- Title Pages
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Sources
- Introduction
- Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence
-
1 The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism -
2 On the Idea of Emergence -
3 Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness -
4 Emergence and Supervenience -
5 Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence -
6 How Properties Emerge -
7 Making Sense of Emergence Jaegwon Kim -
8 Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence -
9 Real Patterns - Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence
-
10 More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science -
11 Emergence -
12 Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex -
13 Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon -
14 The Theory of Everything -
15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence -
16 Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence -
17 Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies - Introduction to Background and Polemics
-
18 Newtonianism, Reductionism and the Art of Congressional Testimony -
19 Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations -
20 Chaos -
21 Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics -
22 Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis) -
23 Supervenience -
24 The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation - Annotated Bibliography
- About the Authors
- Index
Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence
Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence
- Chapter:
- (p.269) 15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence
- Source:
- Emergence
- Author(s):
James P. Crutchfield
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
This chapter discusses some of the most engaging natural phenomena, those in which highly structured collective behavior emerges over time from the interaction of simple subsystems. Emergence is generally understood to be a process that leads to the appearance of structure not directly described by the defining constraints and instantaneous forces which control a system. Over time “something new” appears at scales not directly specified by the equations of motion. An emergent feature also cannot be explicitly represented in the initial and boundary conditions. A feature emerges when the underlying system puts some effort into its creation. These observations form an intuitive definition of emergence. For it to be useful, however, one must specify what the “something” is and in what manner it is “new.” Otherwise, the notion has little or no content, since almost any time-dependent system would exhibit emergent features.
Keywords: natural phenomena, emergence, emergent feature, time-dependent system, collective behavior
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- Title Pages
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Sources
- Introduction
- Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence
-
1 The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism -
2 On the Idea of Emergence -
3 Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness -
4 Emergence and Supervenience -
5 Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence -
6 How Properties Emerge -
7 Making Sense of Emergence Jaegwon Kim -
8 Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence -
9 Real Patterns - Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence
-
10 More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science -
11 Emergence -
12 Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex -
13 Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon -
14 The Theory of Everything -
15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence -
16 Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence -
17 Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies - Introduction to Background and Polemics
-
18 Newtonianism, Reductionism and the Art of Congressional Testimony -
19 Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations -
20 Chaos -
21 Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics -
22 Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis) -
23 Supervenience -
24 The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation - Annotated Bibliography
- About the Authors
- Index
