Who has defended a non-causal (emanationist) concept of strong emergence, compatible with reductionism?

Question

Often in debates about emergence, an opposition is set up between (strong) emergence and reductionism. These are seen as incompatible alternatives.

In particular, if one believes in downward causation, or perhaps some kind of non-causal influence (emanationism ) going from higher-level to lower-level phenomena, then, in the usual framing of the discussion, this is seen as contradicting scientific reductionism, which holds that the causal interactions within the lowest level totally causally determine the behaiviour of the higher level. (Whether or not we can predict the behaivour at the higher-level from the lower-level is a separate question.)

However, I've often wondered if there could be a view analogous to compatibilism in the free will debate which attempts to affirm both strong emergence and causal reductionism.

We can consider how that might go by considering Conway's Game of Life. In this game, there are certain apparently emergent structures such as gliders which move across the grid and seem to have various effects on other structures that they locally interact with. However, in this case, there is also an obvious sense in which causal reductionism is true since we know from how the game is build that deterministic rules governing sequential updates to individual pixels generate all the observed behavior.

Nevertheless, one could deny that gliders and other game of life structures are merely epiphenomenal. A neo-Platonist might hold that these structures are emanations of Forms in a higher level of existence and this claim would not have to contradict the claim that, at the material level, their behavior is causally determined by the pixels and update rules.

Of course, the details of such a view are vague, and I'm not attempting to defend it here. My question is whether there are any articulate modern defenders of something like this. I guess I would call it non-causal or emanationist strong emergence (although it might have a totally different name in the literature).

As an aside, if such view of emergence is viable, then a form of compatibilism about free will might end up being a special case of this type of emergence. This is hinted at in Stephen Wolfram's discussion of cellular automata and free will in A New Kind of Science.

Answer 1

Weak emergence is the thesis that discussing emergent phenomenon is just a useful shorthand to deal with higher level phenomena that are presumed to be reducible in principle but are not yet reduced. A slight modification of weak emergence is that we may have a permanent inability through lack of time or sufficiently accurate sensors to ever be able to reduce all higher-level phenomenon, but this is a practical, not a logical obstacle. Weak emergence is compatibilist with reductionism.

Strong emergence holds that higher level phenomena are NOT reducible to lower level, as a logic principle. As such, it is intrinsically not compatibilist with reductionism. The two aspects to this that have convinced scientists of strong emergence are the unpredictable discoveries of phase changes, and the discovery of multiple realizability within functionalism -- that there are phenomena that DO NOT CARE what substrate they are based on.

The viewpoint that science has adopted, is that of pluralism. IE, that there are valid sciences that study other fields than physics, and NONE OF THESE ARE REDUCIBLE TO OR DEPENDENT ON PHYSICS. Under pluralism, these sciences, and the phenomena they study, have the same truth-validity as physics. They are all equally based on Popperian usefullness of the predictive models.

Pluralism has spread well beyond science. Non-scientists have been insisting for most of a century that scientism is false -- that science is not the only valid way to gain true knowledge of our world. History, art, art criticism, pragmatic skills like fletching, all are valid knowledge sources to those not asserting scientism. The fraction of thinkers who think scientism is valid, has shrunk to a handful, and scientism is now based on the premise that scientists themselves are wrong about scientism. Note that in science, the arbiter of truth of an empirical inference is the ability to convince a consensus of ones peers, so scientism is currently anti-science.

For a good discussion of reductionism, and its recent abandonment within the philosophy of science, see the SEP article, particularly section 5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/

Pluralism is a DIFFERENT viewpoint than non-reductive physicalism. NR physicalism holds that higher tier phenomena may not be reducible to lower tier, but they must be entirely dependent and constrained somehow. IE there are two tiers of validity for scientific inference to reality, and while non-physics inference is VALID, and those phenomena are real, they are also logically dependent on physics. So physics is MORE real. How this constraint/dependence works, is still unknown and TBD, as we really have no idea how emergence works.

The validity of Popperian inference is not field-of-study dependent, so NR physicalists may be claiming there should be some other criteria for our "true" knowledge. OR, they might be speculating about what study of and understanding of emergence will eventually show. NR physicalism can also accept non-science knowledge is valid, so it isn't a revival of full on scientism. I think you may be looking for a fleshed out explanation of non-reductive physicalism. I have not seen such a discussion, but have not done the search of this field to see if anyone has done this fleshing out. I hope this commentary will give you the hooks to do your own search.