Incomplete Nature Part 19

Weak emergentism: The argument that although in emergent transitions there may be a superficially radical reorganization, the properties of the higher and lower levels form a continuum, with no new laws of causality emerging. Often a.s.sociated with epistemological emergentism because it is attributed to incomplete knowledge of the critical causality

NOTES.

CHAPTER 0: ABSENCE.

1. With thanks to Charles Seife, the author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, from which I take this chapter number idea and the quote from Tobias Dantzig's Number at p. 35.

2. This term was suggested to me by my longtime colleague Tyrone Cashman. Though the term takes liberties with the flexibility of the English language, I think that its somewhat cavalier form is compensated by the way it focuses attention on this one most central feature of these troublesome phenomena. I will resist the obvious tendency to call this metaphysical paradigm absentialism, because as will soon be evident, it is an explanation of the emergent and dynamical character of the processes generating these phenomena that is my primary goal.

3. David Chalmers (1995), "Facing up to the problem of consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 2:208.

4. A calculating device made with movable beads arranged on strings, originally devised in the Middle East, but spread eastward as far as China, where it is still in use as a calculation aid.

5. For a trivial example, consider that since 0 x 1 = 0 and 0 x 2 = 0, it follows that 0 x 1 = 0 x 2. We can then divide each side by zero (which is the disallowed operation) and cancel 0/0 in each (which for any other number equals 1, but is undefined for 0), and simplify to get 1 = 2.

6. Prior to the work of the eighteenth-century French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, a special substance given the name "phlogiston" was presumed to be present in all combustible materials and responsible for their susceptibility to catch fire.

CHAPTER 1: (W)HOLES.

1. Tao Te Ching #11: This "translation" is my own effort to clarify the meaning of this enigmatic entry, based on comparisons between a number of different translations from the original ancient Chinese text.

2. In a famous thought experiment, the brilliant eighteenth-century philosopher-mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace suggested that to an infinitely knowledgeable mind the world would be an entirely predictable clockwork process, right down to the movement of each atom. He says: "We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to a.n.a.lysis . . . it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814/1951), p. 4.

3. The function of an organ was once presumed to be inherited from its divine designer, and thus parasitic in the same sense as artifact function. This view still motivates religious critics of evolution. Since Darwin, this a.n.a.logy has been abandoned in favor of what is often described as a teleonomic view (see chapter 4).

4. The realism/nominalism problem will be faced head-on in chapter 6.

5. A Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men) suggests that the depiction of aliens as "little green men" may date to an Italian report from as early as 1910, claiming to have captured aliens, and it was also popularized by a newspaper article satirizing Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds. It notes that goblins and gremlins have sometimes been depicted as small green humanoids. The linkage to copper-based blood is unclear, but the blue-greenish blood of some arthropods and mollusks has probably been folk knowledge for centuries.

6. Interestingly, the legal system has come down on the side of nominalism when it comes to patentability and ownership of software. In a famous precedent-setting lawsuit, the Apple computer company brought suit against Microsoft for copying the "look and feel" of its object-based Macintosh interface. Apple argued that many features of the Macintosh interface appeared in the Windows operating system and thus violated its copyright. These included icons like file folders, click and drag effects, the use of a mouse, and a trash bin for erasing files. Microsoft won the lawsuit by arguing that although there were indeed obvious similarities of "look and feel," they were created by entirely different software instructions, and thus there was no use of the actual code that Apple had patented.

7. Richard Dawkins (1996), p. 133.

8. Steven Weinberg (1993), p. 154.

9. Francis Crick (1994), p. 3.

10. Jerry Fodor (1990), p. 156.

11. The t.i.tle implicitly parodies Bishop Paley's notion that organisms, like watches, could only have been created by an intelligent designer with a purpose in mind. By describing the watchmaker as unable to see, Dawkins is effectively arguing that there is neither forethought nor purposely guided selection of components and a.s.sembly involved. See Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker (1996).

12. Except for that one tiny exception, the Big Bang, which created the whole of the visible universe. But that's another story.

CHAPTER 2: HOMUNCULI.

1. Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms (1978), p. 12.

2. Osmosis Jones, dir. Tom Sito and Piet Kroon with the Farrelly brothers, Warner Bros., 2001.

3. B. F. Skinner, "Behaviorism at Fifty," in T. W. Wann, ed., Behaviorism and Phenomenology (1964), p. 80.

4. Francis Crick and Christof Koch (2003), Nature Neuroscience 6:120.

5. This theory is often paraphrased by the epigraph "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," which means that developmental stages effectively retrace the stages of phylogenetic evolution leading up to the present individual. This was presumed to occur because prior phylogenetic stages represented less elaborated developmental sequences.

6. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1995), pp. 8182.

7. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988), p. 1.

8. Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe (2006), p. 147.

9. Ibid.

10. See Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality (1928/1979).

CHAPTER 3: GOLEMS.

1. B. F. Skinner (1971), p. 200.

2. Daniel Dennett (1978), p. 12.

3. For the cla.s.sic statements of these versions of eliminativism, see, e.g., Rorty (1970), Stich (1983), Paul Churchland (1989, 1995), Patricia Churchland (1986), and Dennett (1987, 1991).

4. I am indebted to theological graduate student Adam Pryor for providing the Hebrew text that demonstrates this typographical pun.

5. Gregory Bateson (1979), p. 58.

6. Although Noam Chomsky's article criticizing Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" and a series of learning experiments by John Garcia are often credited with striking major blows, they are probably more like symptoms rather than causes of the abandonment of behaviorism for a more cognitive approach, which was also influenced by people like Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner.

7. In contemporary digital computers this is accomplished by compiler software, which is usually machine-specific, and mapped to global machine operations.

8. Though it didn't succeed altogether, since as a young man I spent one summer on a rail crew as a "gandy dancer" using a hammer to straighten out spikes bent by a modern version of a motorized spike driver.

9. From IBM Research Lecture RC-115, given in 1958. See Irving J. Good (1959).

10. Jerry Fodor (1980), pp. 14849.

CHAPTER 4: TELEONOMY.

1. This quote from E. Von Bruecke, a nineteenth-century physiologist, was quoted in Cannon (1945), p. 108. Thanks to Don Favareau for suggesting this quote.

2. See Ernst Mayr (2001), "The philosophical foundations of Darwinism," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 145, no. 4 (December), pp. 49293.

3. Ernst Mayr (1974), chap. 3; italics in the original.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 98.

6. Jesper Hoffmeyer (1996), p. 56.

7. Quoted in ibid.

8. Paul Weiss (1967), p. 821.

CHAPTER 5: EMERGENC.

1. The author's translation of a line from Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance (1979), p. 278.

2. George Henry Lewes (1874), Vol. II, p. 412.

3. John Stuart Mill (1843), Bk III, chap. 6, sect. 1.

4. Gregory Bateson (1979), pp. 45556.

5. See Robert Wilson's Genes and the Agents of Life (2005).

6. This quote from Stephen Hawking appeared in a 2000 newspaper interview. See Hawking: "I think the next century . . ."

7. Mill (1843), Bk III, chap. 6, sect. 1.

8. Strict Darwinians of the time followed August Weismann's dictum that acquired somatic changes could not directly influence what was inherited via the germ line in the next generation.

9. See Conwy Lloyd Morgan's Emergent Evolution (1923).

10. See, e.g., Leo Buss, The Evolution of Individuality (1987), or Eors Szathmary and John Maynard Smith, The Major Transitions in Evolution (1995).

11. See C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925).

12. Samuel Alexander, s.p.a.ce, Time, and Deity (1920).

13. For more detailed philosophical taxonomies of emergence, see, e.g., Philip Clayton, (2003), Michael Silberstein and Anthony Chemero (2009), or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/.

14. See Paul Humphreys (1997 a & b). Humphreys would probably object to the much broader a.n.a.logical extension of his concept of fusion that I employ in this comparison. However, the heuristic usefulness of the general idea implicit in his more technical usage is that it exemplifies the system dependence of the concept of a component part.

15. "Synchrony" refers to processes and events occurring simultaneously, whereas "diachrony" refers to processes and events that succeed and follow one another in time.

16. Jerry Fodor (1998), p. 61.

17. See Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1923).

18. Donald Davidson, "Mental Events," in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson, eds., Experience and Theory (1970), p. 214.

19. See, e.g., Pepper (1926).

20. Mark Bickhard, "Process and Emergence" (2003). To support this claim from quantum physics, Bickhard cites numerous distinguished physicists including, notably, Steven Weinberg (1995, 1996, 2000).

21. The phrase phase s.p.a.ce originates from the use of graphs to represent the way that substances (like water) change phase from solid to liquid to gas with respect to different values of temperature and pressure. Graphs of other forms of dynamical processes can involve many dimensions, and so may not be easily depicted. The term state s.p.a.ce is in many respects more accurate, since each point in such a graph represents a specific state of the system; however, we can also think of the points along a trajectory of change as being phases of change. In real-world systems, and even complex mathematically represented systems, such trajectories never intersect themselves. But in finite automata this will ultimately occur, at which point the trajectory will form a complex loop following an identical path over and over from that time forward.

22. The phrase is borrowed from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who used it to characterize an argument that while not demonstrative, nevertheless aids in thinking more clearly about a difficult problem.

23. Mark Bickhard (2005).

24. To continue the a.n.a.logy, fMRI effectively produces a snapshot that is averaged across distances many orders of magnitude larger than neurons, averaged across many seconds or minutes, and often even averaged across multiple trials and multiple subjects.

25. See Timothy O'Connor (2000).

26. Douglas Hofstadter coins this expression in his G.o.del, Escher, Bach (1979).