From: Hans Ehrbar <econ-AT-lists.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: Re: Water anyone?
Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2001 06:54:54 -0700



Greg,

I agree that one cannot "deduce or induce from knowledge
about hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms all of the uses of
water."  But I would not necessarily make water itself
responsible for this; this is simply so because the world is
open, and it is true about the uses of anything else too.
Of course, the openness of the world and emergence are
closely related, therefore emergence is present in your
example, but it is not in the foreground.

The fact that taking heat away from water turns it into a
solid is something which can be explained using the laws of
physics, therefore I would not count it as one of the
emergent properties of water.  What may have seemed like a
novelty to Hume is now known to be something which flows
from the molecular structure of water and the laws of
physics in general.

But if you look at the laws of physics themselves
you do not find a monistic deductive structure but
new regularities come in at various levels.

For instance: we know that water consists of molecules whose
structure we also know fairly well, therefore on might think
we can use the laws of mechanics to explain what all these
water molecules do.  This is not true.  The laws of
mechanics are all reversible in time, but water obeys the
laws of thermodynamics, which are not reversible in time.
One can use electric energy to heat water, but if one tries
to convert the heat back into electricity, say using a steam
engine, then only a small portion of that energy can be
reconverted.  Thermodynamics is not reducible to the
mechanics of large quantities of molecules; and this is not
so because we haven't found the right mathematical formula
yet, but because something that is irreversible in time can
on principle not be reduced to something that is reversible
in time.  Here quantity turns into quality, or the whole
is more than the sum of its parts.

Also everything that has to be studied with chaos theory:
the growth of snowflakes, turbulent flows of water, are
examples of macroscopic order emerging from microscopic
disorder.  Even the law of large numbers or the central
limit theorem in probability theory are the emergence of
order out of disorder.

In number theory you have examples of emergence of disorder
out of order; many facts about the natural numbers are
only known on a probabilistic basis, and due to Goedel's
incompleteness theorem, certain properties cannot be decided
altogether.  Even in a structure as simple as the natural
numbers, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Other examples of emergence are the division between
living and inanimate matter.

I think once you enter the sphere of human activity you find
many more examples of emergence, including incomplete or
temporary emergence.  The rules of language or music are
emergent from the activities of countless speakers or
musicians.  Love is emergent from both lovers, science is
emergent from experience, etc.

We don't understand any of these examples of emergence very
well, and if it is real emergence, then there will always be
something we don't understand about it.  But there is always
the possibility that, as our knowledge progresses, it will
turn out that certain things which we thought are emergent
really aren't.


Disclaimer: although I formulated all this as if I was
certain about it, this is only my gut feeling about it all,
and if anybody wants to argue about any of this please speak
up.  I don't know how much of this agrees with Bhaskar, and
I also don't know the other literature about this topic.
I'd still like to hear what others think, before we return
to more specific discussions.


-Hans.


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