[2] British emergentists had a kind of organizational conception of what counted as lower, and still wanted to claim that something else could be emergent at the higher level (Beckermann, 1992a, 1992b; McLaughlin, 1992; Stephan, 1992; Stöckler, 1991). The emergent property supposedly came into being with particular organizations of constituents, but it was in-principle not derivable from lower level considerations. Such emergence was itself presumed to be part of the physical laws of the universe: under such and such organizational or patterns conditions, this new causal property comes into being. This position may constitute a physicalism, but it violates the non-ad-hoc-ness of naturalism.
[3] There is an epistemological view of emergence that depends on higher level properties not being derivable from lower level considerations, as a distinct issue from that of whether or not the higher level properties are determined by lower level properties and relations (Hoyningen-Huene, 1992). In such a view, chaotic systems provide a clear kind of (epistemic) emergence in that their course over time is not calculable in-principle, even though it is completely determined. Among other consequences, this implies that it may not be determinable which of two or more different attractors a given system is or will be in because the attractors themselves or (inclusive) their basins of attraction may be chaotically mixed and not separable in any physically realistic sense (e.g., Newman, 1996). I find this to be an interesting conception of emergence, but it is not the one at issue in this paper. I am concerned with issues of ontological and physical emergence, not only epistemological unpredictability (Hooker, 1979, 1981a).
[4] This would likely be considered to be too weak a notion of emergence by some -- the British emergentists, for example. But the point of the concept of emergence is to differentiate novel causal powers. Causal powers that are in principle not derivable from lower causality and initial and boundary conditions would certainly be a kind of emergence -- though likely an empty kind, and certainly an ad-hoc kind -- but it is difficult to find a reasonable argument that this should be held as the only notion of emergence. Conversely, the point of reduction, at least in the sciences, is to reduce the number of ontological kinds necessary to understand the world, without necessarily prejudicing, and certainly without necessarily rejecting, the reality of at least some aggregations of instances of those kinds. Hooker, for example, distinguishes between ontological reality, which is a reality of ontological kinds, and physical reality, which can include aggregations of instances of those kinds. Ontological reduction can, in this view, occur without eliminating the physical reality of those aggregations: atoms, molecules, living beings, and, presumably, minds can well be physically real in this view, even though ontological reduction may show that the only ontological kinds are of sub-atomic particles (Hooker, 1979, 1981a, 1981b, 1981c). That is, ontological reduction of X does not necessarily carry the implication of the elimination of the reality of X.
The key point would seem to be that of the existence of genuine emergent causal powers. If it were held that higher level physical systems might "exist", but that their causal consequences were strictly a result of the working out of the causal powers of the fundamental particles that constituted them, then that physical existence might seem unacceptably pale and unsatisfying as a notion of emergence. This stance depends on a strong distinction between causal consequences and causal powers, because it is clear that differing organizations of particles will have, in general, differing causal consequences. So the issue is whether or not there are emergent causal powers, whatever those might be. The assumption that this distinction between causal consequences and causal powers makes sense, in turn, depends on the assumption that there exists something that bears those genuine causal powers -- distinct from mere causal consequences. Fundamental particles are the obvious candidate for these bearers of ultimate causality. It is to this set of issues regarding causal powers that I now turn in the main text.
5 Notions of causality must be re-examined both in the context of quantum field theory and of emergent causality. One interesting proposal, though not fully adapted to field theory, is Collier (1997). Pattee (this volume) would eliminate the notion except in an agent centered sense. Inquiring about the cause of something makes false presuppositions in most complex circumstances -- there can be multiple necessary and sufficient complexes of process involved. It would still seem, however, that a distinction needs to be made between phenomena that are accidentally related and those that are more deeply related, however complex, and that "cause" is often used to mark that distinction.
6 Furthermore, there is no scale above which quantum effects can be ignored, and, therefore, below which it might seem processes can be privileged as a reduction base: non-classical quantum effects can occur at any scale -- superconductivity, for example. Still further, quantum processes per se cannot be privileged as a base for classical processes because there are no classical processes per se -- there are no classical processes other than (emergents of) organizations of quantum processes.
7 Particles are precisely such a "bottoming out" of organization because particles have no internal organization. That, in fact, is definitive of particles. This lack of internal organization, in turn, insures sharp boundaries: any non-sharp boundary would require some sort of organization internal to that boundary. Together, lack of internal organization and sharp boundaries (whether extensionless or not) yield point level localisms of causal influence and constraint. This set of properties forms a metaphysical package, and the entire package is rejected in a quantum field perspective: there is no bottoming out; there are no sharp boundaries; and (almost) nothing is local.
[8] Assuming that minds can be understood naturalistically as organizations of particular kinds of processes. (A process model of mind, of course, can be expected to be quite complex.)
[9] It is arguable, incidentally, that the "basic particle" reduction picture is not just factually false, but it is also logically incoherent. For example, if the particles have no extension, then a field view is forced in order to account for particle interactions, since the probability of such particles ever actually hitting each other is zero. If particles have finite extension, however, then they pose problems of compressibility, velocity of transmission of force through their diameter, extreme difficulty in explaining differing kinds of interactions (gravity, electricity, etc.), and so on. If a move is made to a combination of particles and fields (the typical contemporary semi-sophisticated view), then all of the basic issues are already granted anyway in the granting of fields at all. Any field view destroys the seduction into a micro-particle reduction because configurational and organizational properties make differences in causal power, not just in the working out of lower order causal power. There are no particles, but, even if there were, so long as fields are granted at all, the microreduction motivation fails -- and a strict particle view is not only factually false but conceptually incoherent as well. (It is worth pointing out that Special Relativity plus conservation of energy forces a field physics, and, thus, a field metaphysics.)
[10] Though it is not clear what is supposed to bear those internal relations. The syntactic assimilation of relations to properties as all being "just" N-adic predicates for varying Ns seems to have obscured the metaphysical problems that relations pose to any substance-property metaphysics (Olson, 1987).
[11] It is already clear that causally relevant properties are not necessarily local, and, therefore, not necessarily supervenient (Burge, 1989, 1993; LePore & Loewer, 1987, 1989; van Gulick, 1989). The point here is an extension of that to the existence of certain kinds of systems -- in particular, of far-from-equilibrium systems. For other discussions of inadequacies of the concept of supervenience, see Collier (1988) and Horgan (1993a, 1993b).
[12] And quantum field theory requires that all entities are topological entities, not substance entities. Topological entities are defined in terms of what classes of shapes can and cannot be continuously deformed into each other without breaking or tearing anything. A surface with one hole in it, for example, can be smoothly deformed into a teacup, but a surface with one hole in it cannot be smoothly deformed into a surface with two holes in it -- something has to tear. Similarly, a sphere cannot be smoothly deformed into a torus (doughnut), and a simple loop cannot be smoothly deformed into a simple overhand knot (with the ends joined). Such considerations at the level of vacuum processes have proven to be central to quantum field theory (Atiyah, 1987, 1991; Dijkgraaf & Witten, 1990; L. Kaufmann, 1991; Weinberg, 1996; Witten, 1988, 1989). Clearly they are important at a macro-level: a flow with a vortex in it is causally different from a flow with no vortex.
[13] There exist, of course, questions about the nature of the vacuum processes which are (hierarchically) organized at so many different scales. That nature is largely unknown (Atiyah, 1991; Bickhard, in preparation-c; Brown & Harré, 1988; Misner, Thorne, Wheeler, 1973; Saunders & Brown, 1991). But continuity, non-locality, and virtual excitations, for example, compel that that nature is not particle-like.
14 We now have some idea, for example, of the nature of the emergence of life, though it is enormously complex. The nature of mind is still quite elusive. Mind is the last mystery that still resists naturalism. This chapter attempts to block arguments against the metaphysical acceptability of the notion of emergence, but it does not present any model of the emergence of any particular phenomena. My own contributions to a model of mental phenomena can be found elsewhere (e.g., Bickhard, 1992, 1993, in press, forthcoming, in preparation-a).
[15] The British emergentists not-with-standing, the scientific use of the concept of emergence fits quite well with this notion of emergence in organization, rather than some sort of emergence beyond anything non-ad-hoc attributable to organization (e.g., Anderson & Stein, 1984; Bechtel & Richardson, 1992; Broschart, 1996; Careri, 1984; Chapman & Agre, 1986; Cherian & Troxell, 1995; Maes, 1992; Tucker, Hirsh-Pasek, Hollich, this volume).
[16] There is also a form of persistence of types of process organization that is the result of instances of that organizational type causing, or at least increasing the probability of, the creation of more instances of that organizational type, such as in auto-catalysis or reproduction. I will not address these here (Bickhard, 1993; Bickhard & Campbell, D. T., in preparation).
Complex hierarchies will tend to be hierarchies of various levels of relatively stable organizations of process -- atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, and so on. There is no requirement that all such kinds of stability in a hierarchy be of the same form, though once far-from-equilibrium stabilities occur, all higher levels will inherit far-from-equilibrium properties. Atoms and molecules (most of them), for example, will constitute energy well stabilities within dissipative (far-from-equilibrium) organisms, while far-from-equilibrium organisms will be constitutive of higher level far-from-equilibrium species, ecosystems, and the biosphere (Bickhard & Campbell, in preparation).
Clearly, the particular properties emergent in any particular organization of underlying process will depend not just on the abstract organization of processes that yields that emergence -- the organization that constitutes the phenomenon or entity in question. Those emergent properties will also depend on the kinds of lower level stabilities and lower level emergents that participate in those constitutive processes. Atomic stability emerges in certain organizations of process among electrons, protons, and neutrons; atomic stability is not possible with constituents of atoms themselves (you cannot build atoms out of atoms), though a different kind of stability -- molecular stability -- sometimes is possible. Similarly, it makes a crucial difference whether the participants in a flame or an organism process are oxygen or helium: stability is possible in the first case, but not the second. Emergent properties, including stabilities, therefore, are usually dependent on most or all of the lower level hierarchy of levels of process. Exceptions to such hierarchical dependence, such as the claims of functionalism that functional properties are independent of realization, are the exception (and even the claims of functionalism can be challenged).
Furthermore, there will often not be a clean differentiation of levels that is consistent across all portions of a process hierarchy. The hierarchy of organ, tissue, cell, molecule, and so on that is characteristic of a heart or kidney, for example, interacts at an equivalent level in most animals with the process of oxygen transport, in which most of those intermediate levels are missing -- there is no tissue or organ level above hemoglobin. Similarly, large scale oxygen cycles or water cycles interact in the biosphere in crucial ways with multi-leveled cell-organism-ecosystem hierarchies, but, again, with most of the levels missing. Levels crossing is ubiquitous (Lemke, this volume). Accounting for emergents in terms of hierarchies of lower level process, clearly, can be very complex.
[17] The illustration leaves the realm of biological reality here. I haven't bothered to find out if any actual bacterium is capable of this. My point is more general, and this is illustration.
[18] and of all other forms of normativity as well.