Conference paper abstract, A. Theodore Izmaylov, 2024.
Keywords: emergence; reduction; individualism–holism debate; computational complexity; Conway’s Game of Life
Reduction-emergence and individualism-holism debates in the philosophy of natural and social sciences loosely label arguments as ’weak’, ’in practice’, ’merely epistemological’ if they refer to the practice of actual or possible science by any cognitive agents in a physical world and ’strong’, ’in principle’, ’ontological’ or ’metaphysical’ even if they hold only mathematically, unbound by physical constraints. It is confused and irrelevant to science and philosophy thereof.
I suggest an alternative informed by the asymptotic computational complexity and asymmetry of complexity classes of reductivist and emergentist epistemic procedures. Using Conway’s Game of Life as a formal model for philosophical experiments, I show how the time and space resources needed for reductivist explanation of social by individual, mental by physical, chemical by physical might grow unfeasibly with the size of the phenomena studied. While emergentist approaches use computationally lighter empirical identification and higher-level causation. I suggest the computability and feasibility of epistemic procedures in a physical world as a hallmark of the relevance and strength of philosophical arguments.
Batterman, R. W. (2002). The devil in the details: Asymptotic rea- soning in explanation, reduction, and emergence. Oxford University Press.
Bedau, M. A. (2013). Weak emergence and computer simulation. In P. Humphreys C. Imbert, Models, Simulations, and Representations (pp. 91-114). Routledge.
Huneman, P., Humphreys, P. (2008). Dynamical Emergence and Computation: An Introduction. Minds and Machines, 18(4), 425-430.
Pexton, M. (2019). Computational Emergence: Weak and strong. In The Routledge Handbook of Emergence. Routledge.
Wilson, J. (2016). Metaphysical emergence: Weak and strong. In Metaphysics in contemporary physics (pp. 345-402). Brill.
“Formal Methods And Science In Philosophy V” Conference. Inter-University Center Dubrovnik, Croatia, May 16, 2024.