduction a short overview and evaluation of some major turning points in this history. I will naturally spend more time presenting the origin and the definition of Aristotle’s theory of four causes and its further qualification in the teaching of Aquinas. I will describe the causal reductionism in modern science and philosophy rather briefly, but still informatively. Moving to causal nonreductionism in the most recent philosophy of science,