An Emergent Cosmos: An Exploration and Defense of the Concept of Emergence

Abstract

The concept of emergence stands in need of an update, and I propose that ontologically emergent phenomena are characterized by four necessary features: relationality, novelty, irreducibility and broken symmetry. ‘Emergence’ is a useful term to denote the varied qualitative changes that spontaneously arise as the scale and complexity of related phenomena increases. Moreover, emergent phenomena share a unique relationship with the phenomena from which they emerge, namely the emergent relation. This relation is distinct from other types of relations (i.e., identity, composition, supervenience, etc.) and moreover is not beset by the problems of causal exclusion or downward causation. Lastly, I advance this account of emergence partly as an empirical hypothesis. The epistemic resources in dynamical systems theory are uniquely suited to describe the evolution of systems that manifest emergent phenomena. This is primarily because features like novelty and broken symmetry can be given mathematically precise descriptions in dynamical systems terms. The advantage of this updated concept of emergence is its compatibility with ideas of explanation, prediction and reduction.