Review of The Reemergence of Emergence
Edited by Philip Clayton and Paul Davies
The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion
ISBN 0-19-928714-7 978-0-19-928714-7
Review by Dale Gillette
Note: The review will be in the following format: for each section, or group of sections of the book, I will start with a text that contains a condensed version of the review followed by my standard review.
__________________________________________________________________
“Reemergence of Emergence” is about a recent surge in philosophical/theological scholarship that renews the emphasis on “emergence” that flowered during the early 20th Century. “Emergence (weak and strong) refers to growth that has properties that are beyond those of what is being emerged. An example of an emergence that is much discussed in this book is the mind (thinking) emerging from brain processes.
Definitions of supervenience, and weak emergence and strong emergence are given as follows:
Supervenience [literally arriving on top of] A sphere’s surface is “supervenient” to the volume of a sphere.
Weak Emergence: A higher “ontological” state [ontology state = level of human experience] is caused by a lower ontological state.
Strong Emergence: A higher ontological state that is caused by other higher ontological states
Examples of supervenience, and weak emergence and strong emergence are given as follows:
Supervenience: A perception by some mind/brain theories is simply the same thing as the corresponding brain state. (The same essence is given two names, e.g. a perception of hunger is identical with the brain state corresponding to it.). [Physicalism]
Weak Emergence: A perception is caused by a brain state. [Weak emergence]
Thus the same phenomenon can be seen in two different ways. I consider it to be the goal of this book to argue for the emergentist interpretation.
Strong Emergence: Thoughts that are caused by other thoughts. If the sensation of hunger is a weak emergent of sensory organs responding to the bodily state of needing nourishment, then the planning of how that sensation can be dealt with (for example by finding food) is a strong emergence. The planning of finding food was caused by the sensation of hunger and not by the actual bodily state of needing nourishment. Consequently in my interpretation, the planning for finding food is a strong emergent of the weak emergent sensation of hunger that was caused by a physical state.
_________________________________________________________________________
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
______________________________________________________________________________
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.
_______________________________________________________________________________
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.
III. Consciousness and Emergence
______________________________________________________________________
Section III on “Consciousness and Emergence” contains a sort of “debate” about emergence: Jaegwon Kim is skeptical of it while Michael Silberstein is strongly in favor of it. Although I may not be the judge of such matters, it seems to me that Silberstein presents a stronger argument and therefore that “strong emergence” is possible---- for example mind is an emergent property of the brain without any miraculous interventions taking place.
_______________________________________________________________________
A general discussion about the concept of “emergence” was given by Jaegwon Kim. Although his chapter fulfilled a valuable skeptical treatment of emergence, I found that it was overpowered by the chapter by Silberstein. In Michael Silberstein’s chapter, it is argued that ontological emergence is philosophically sound and is “potentially scientifically explanatory.” “Ontological emergence does violate causal closure of the physical (the principle that physics studies a closed causal system), but, as we shall see, that is no reason for concern.” <p 204> Further, “Brain states are physically necessary but not sufficient conditions for the existence of the various mental states that they causally and non-causally support.” <p 205> I (DAG) interpret this statement of necessity of the brain for mental states as the denial of the disembodied mind. I would also interpret that it denies phenomena like the “near-death” experience if brain states are actually measured as non-functioning. “Ontological emergence is therefore not a kind of dualism but a monism that rejects naïve essentialism: mental properties or processes are biological, physical, functional, phenomenological, and intentional in nature. In the context of ontological emergence, we see that metaphysical monism and ontological pluralism are truly compatible” <p 206> [DAG--an example of metaphysical monism and ontological pluralism may be found in B. Spinoza’s philosophical system {the Ethics}. In Spinoza’s metaphysics, ontological mind and ontological body are included in “attributes” which are parts of one “substance” [Spinoza’s highest ontological level]. Silberstein is similarly calling the “emergent mind” as being ontologically different than the physical brain; however both “mind” and “brain” are part of one unified entity --- a monistic metaphysics.] .
Silberstein then comes to a “enactive theory of mind.” A diagram of mind and cognition are shown in the diagram:
External ----à Mind ----àBehavior
World Brain
For the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) and the Representational Theory of mind, “the mind abstractly represents the latter via symbols of some sort.” <p 209> However, Silberstein’s “enactive theory” does not use symbols in a similar way that a computer would; “consciousness and cognition inherently involve embodied action in the world and encompass the complex of mind-body, and environment. These then are connected by means of ‘structural couplings’ and various other mutual and direct interdependencies.” <p 209> His theory emphasizes that the external world is not secondary to thought and leads to the conclusion that a brain in a vat is not equal to a brain in an active body. In considering his theory, Silberstein concludes that “at the very least, ontological emergence provides us with a framework for answering [Jaegwon] Kim’s questions [from the previous chapter in the book]: how can the mind exert its causal powers in a world that is fundamentally material, and how can there be such a thing as consciousness in a material world?”
IV. Religion and Emergence
________________________________________________________________
God is seen as having the possibility to bring about the occurrence of particular events and patterns of events—and at the same time not violating the regularities of nature (i.e. science). This could be brought about by something like a flow of information—which would not violate scientific principles. Gregerson organizes religious thought into five different categories but only three of them are relevant to emergence--Evolving Theistic Naturalism, Atemporal Theism, and Temporal Theism.
_______________________________________________________________________
Arthur Peacocke’s chapter “emergence, mind, and divine action: the hierarchy of the sciences in relation to the human mind-brain-body,” uses a denial of the “completeness of physics” as an essential argument for the need for divine action in the world. Similar to Michael Silberstein, Peacocke sees that interactive organization rather than component behavior is important to the explanation of reality. Peacocke
quotes Samuel Alexander: “To be real is to have causal power.” Since the mind is causal, it is also real.
Peacocke after having reviewed many models of God’s interactions in the world offers a panentheistic perspective that conceives the world as being within God but also being more than the world. “God could bring about the occurrence of particular events and patterns of events—which express God’s intentions that do not abrogate any of the regularities that apply to the levels of the world’s constituents and which may be considered to be influences within God own self. “This may be conceived as something like a flow of information—a pattern-forming influence.” “Patterns of events in the physical, biological human, and even social levels could be influenced by divine intention without abrogating natural regularities at any of these levels.” <p 275> “I am inclined to postulate divine top-down influences at all levels but with an increasing intensity and precision of location in time from the lowest physical levels up to the personal level, where they could be at their most intense and most focused.” <p 276>
Niels Henrik Gregersen offers five different models of religious interpretations of emergence. This list offers a kind of spectrum of religious interpretation of emergence based on Gregersen’s organization. As such, I found it a very useful way of comparing religious interpretations of emergence.
1. Flat religious naturalism (FRN): the ontological position that “nature is all there is. FRN is unconcerned with emergence and therefore has nothing to say about it. Examples of FRN are the 19th Century transcendentalist writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Recently, Ursula Goodenough presents FRN in her book The Sacred Depths of Nature. “No miracles come from outside into the world, but the world of nature itself abounds in miracles.” < p 288>
2. Evolving Theistic Naturalism
Samuel Alexander’s book Space, Time, and Deity is one expression of this. “Evolving Theistic Naturalism” shares with “Flat Religious Naturalism” the view that nature is prior to God and that the divine is a quality of nature, not its source. Harold Morowitz is another prominent writer supporting this view.
3. Atemporal Theism.
This view expounds that God cannot change. It is a classic position in philosophical theology shared by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians like Maimonides, Aquinas, and Avicenna. Willem B. Drees is a proponent of this view. “One might say the like the silence that contains the sonata and the white paper that contains a drawing, God sustains our existence.” God would be considered as a sense of potentiality, of non-existence, a ‘dimension in and by which all other dimensions exist.” (Drees, 2002). < p 291>
Paul Davies also offers an atemporal theism where no divine supervision of evolution is necessary. “I am proposing that God ‘initially’ selects the laws, which then take care of the universe…Without the need for direct supernatural intervention.” <p 292> (found in Clayton and Peacocke, 2004)
4. Temporal Theism
Temporal change of God was unheard of in antiquity and the middle ages but is now a common feature of theology. Alfred North Whitehead’s process theology was one of the first philosophies to offer temporal theism. “According to process theology, God not only possesses a ‘primordial nature’ which is essentially unchanging, but also a ‘consequent nature’, which appears a result of the ongoing divine absorption of temporal developments into the mind of God.”—A. N. Whitehead, 1978, pp 342-52.)” Other temporal theists include Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Keith Ward, and Robert John Russell.
Arthur Peacocke locates only two sources of ontological indeterminacy in the world: quantum indeterminacy and consciousness, and neither of them is in his view sufficient for a theology of a transformative divine presence in nature. “It is rather nature as whole that exhibits cases of emergence and that moves in the direction of ever greater complexity…..He thus hypothesizes [that]..God may ...exert a persistent flow of information on the world-as-whole. Since no information flows without some exchange of matter and energy, ….God’s influence is not seen as an additional supernatural causality, but rather as a causality always couched in, and hidden by natural processes.” <p 295> Peacocke’s theory would accept supervenience, weak emergence and strong emergence given in the box above [first page of this essay]..
Two statements are consistent with temporal theism:
· “If God is the creator at work in, with and under creation, then there is a natural fit between the emergentist view of nature and the tradition of temporal theism”.
· “Nature equals God and nature.” <p 297> [DAG: this is a very short declaration of panentheism]
5. Eschatological Theism. Eschatological theism refers to the end of time and how God will bring this about. Eschatology is a prominent feature of classical religions. According to eschatology, the past and the present must be seen in the light of the future, rather than the future being explained out of the past or the present. Eschatology is found in the philosophy of Wolfhart Pannenberg, Juergen Moltmann, A. N. Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin. Much of Eschatological theism does not share ‘the broad naturalist assumption found in standard versions of emergence’.
V. A Critical Appraisal
___________________________________________________________________
The book is summarized and a sketch is given of the yet-to-be-produced constructive theory of emergence that Clayton expects will someday be developed. The sketch is summarized by “Clayton’s wager” that no physicalist* scientific solutions will ever be found that will constitute a “theory of everything.” Because of this failure, the concept of emergence probably will find acceptance.
* “physicalism” means that “all that exists in the space-time world are basic particles recognized by physics and their aggregates. <p 2>
___________________________________________________________________
The final chapter of the book is “Emergence from Quantum Physics to Religion: A Critical Appraisal” by Philip Clayton. After a short recapitulation of the chapters, he characterizes the chapter by Jaegwon Kim as being skeptical of emergence while those of George Ellis and Michael Silberstein are strongly sympathetic with the possibilities of emergence in explaining reality. He marks out these chapters as providing a kind of debate about emergence within the book. On the importance of emergence to religion, Clayton states that “Arthur Peacocke and Niels Gregerson, like George Ellis, believe that the phenomenon of emergence is relevant to our understanding of religious phenomena and that it can be theologically productive.”
Clayton’s “Toward a constructive theory of emergence” and “Religion and emergence” are wonderfully written and thoughtful sections ( pages 307-320) that one might read to get the essence of the book if reading time cannot be found for its entire 322 pages. These pages include his “sketch” of a unified theory of emergence (DAG--which will hopefully be written by several authors within the next 20 or so years!)
His sketch is framed as “Clayton’s Wager.” I (DAG) interpret Clayton’s wager is that no deterministic “Theory of Everything” will be found to explain all the examples of emergence that exist in the book. “The world has not turned out to be explainable solely in terms of the matter and energy relations of physics as we know it.” <p 308> Since many of the systems in which we are interested are “open,” they may not be deterministic. Indeterminacy may also be caused if it is a chaotic system. It has also been found that some macro-physical systems show some indeterminate quantum effects. Additionally, emergent entities do not contradict the physics on which they depend. For example, Clayton’s wager could be placed on mental phenomena being understood without being explained away by analogy to other emergent relationships.
Clayton sums up the book by saying “It seems to me…that emergence theory tends to undercut dogmatic knowledge claims about the nature of God. Such claims tend to presuppose that one can have timeless knowledge, a view that implicitly lifts the epistemic agent above and hence out of the flow of history in which she is immersed. If emergence is right, our epistemic situation is constantly changing, is so far as we are products of a pervasive process of biological and cultural evolution.” <p 320>
The Reaction of the Reviewer to this Book
This book was extremely pleasing to me in that it provided strong evidence that there is a very concerted effort to bring about a reconciliation of science and religion. As I have written before, I have had twin beliefs in my life: in science as an engine of finding the truth and a belief that we and the world are all one. The first belief has been enforced by a long career in physical science and the second was initiated by a mystical experience when I was a teenager and strengthened since that time by life experiences showing that living by that belief leads to a happy life.