Emergence, evolution, and the geometry of logic: Causal leaps and the myth of historical development

Foundations of Science

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 9-37

  Palmquist, Stephen ^a  

^a HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY   (Hong Kong)

Author keywords

Analysis and synthesis; Causality; Emergence; Evolution; Geometryand logic; Insight; Intrinsic properties; Kant

Indexed keywords

ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS; CAUSALITY; EMERGENCE; EVOLUTION; GEOMETRYAND LOGIC; INSIGHT; INTRINSIC PROPERTY; KANT;

SOCIAL SCIENCES;

GEOMETRY;

EID: 33846807838     PISSN: 12331821     EISSN: 15728471     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10699-006-0004-1     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Iwould like to thank three anonymous reviewers of a previous draft of this essay for providing criticisms and suggestions that prompted numerousimprovements, such as the addition of the present paragraph providing historical contextualization. However, in keeping with my argument in Section 4, this contextualization should not be regarded as exercising direct causal in.uence on the ideas I present in this paper.
2. Morgan, C. L.: 1923, Emergent Evolution. New York: Holt. Morgan was a biologist more than a philosopher, but he appealed explicitly to Lewes in countering the reductionist trend in early twentieth century psychology with the claim that a gradation of different levels of mentality exists across different animal species.
3. Alexander, Samuel: 1920, Space, Time, and Deity. London: Macmillan. Alexander (influenced by Morgan) develops a theory of emergence that is probably the closest of all these early defenders of emergence to that of contemporary non-reductive materialism: Even though the neuro-chemical level of reality is the ultimate foundation of all conscious life, the latter level emerges from the former in such a way that explanations at this higher level cannot be reduced to those at the lower level. Nevertheless, Alexander, like standard non-reductive materialists today, regards this emergence as causally linked in such a way that (all physical factors being known) prediction could take place between levels. Emergence, according to Alexander, only reveals new qualities, not fundamentally new realities.
4. Broad, C.D.: 1925, The Mind and Its Place in Nature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Broad expands the application of emergent thinking beyond the issues of the origin of life and mind, applying it to the question of whether any given science (such as chemistry) is reducible to another (such as physics). For Broad emergence is the chief alternative to a mechanistic view of nature whereby all sciences ultimately reduce to one. In Broad's view, the laws and principles of each specific science cannot be predicted from knowledge (even a complete knowledge) of the lower, more general levels of science alone. Instead, "we must wait till we meet with an actual instance of an object of the higher order before we can discover such a law (p. 79). What emerges, on this view, really is something new.
5. Scientists often merely assume that such emergence takes place. See, for example, Wise, S. P. (ed.): 1987, Higher Brain Functions: Recent explorations of the brain's emergent properties, New York:WIley; none of the contributors shows any awareness that there might be philosophical problems arising out of the very notion of emergence. Probably the most important writer on emergence during the middle half of the twentieth century was the chemist-philosopher, Michael Polanyi, though his work is often neglected by mainstream philosophers. For an exception to this trend, see the special issue on emergence in Tradition and Discovery XXIX.3 (2003), especially Philip Clayton's article, Emergence, Supervenience, and Personal Knowledge, pp. 8-19.
6. Non-reductive materialism remains popular despite the serious criticisms advanced by Jaegwon Kim, especially in his influential article: 1999, Making Sense of Emergence, Philosophical Studies 95:3-36; hereafter abbreviated MSE. The most important of Kim's numerous earlier essays on this and related subjects are compiled in his book: 1993, Supervenience and Mind: Selected philosophical essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; see especially Chapter 8, Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept, and Chapter 14, The Myth of Non-reductive Materialism. Kim (1999) develops his position still further in Mind in a PhysicalWorld: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. For a good example of a philosopher who has not been put off by Kim's skepticism, see Bunge, M.: 2003, Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; hereafter E&C. This tour de force interprets emergence within the context of systems theory, relating it to a wide range of scientific, philosophical, and cultural (e.g., socio-economic) issues.
7. Recent works on emergence are far too numerous to list here.For a detailed summary of the history of emergence in philosophy, see Emergent Properties in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http:// plato.stanford. edu/entries/properties-emergent/. Robert Van Gulick surveys the recent literature: 2001, Reduction, Emergence and OtherRecent Options on the Mind/Body Problem: A Philosophic Overview. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8.9-10:1-34, the first article in a special issue on emergence. Crane, T.: 2001 Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, offers a helpful summary and analysis of the key issues (see especially pp. 62-66). See also the intriguing book by Taylor, Mark C.: 2001, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Interest in all aspects of emergence and its applications reached a new peak in 1999, with the founding of the journal Emergence: Complexity and Organization (see http://emergence.org).
8. For an example of a typical scholarly exchange relating to this issue, see Wiggins, D.: 1984, The Sense and Reference of Predicates: A Running Repair to Frege's Doctrine and a Plea for the Copula. Philosophical Quarterly 34, and P. F. Strawson's response: 1997, Concepts and Properties or Predication and Copulation, In P.F. Strawson (ed.), Entity and Identity and Other Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 85-91.
9. Kim himself admits that, even if ontological emergence is rejected as an impossibility as a result of the serious problems he raises concerning low "downward causation" could possibly function (see "MSE", pp. 28-33), the notion of such causation (and the whole theory of emergence along with it) could be salvaged "by giving it a conceptual interpretation" (p. 33), as describing "levels within our representational apparatus, rather than levels of properties of phenomena in the world. "Such a conceptual approach is precisely what I adopt in Section 2, though I also make some tentative ontological applications in later sections.
10. Kim rightly observes (in "MSE", p. 19) that this feature of emergentism, this "talk of 'levels' has thoroughly penetrated not only writings about science, including of course the philosophy of science, but also the primary scienti.c literature of many fields." See note 5, above, for several examples. By demonstrating how the Geometry of Logic illustrates the emergence of new levels in a purely mathematical (a priori) context, I intend to provide a useful mapping tool to those scientistswhose empirical research requires them to deal with such levels.
11. See for example, Palmquist, S. R.: 1992, "Analysis and Synthesis in the Geometry of Logic", Indian Philosophical Quarterly 19:1, pp. 85-108, and Chapter 5 of Palmquist, S.R.: 2000, The Tree of Philosophy 4. Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press. My most detailed application of the Geometry of Logic has been in my various writings on Kant, especially Chapter III of Palmquist, S. R.: 1993, Kant's System of Perspectives: An architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosphy. Lanham: University Press of America. The full defense of this assumption regarding the parallels between logic and geometry is contained in my unpublished monograph, The Geometry of Logic (draft available at http:// www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/gl/toc.html).
12. Morgan, following Lewes, refers to such non-emergent properties as "resultant" (see note 2). Kim adopts their use of this term in "MSE" (see pp. 6-8, 21-22), as does Bunge in E& C (see Chapter 1, especially p. 16). The term is misleading, however, inasmuch as emergent properties "result" from the basal conditions at the lower levels of complexity just as much as mergent properties do. As Kim points out, the defining feature of resultant properties, in contrast to emergent properties, is that only the former "are predictable from lower-level information" (21), as provided by "a system's total microstructural property" (p. 7). Neither Kim nor Bunge raise the issue of whether "resultant" is adequate as a technical term, so neither attempts to provide a better one, as I have done here by proposing the use of "mergent".
13. Kim also uses both of these words ("MSE", pp. 6, 10-11, 18, 34), yet does not attempt to explain their meaning in any technical way. He does state in passing that "non-intrinsic" properties are "relational with respect to other properties in [the material base]" (pp. 10-11); that is, they arise contingently out of one or more mergent properties. As an example of an extrinsic property Kim cites "being 50 miles to the south of Boston" (p. 34). Bunge also contrasts "intrinsic" with "relational" in E&C 17, but makes minimal use of the distinction.
14. This distinction is closely related to the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction, where intrinsic properties would be definable as analytic, with extrinsic properties being synthetic. However, I have avoided this terminology throughout this essay because of the many problems associated with it. For a thorough discussion and reinterpretation of this more traditional distinction, see Palmquist: 1993, Kant's System of Perspectives, especially pp. 111-120; and Palmquist, S. R.: 1987, "A Priori Knowledge in Perspective: (I) Mathematics, Method and Pure Intuition", The Review of Metaphysics 41:1, pp. 3-22. Although Kim is correct to say that "the boundary between what's conceptual and what is not is certain to be a vague and shifting one" ("MSE", p. 11), this does not, in my view, render such distinctions useless. Rather, as Bunge recommends, we should always seek to employ both analysis and synthesis as complementary methodological functions (E&C 24-25).
15. I am not here attempting to defend these claims, but merely summarizing the essential features of claims I have defended at great length elsewhere (see note 11).
16. See, for example, Beesing, M., Nogosek, R. J. and O'Leary, P. H.: 1984, The Enneagram: A Journey of Self Discovery. Denville, New Jersey: Dimension Books. The relationship between the Enneagram and Jung's theory of personality types is discussed in Palmquist, S. R.: 1997, Dreams of Wholeness: A Course of Introductory Lectures on Religion, Psychology, and Personal Growth. Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, pp. 177-185.
17. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Chapter I of the Analytic of Concepts. I demonstrate the precise 12CR structure of Kant's table of the logical forms of judgment (from which he derives the 12 categories) in Section III.3 of Kant's System of Perspectives (1993).
18. Most interpreters regard Jung's types as a 16-fold theory (i.e., a 4LAR); but I have argued in that it can also be interpreted as a 12CR. "Perspectives in Counseling: Kant's Categories and Jung's Types as Models for Philopsychic Counseling" (forthcoming; draft available at http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/srp/arts/PiC.htm). In either case, its highly logical structure is one of its most signi.cant (yet often ignored) features.
19. Quantum physicists are far from being in agreement over how best to describe the fundamental building-blocks of the physical world; but what is typically called the "standard model" nowadays portrays a system consisting of six quarks and six leptons, for a total of twelve basic sub-atomic particles. Both types of fundamental particle are further divided into three pairs of opposites (i.e., negatively or positively charged). If each triad constitutes a 1LSR (an admittedly debatable assumption), then the whole systemwould be a 12CR, with the basic 2LAR consisting (as usual) of two twofold distinctions: Quark (+) versus lepton (-); and positively (+) versus negatively (-) charged. That is, the 2LAR that underlies all material substance is: Positively charged quarks (++), positively charged leptons (-+), negatively charged quarks (+-), and negatively charged leptons (--). I discuss various philosophical implications of quantum physics in "Quantum Causality and Kantian Quarks" (forthcoming; draft available at: http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/srp/arts/QCKQ.htm).
20. This feature is explained in more detail in Chapter 5 of Palmquist: 2000, The Tree of Philosophy; and in Section 2.1 of Palmquist: The Geometry of Logic.
21. This becomes particularly evident when actual examples of synthetic relations are examined: The synthetic component always contains more than just a combination of the two opposites that went before it. This mysterious and unpredictable feature of synthetic logic, wherein opposites unite in the form of a newly emerging reality, is re.ected by the convention of labeling the third term "x".
22. Here, Iamassuming that "emergence" refers to the unified whole of a more complex "level" of reality (or logical level, in the case of the Geometry of Logic). Bunge employs a diagram that has a similar logical structure to Figures 1-3, combined (i.e., a system consisting of one element, branching to a system consisting of two elements, and from there to a system with four elements); but he labels the movement from the fourfold to the unity as "emergence" and the reversemovement (i.e., themovement toward the more complex level) as "submergence" (E&C, p. 15). This is clearly an error - though it is apparently an error only in Bunge's diagramming skills, since elsewhere he recognizes that emergence occurs at levels where more complexity is exhibited. The idea Bunge appears to be presenting with his diagram is that when emergence happens all the complexity is uni.ed under a single organizing principle, as when an "organism" (e.g., a human body) unites numerous "organs" (heart, lungs, brain, etc.). But if this is what Bunge had in mind, he should have introduced different terms, such as "convergence" (for the movement toward unity) and "divergence" (for the movement toward complexity), in order to avoid giving the technical term, "emergence"multiple meanings. Bunge rightly assumes throughout his book that emergence happens only within systems, where a system is "an object with a bonding structure" (p. 20). On this de.nition, the Geometry of Logic qualifies as one such system and can therefore exhibit the characteristics of emergence. Bunge later proposes a more complex, fourfold de.nition of a system, in terms of "composition", "environment", "structure", and "mechanism" (p. 35) characteristics that together constitute a perfect 2LAR.
23. See Mandelbrot, B. B.: 1983, The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York: W.H. Freeman. Fractal geometry, the geometry of spaces presumed to have fractional dimensionality, was among the earliest forms of chaos theory; as such, it is at the opposite end of the spectrum of geometrical complexity as the Euclidean system. Fractals have the paradoxical feature that properties appearing at. rst to be emerging chaotically, as random changes following no predetermined pattern, eventually develop into patterns that repeat themselves in a clearly discernable way over and over again. In other words, extrinsic emergent properties come to be regarded as extrinsic mergent properties as the geometrical pattern (the "fractal") is viewed at higher and higher levels of complexity.
24. A "perfect" relation in the Geometry of Logic is one that is "complete" i.e., one wherein all components represent real possibilities. By contrast, any relation wherein one or more components are either logically impossible or empirically unrealizable is "imperfect".
25. The decision as to how to correlate each concept with a specific part of the map is to some extent arbitrary. Because the map is symmetrical, it can be rotated or flipped at will without changing the logical relations between its parts. What is far more important is to establish the relative relationships between each term, so that any alternative way of mapping the same 2LAR could be rendered identical to any other simply by changing the orientation of the diagram. I have outlined and defended the mapping conventions I use in The Geometry of Logic (see especially Section 2.2) and in the various other publications listed in note 11, above.
26. Kant, I.: 1993, Opus Postumum, tr. Eckart Förster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; see e.g., pp. 13, 37.
27. This problem tends to be glossed over by scientists who employ the concept of emergence in the course of explaining such evolutionary changes. See, for example, Kaas, J. H.: "The Organization and Evolution of Neocortex". In Wise (ed.), Recent Explorations (see note 5, above), pp. 347-378. Kaas states, matter-of-factly: "Mammals emerged from reptiles about 250 million years ago" (p. 359); he even provides a table showing the various branches in this "phylogenetic tree" (p. 360), though he does admit that "[t]here are many uncertainties about the branch points and time course of this radiation" (p. 359). Nowhere does he explain where the new elements come from, nor even acknowledge this as a problem.
28. See especially Teilhard De Chardin, P.: 1959, The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper and Row.
29. This theory's distinction between continuous and discontinuous change is roughly equivalent to the distinction I have made between. ux and evolution. For a good introduction, see Woodcock, A. and Davis, M.: 1978, Catastrophe Theory: A Revolutionary Way of Understanding How Things Change. London: Penguin.
30. See, e.g., MacLean, Paul D.: 1990, The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions. New York: Plenum Press. MacLean persuasively argues that the brain has three layers that correspond directly to the three major evolutionary changes that have affected life on earth: The Reptilian Brain governs sentience; the Mammalian Brain governs our conscious awareness; and the Neocortex governs the higher processes of rationality.
31. This strongly suggests that intrinsic emergence has the epistemological status of analytic a posteriori: The fact that an evolving property is intrinsic makes it analytic; the fact that it emerges makes it a posteriori. I have examined various other applications of this paradoxical epistemological form in Palmquist, S. R.: 1987, "A Priori Knowledge in Perspective: Naming, Necessity and Analytic A Posteriori", The Review of Metaphysics 41:2, pp. 255-282; see also Kant's System of Perspectives, pp. 134-139, 237-239, 367-368. However, as pointed out in note 14, I shall not develop such a possibility in this essay.
32. After noting the emphasis placed by the early emergentists (e.g., Lewes and Morgan) on understanding the historical development that led to the appearance of the different "levels" of the world as we now know it, Kim cautions (in "MSE", p. 20): Contemporary interest in emergence and the hierarchical model is focused not on this kind of quasi-scientific and quasi-metaphysical history of the world, but rather on what it says about the synchronic structure of the world - how things and phenomenon at different levels hang together in a temporal cross section of the world, or over small time intervals." Here, Kim seems to be referring to the interest contemporary philosophers have in theories of emergence, for scientists (some scientists, that is) are still as interested as ever in understanding the history of evolutionary changes. Kim goes on to discuss what he takes to be the key philosophical issue relating to emergence: The possibility of supervenience or downward causation", whereby emergent properties (e.g., conscious thoughts) are believed to have a causal influence on lower level (e.g., physical) states or events. But asKimpersuasively argues (p. 25), the non-existence of downward causationwould render emergentism identical to epiphenomenalism, thus effectively implying that there are no genuinely emergent properties at all. The issue of downward causation, however, is beyond the scope of this paper because my second assumption (in Section 1) was that emergent properties do exist. Instead of dwelling on downward causation, my comments in the remainder of this paper can be regarded as an attempt to revitalize philosophical and theological interest in exploring the implications of this "quasi-scientific and quasi-metaphysical history". Perhaps the reason it is not, and cannot be, genuinely and genuinely metaphysical is that it is genuinely theological.
33. As Kim points out (in "MSE", pp. 20-21): A characteristically emergentist doctrine... [is] that some of the properties of... complex systems,though physically grounded, are nonphysical, and belong outside the physical domain. The concluding paragraphs of this essay will seem to be out of place unless this fact about emergentist theories is kept. rmly in mind. By waxing theological, I am merely pressing emergentism to one of its potentially fruitful extremes. That such reflections are far from being devoid of scientific grounding and philosophical significance is demonstrated by studies such as Barrow, J. D.: And Tipler, F. J.: 1986, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
34. Kim concurs with this understanding of emergence. In "MSE" he explains that the unpredictability of a property's emergence "may be the result of our not even having the concept of E [the emergent property]" before the emergence takes place; we may have no idea what E is like before we experience it".