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Emergence Made Ontological? Computational versus Combinatorial Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Philippe Huneman
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Abstract

I challenge the usual approach of defining emergence in terms of properties of wholes “emerging” upon properties of parts. This approach indeed fails to meet the requirement of nontriviality, since it renders a bunch of ordinary properties emergent; however, by defining emergence as the incompressibility of a simulation process, we have an objective meaning of emergence because the difference between the processes satisfying the incompressibility criterion and the other processes does not depend on our cognitive abilities. Finally, this definition fulfills the nontriviality and the scientific-adequacy requirements better than the combinatorial approach, emergence here being a predicate of processes rather than of properties.

Type
Computational Emergence and Its Applications
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 75 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2006 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers. Edited by Cristina Bicchieri and Jason Alexander , December 2008 , pp. 595 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I warmly thank Paul Humphreys and John Sumons for their precious comments on an earlier version of this article.

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