"John Wilkins"  wrote in message
news:c7hmdk$hu9$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> Guy Hoelzer  wrote:
> > in article c79l1b$11bb$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org, Wirt Atmar at
> > wirtatmar{at}aol.com wrote on 5/4/04 7:54 PM:
> >
> > > Whenever emergent properties are introduced into a philosophy of
> > > evolutionary design, a higher-order mysteriousness is simultaneously
> > > introduced into the process that treads dangerously close to vitalism.
> >
> > [snip] I see vitalism as something to be explained by science, rather
> > than avoided as if it must represent a falsehood.  I suspect that the
term
> > "vitalism" connotes different things for us.

> I think you are anachronistically interpreting "vitalism"
> the term.
>
> Wirt is exactly right about emergentism. It is a claim that a property
> occurs at a physical level or scale which cannot be reduced to the
> properties of the components. Hence, for example, consciousness is the
> paradigmatic case of an emergent property, because it is supposed to
> have features that cannot be explained as the vector sum of all the
> dynamics of neurons and their environmental inputs. But each new
> discovery shows this to be false. Likewise with evolution. Each emergent
> property turns out to be either a cause for a research program to
> decompose it into its substrate, or can already be explained that way.
> People who rest satisfied with emergent properties do, indeed, tread
> close to mysticism and vitalism.
> >
> > I also take issue with your assertion that when "emergent
properties are
> > introduced into a philosophy of evolutionary design, a higher-order
> > mysteriousness is simultaneously introduced."  Mysteries are almost
always
> > parts of our models, especially in the study of such high-order
phenomena as
> > evolutionary biology.  That is what assumptions are all about.  Even our
> > assumptions are usually about very high-order phenomena, which
themselves
> > would require hefty assumption sets to explain.  I do not see the
> > introduction of emergent properties [note that this is VERY different
from
> > the notion of emergent systems] as introducing either mystery or
vitalism
> > into theory.  Pressure, for example, is an emergent property of a
collection
> > of atoms, which is not definable for a single atom in isolation.  Would
you
> > say that introducing the concept of pressure into physical theory
invoked
> > additional mystery and "treads close to vitalism?"
>
> The primary claim made by emergentism is that you cannot account for the
> property in terms of its parts without remainder. Pressure can indeed be
> so accounted for - there is no emergence here. The classical example,
> introduced by Mill in his 1837 System of Logic, is the liquid properties
> of water, which he said could not be deduced from the properties of
> hydrogen and oxygen. But we do exactly that these days - you can model
> quite accurately the dynamics and microproperties of water on a computer
> using only the known properties of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. It only
> took a computer that was more powerful than Mill had to hand.

I have no desire to defend Guy Hoelzer's reading of "vitalism", but I do
wish
to take issue with John Wilkins' reading of "emergentism".  However, since
John knows much more about the history of the use of this word than I do,
prudence dictates that I should coin a new term for the variant form of
emergentism that I wish to defend.  Therefore, I will call myself an
"emergence-oriented reductionist".  I suspect that most scientifically
literate
persons interested in emergence adhere to this ideology.

An "emergence-oriented reductionist" definitely does NOT believe that
you cannot account for the emergent property in terms of the properties
of the system components and their interactions.  If an "emergent property"
is discovered that is not yet explained in those terms, then that is
motivation
for the creation of a reductionist research programme to find the missing
explanation.

But if all "emergence" exists only to be explained away, you may ask, why
does the "emergence-oriented reductionist" go out of his way to call
attention to "emergent properties"?  Good question.  The answer requires
that we consider a three-level description of a system.

Consider a top-level system S which can be decomposed into mid-level
subsystems M_sub_1, M_sub_2, ..., M_sub_i, ...  Suppose that there is
a property S_EP that is emergent in the sense that the explanation of
S_EP is only possible reductionistically by considering the properties
of all the M_sub_i subsystems AND their interactions.

Now, assume that the M_sub_i subsystems are further broken down into
lower-level subsystems L_sub_i_sub_j, and that the properties of the
mid-level subsystems (both emergent and nonemergent) are reductionistically
explained by the low-level properties and their interactions.

The question now arises: can we eliminate the middle level of subsystems
and interactions from our explanatory structure?  In theory, this should be
possible, as long as we can come up with a way of describing all of the
interactions - M to M, L to L, and M to L - in the same language.  But,
this attempt to translate all of the interactions into a single low-level
language
may fail because we have impoverished our descriptive vocabulary.  We
have eliminated all of the properties that were emergent at the mid-level!
So, how do we translate the original description of M to M interactions into
descriptions of L to L interactions?

At the very least, an "emergence-oriented reductionist" views the task of
eliminating explanatory level M with distaste.  On a day when he is feeling
intransigent, he may even claim that the elimination of the middle level of
explanation is impossible in principle.

Let us look at John's example of the emergent wetness of water as an
example of what I have just expounded.  A reductionist explanation of liquid
water might postulate a "fluid mosaic" model, with small domains of
crystaline water separated by boundary regions of gaseous water.  The
dynamics is that water molecules are continually moving from the crystaline
phase to the gas phase and back.  That is, we have a three-level
description -
molecules, crystaline domains, and the liquid system as a whole.  And,
there is just no way to collapse this to a two-level description and throw
out
the properties - emergent and otherwise - of the middle level.  Similarly,
it would be impossible to do a hydrodynamic model of stream flow at the
molecular level, because emergent properties of liquid water (viscosity,
surface tension, etc.) have been lost.
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