SPLectrum and Emergence

History keeps a file marked strong emergence — properties of wholes that cannot be derived, even in principle, from full knowledge of their parts. And history has taken entries out of it more than once. Vitalism filed life there; biochemistry restated it. C. D. Broad, the most careful mind ever to organise the file, put silver chloride in it in 1925 — the properties of a compound, his confident example of a relation no amount of knowledge could close. Quantum mechanics began deriving chemical bonds within the decade. Philosophers of chemistry still argue about how complete that derivation is, but the example moved. The file is not empty; experience is still in it.

Now set a different case beside it. From 1859, when Le Verrier identified it, Newtonian mechanics could not account for the drift in Mercury’s orbit. The relation between the theory and the observation could not be stated. Astronomers filed it as a problem — an unknown — and kept working inside the context they had: a planet was posited inside Mercury’s orbit and named Vulcan, and the inverse-square law was tried at slightly different exponents. General relativity closed it in 1915. So here is the question: why does an unstatable orbit get filed under unknown, while an unstatable whole gets filed under strong emergence?

In SPLectrum’s eyes the second filing says nothing the first doesn’t — except a claim about the future, made from the one position that cannot make it: the future of knowledge is not visible from inside the here and now, the current language. In SPLectrum’s picture, what we know lives in languages, and languages evolve. Something genuinely new looks, from inside our knowledge, like a surprising disclosure against what that knowledge already holds — a new context on top of an existing one. And the new context does not dissolve when relations across the seam get stated. Chemistry remains a working language on top of physics, not a chapter inside it; Broad’s silver chloride came to be stated in the language of quantum mechanics, and chemistry went on being chemistry. What may hold in the current language is that the relation cannot be derived here and now. The in principle is the part that does not travel.

There is one more clause, and it is the pluralist one. SPLectrum is just one voice among many, and other languages are free to define as they see fit. A philosophy can make emergence ontological. David Chalmers’s hard problem does this for experience: no physical knowledge, however complete, will derive it. So what bridges the gap is filed as fundamental law — added, not derived, and on his account permanently so. Within his language, that holds. What does not travel is the never. Inquiry works by bringing what it meets into relation with what it already holds, one seam at a time, and it has never been told in advance which seams will close. To declare one closed for good is to speak for every future language from inside the current one, and no language is placed to do that.

So the position, stated plainly. Novelty is real, and it arrives as a new context on top of an existing one. Say what layered on what, and within which language you are speaking. Where your context cannot state the relation, file it under unknown and keep working; the file has a good record. And where a discussion of emergence is running in no well-defined context at all, it is a discussion about the word. The reference library carries what the word’s many communities each mean by it. And that is the better place to start.

This post is part of the reality series. See also Emergence on the reality side.

Photo: emmebience / Unsplash