Strong emergence
Encyclopedia
Strong emergence is a type of emergence
Emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....

 in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents. Some philosophers have proposed that qualia
Qualia
Qualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...

 and consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

 demonstrate strong emergence. Strong emergence stands in contrast to weak emergence
Weak emergence
Weak emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is reducible to its individual constituents.This is opposed to strong emergence, in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents....

.

Overview

Strong emergence says that if systems can have qualities not directly traceable to the system's components, but rather to how those components interact, and one is willing to accept that a system
System
System is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole....

 supervenes
Supervenience
In philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship. For example, mental states might depend on physical brain states. This dependency is typically held to obtain between sets of properties. A classic example is that mental states of pain supervene on 'C-fibers firing'...

 on its components, then it is difficult to account for an emergent property's cause. These new qualities are irreducible
Irreducible (philosophy)
The principle of Irreducibility, in philosophy, has the sense that a complete account of an entity will not be possible at lower levels of explanation and which has novel properties beyond prediction and explanation...

 to the system's constituent parts. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This view of emergence is called strong emergence. Strong emergence is a view not widely held in the physical sciences but proposed as a philosophical theory of etiology
Etiology
Etiology is the study of causation, or origination. The word is derived from the Greek , aitiologia, "giving a reason for" ....

, epistemology and ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...

.

However, "the debate about whether or not the whole can be predicted from the properties of the parts misses the point. Wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be co-determined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environment(s)." Along that same thought, Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...

stated, "it is the synergistic effects produced by wholes that are the very cause of the evolution of complexity in nature" and used the metaphor of Janus to illustrate how the two perspectives (strong or holistic vs. weak or reductionistic) should be treated as perspectives, not exclusives, and should work together to address the issues of emergence. Further,
"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe..The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity..At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear..Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry..We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts."


The plausibility of strong emergence is questioned by some as contravening our usual understanding of physics. Mark A. Bedau observes:
"Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing."


One must make a distinction between a) macroscopic properties (e.g. superconductivity) which nobody has, as a matter of fact, been able to deduce from the microscopic equations and b) the idea that something macroscopic has features that are not even due to microscopic interactions. Laughlin belongs to a). In his book, he explains that for many particle systems, nothing can be calculated exactly from the microscopic equations, and that macroscopic systems are characterised by broken symmetry: the symmetry present in the microscopic equations is not present in the macroscopic system, due to phase transitions. As a result, these macroscopic systems are described in their own terminology, and have properties that do not depend on many microscopic details. This does not mean that the microscopic interactions are irrelevant, but simply that you do not see them anymore - you only see a renormalized effect of them. Laughlin is a pragmatic theoretical physicist: if you cannot, possibly ever, calculate the broken symmetry macroscopic properties from the microscopic equations, then what is the point of talking about reducibility?

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