Related papers: Emergence and Reduction Combined in Phase Transiti…
This is a companion to another paper. Together they rebut two widespread philosophical doctrines about emergence. The first, and main, doctrine is that emergence is incompatible with reduction. The second is that emergence is supervenience;…
This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between…
In previous work, I described several examples combining reduction and emergence: where reduction is understood a la Ernest Nagel, and emergence is understood as behaviour or properties that are novel (by some salient standard). Here, my…
In the scientific literature, the term emergent phenomena is invoked in the context of a collective behavior observed in a complex adaptive system that exhibits no correspondence with the behavior of the system constituents. Although this…
We aim here to show that reductionism and emergence play a complementary role in understanding natural processes and in the dynamics of science explanation. In particular, we will show that the renormalization group - one of the most…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…
Emergent behavior that appears at a given level of organization may be characterized as arising from an organizationally lower level in such a way that it transcends a mere increase in the behavioral degree of complexity. It is therefore to…
This article discusses the relationship between emergence and reductionism from the perspective of a condensed matter physicist. Reductionism and emergence play an intertwined role in the everyday life of the physicist, yet we rarely stop…
The broad concept of emergence is instrumental in various of the most challenging open scientific questions -- yet, few quantitative theories of what constitutes emergent phenomena have been proposed. This article introduces a formal theory…
"Emergence", the phenomenon where a complex system displays properties, behaviours, or dynamics not trivially reducible to its constituent elements, is one of the defining properties of complex systems. Recently, there has been a concerted…
The concept of emergence is critically analyzed in particular with respect to the assumed emergence of mental properties from a neuronal basis. We argue that so-called contextual emergence is needed to avoid an eliminatory reductionism.…
The concept of emergence, or synergy in its simplest form, is widely used but lacks a rigorous definition. Our work connects information and set theory to uncover the mathematical nature of synergy as the failure of distributivity. It…
Is reduction always a good scientific strategy? Does it always lead to a gain in information? The very existence of the special sciences above and beyond physics seems to hint no. Previous research has shown that dimension reduction…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
A central challenge in the study of complex systems is the quantification of emergence -- understood as the ability of the system to exhibit collective behaviours that cannot be traced down to the individual components. While recent work…
This paper is a complement to the studies on the minimum of a real-valued branching random walk. In the boundary case (Biggins, Kyprianou 2005), A\"{i}d\'ekon in a seminal paper (2013) obtained the convergence in law of the minimum after a…
The Abstraction Refinement Model has been widely adopted since it was firstly proposed many decades ago. This powerful model of software evolution process brings important properties into the system under development, properties such as the…
Emergence (macro-level effects from micro-level causes) is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced…