Concepts of Dynamic Emergence

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Project summary.The research will examine a concept of dynamic emergence that shows promise as a way of understanding how emergent phenomena can be produced over time in computational models. The emphasis throughout will be on dynamic modes of emergence rather than the synchronic approaches that have dominated the philosophical literature. The results will illuminate a number of newer and more traditional issues in the philosophy of science including the concept of `weak emergence'; it will provide an alternative to supervenience treatments of emergence; the extent to which the conceptual framework of levels of organization is dispensable; what it means for a structure to be autonomous; the sense, if any, in which this type of emergence is essentially epistemic; the relations between multiple realizability and emergence; and the role played byconceptual emergence. A particular class of models that exhibit self-constraining behavior will also be investigated.Intellectual merit of the proposal.The proposed research will connect ideas about emergence in philosophy with those that have been developed in complexity theory. The PI's previous published work on emergence and on computational science, written over the last decade, together with his previous and future collaborative work with inter-disciplinary research groups, will be combined in this research project. The research will build on existing work in emergence but has as its primary goals developing a novel account of dynamic emergence and exploring the new area of self-constraining systems.Broader impact of the research.The results should be of interest to researchers in the area of complexity theory as well as to philosophers of science and technology. The results will be incorporated into the PI's philosophy of science classes as illustrations of how contemporary scientific modeling works. The results of the research will be published in core philosophy journals and probably also journals devoted tocomplex systems theory.