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Reemergence of Emergence follows up on the second of two crucial philosophical assumptions supporting a specific theory of panentheism in Philip Clayton’s book, God and Contemporary Science (G&CS).  The first assumption is the “presumption of naturalism” (that all physical events in the world are necessarily describable by physical science).  The second assumption (the subject of the present book) is the “emergence” of more complex properties from simpler properties.”    In Clayton’s preface of the present book, he emphasizes that “emergence is equally important to science as it is to the theory of panentheism…In spite of the persistent hype that physicists are poised to produce …a ‘theory of everything’ thereby allegedly relegating philosophy to a scientific appendage, there remain at least two areas of philosophy that still seem far from being incorporated into mainstream science.  The first is the nature of consciousness and the second is emergence.  Most philosophers regard the former as inextricably bound up with the latter.”

 “Strong” emergence is central to the theory of panentheism.  Weak emergence proceeds from one ontological category (e.g. “physical”) to another, e.g., “thought.”  “Strong” emergence is the causation of a new higher ontological category by something from that same category.  Paul Davies, the second co-editor of the book, states that “strong emergence is ...that the micro-level principles are quite simply inadequate to account for the system’s behavior as a whole.”  

Philip Clayton (the first co-editor of the book) asserts that “strong emergentists maintain that genuinely new causal agents or causal processes come into existence over the course of evolutionary history” and by contrast “weak emergentists insist that…causal principles remain ultimately physical.”   In the first chapter Clayton reviews the history of the emergence position starting with Hegel through Samuel Alexander, Whitehead, and others.  Weak emergence predominated in early work. Clayton argues for strong emergence for the next step as an explanation of some properties of reality.   The book is organized to support this goal:  Part I covers the physical sciences, Part II covers the biological sciences, Part III covers consciousness and emergence, and Part IV (probably the most relevant part for the purposes of panentheism) covers religion with respect to emergence.  The individual chapters summarized in the four parts of the book use the word “emergence” in slightly different ways and different chapters define weak and strong emergence in slightly different ways.  Rather than being unified by a single point of view, the book is a collection of appraisals of emergence in many different disciplines with a wealth of data and independent points of view.  “This book should be read not as a systematic apologetic for a single theory of emergence, but rather as a sourcebook: it contains the data and theoretical resources necessary for evaluating whether a unified theory of emergence is possible, without actually providing such a theory.” ^{<p 307>}  In the last chapter of the book, Philip Clayton offers a sketch of a general theory of emergence.     

I.   Physical Science

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Emergence does not require miracles or other unspecified forces to explain the emergent.  It does require a “harnessing of already existing forces which have been scientifically described and verified.   It does not require an additional causative agency.       

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Paul Davies, in his chapter considers Benard’ instability (a fluid property where a heated fluid spontaneously forms a convective cell--a structure replacing a previously random turbulence), Davies states that “the onset of convection certainly represents novel emergent behavior, but the normal inter-molecular forces are not in competition with, or over-ridden by novel global forces.   The global system ‘harnesses’ the local forces, but at no stage is there a need for an extra type of force to act on an individual molecule to make it comply with a ‘convective master plan.’” ^<p38>    Harnessing of local forces does not require an additional causative agency.  “The history of science is littered with failed forces or causative agencies (the ether, the élan vital, psi forces…) that try to explain some form of emergent behavior on the cheap.” ^<p39>    He illustrates downward causation as a robot altering its own computer circuitry such that the operation of the robot is changed.  “There probably exists a complete hardware description of events [in the alteration of the robot] in terms of local interactions.  In other words, there are no new forces or principles involved there” that act ‘down’ from the software onto the electronic circuitry of the robot.  Davies’ suggestion is “to take downward causation seriously as a causal category.  But it comes at the expense of introducing either explicit top-down-physical forces or changing the fundamental categories of causation from that of local forces to a higher-level concept such as information.” ^{<p 51>}  

Chapter 3 by Erich Joos is a discussion of Schrödinger’s equation which allows (1) a specific outcome as a result of a “collapse” of the probability of possible outcomes to a specific event or the existence of parallel universes where all possibilities are maintained.  If the “collapse model is chosen, consciousness or possibly a physical cause is responsible for the choosing of one outcome from all possible outcomes represented in the Schrödinger equation.  Chapter 4 by George Ellis is titled “On the nature of emergent reality.”   The chapter is a detailed description of many emergent systems and in some sense can be thought of as providing concrete examples for the book.  The clarity and wide range of these examples make them recommended reading for anyone wishing a better understanding of emergence.   “It is clear” concludes Ellis, “that non-physical quantities such as information and goals can have physical effect in the world of particles and forces and hence must be recognized as having a real existence. Associated with the view is a richer ontology than “simple physicalism,” which omits important causal agencies from its vision.  That view does not deal adequately with the real world.” 

II. The Biological Sciences

Chapter 5 leads off the biological emergence chapters.   Terrence Deacon starts off with historical philosophical positions (Bacon, Spinoza, Descartes, etc).   Deacon then introduces the presence of biological mechanisms that lead more competitive organisms to take advantage of “spontaneous processes that produce an increase in order.  They are harnessed with such subtle biasing as to seem almost inevitable---until we consider how curious and improbable they are in the context of physical processes in general.  The molecular processes that constitute metabolism in a living cell manage to produce chemical reactions that defy the odds by many orders of magnitude” ^{<p 116>}     “Unlike the logic of machine design, however, in which things must be forced to occur,….the logic of organism ‘design’ instead depends on recruiting  the spontaneous intrinsic tendencies of molecular substrates and structural geometries…..Where there is no external means for the generation of order, order must arise from tendencies already present” ^{<p 116>}     [as, for example self-organizing cycles of reactions.]  

Emergence is difficult to explain because “when highly regular and complicated patterning appears spontaneously, or when future states of organization appear to be the drivers of antecedent processes, they demand a special explanation, because they give the impression of time running backwards.  ^<p117>   These spontaneous ordering features are dependent on the flow of energy provided by increasing entropy because they are not so much regularities of structure as they are regularities in the dynamics of a process, though it may also leave a structural trace.  Among these processes are simple dynamical regularities like eddies and convection cells, coherence-amplifying dynamics like the conversion of incoherent white light into monochromatic coherent light within a laser, structural pattern-generation processes like snow crystal formation, and complex chemical dynamics like autocatalysis.   Deacon agrees with other contributors to the book that one can understand the emergence of new forms without requiring new physical laws.  Like other authors in the book, he suggests levels of emergence very similar to those listed on the first page of this review.