Emergentism

The intentional structure of conscious knowing, and the emergent nature of being, together with a conception of discovery in science and aesthetic appreciation in art, are used to delineate four different ways of understanding mystical experience, and the possibilities for meaningful speech that each way may provide. The four ways are (1) a breaking in to a new interpretive scheme and way of being that is discovered as a solution to the problem of human suffering (here some meaningful speech appears possible); (2) a breaking out of all conceptual schemes into a pre-linguistic original perception of the world (here no meaningful speech appears possible); (3) a breaking upward in which contradictory personal experience come together in a focal joint comprehension, perhaps guided by religious practice (here we have either utter ineffability or some culture-specific possibilities for speech); and (4) a breaking through that uses the aesthetic notion of disinterestedness or detached engagement to account for the mystic's experience. Michael Polanyi's conception of art hints at how the fourth way might be a unification of the first three ways; they might be various apprehensions or moments in the experience of a divine Reality—whether that reality be emergent, preexistent, or ultimate.

Con Darwin y Nietzsche se podría decir que inicia el proceso de naturalización del hombre. Para la religión el hombre fue creado con un objetivo y finalidad muy específica. Este fue creado con una doble ontología: una biológica (natural) y otra sobrenatural (divina). La filosofía de Nietzsche parte de la vida. Está en contra de la moral tradicional, que se fundamenta en Sócrates, Platón y el Cristianismo. El considera que esta moral es una moral contra la naturaleza porque va contra los instintos. Searle, a diferencia de Descartes, no cree que la mente, la conciencia y todo lo que tiene que ver con fenómenos de la mente, pertenezca a otro mundo diferente del mundo biológico. Según el Dr. Crick, las sensaciones, alegrías, penas, libertad, voluntad e identidad personal, son el resultado de la interacción de una innumerable cantidad de neuronas.

Drawing extensively on the research findings of natural and social sciences both in America and Europe, Reframing the Social argues for a critical realist and systemist social ontology, designed to shed light on current debates in social theory concerning the relationship of social ontology to practical social research, and the nature of "the social." It explores the works of the systems theorist Mario Bunge in comparison with the approach of Niklas Luhmann and critical social systems theorists, to challenge the commonly held view that the systems-based approach is holistic in nature and necessarily downplays the role of human agency.

Theoretically sophisticated and investigating the work of a theorist whose work has until now received insufficient attention in Anglo-American thought, this book will be of interest to those working in the field of social theory, as well as scholars concerned with philosophy of social science, the project of analytical sociology, and the nature of the relationship between the natural and social sciences.


Reviews:

“This is the clearest and most comprehensive discussion of contemporary social ontology. The author's definitions and illustrations of such key concepts as those of system, process, mechanism, and emergence, often used sloppily, are lucid. And his evaluation of the competing theories is magisterial. This book should greatly help any social theorists and philosophers seeking clarity and depth.” (Mario Bunge, McGill University, Canada)
 
“Poe Yu-ze Wan has produced an impressive book that brings social systems theory into the twenty-first century. In a beautifully well-judged argument that deserves to be widely read, he shows how social theorists are moving towards mechanismic explanation and ‘emergentist systemism’ – and why they are right to do so.” (Dave Elder-Vass, Loughborough University, UK)

“Every scholar interested in this literature needs to read this book simply to be able to claim that he or she is acquainted with the state of the art and with the now staggering breadth of writings on the various inter-related subjects.” (Omar Lizardo, University of Notre Dame, US)

“Whoever wishes to become introduced to the contemporary philosophical debate on causality (with special reference to social causality) cannot do better than studying this book.” (Wolfgang Krohn, University of Bielefeld, Germany)

“…dieses Klar gegliederte und flüssig geschriebene Buch…. Auch kann dieses Buch jedem zu Diensten sein, der sich einen konzisen Überblick über die Probleme und Argumente zu verschaffen sucht, welche die Entwicklung einer wissenschaftstheoretisch informierten „erklärenden Soziologie“ nicht erst seit jüngster Zeit begleiten.” (Michael Schmid, Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany)

Ce premier volume du dossier d'habilitation à diriger des recherches expose l'unité de mon travail depuis la maîtrise (nouvellement nommée Master 1) et résume quelques-uns de mes principaux travaux depuis la thèse de doctorat "Sens et connaissance". Les quatre sections qui composent ce mémoire de synthèse correspondent aux quatre rubriques du Volume 2, où sont réunis des travaux publiés. C'est pourquoi elles s'intitulent respectivement "Études simondoniennes", "Études de philosophie française contemporaine", "Études de philosophie allemande contemporaine" et "Publications préparatoires à La Société de l'invention/La Philosophie du paradoxe".

Despite its recent popularity, Emergence is still a field where philosophers and physicists often talk past each other. In fact, while philosophical discussions focus mostly on ontological emergence, physical theory is inherently limited to the epistemological level and the impossibility of its conclusions to provide direct evidence for ontological claims is often underestimated. Nevertheless, the emergentist philosopher’s case against reductionist theories of how the different levels of reality are related to each other can still gain from the assessment of paradigmatic examples of discontinuity between models in physics, even though their implications must be handled with care.

During the nineteenth century vitalist theories of life were contrasted with mechanistic and materialist hypotheses regarding the nature of life. Religious, philosophical and empirical reasons were offered for vitalism by numerous thinkers. Mechanistic theories of life appeared problematic, despite their steady empirical success. Emergent evolutionism was thought by some (mostly English-speaking thinkers) to be a compromise position between vitalism and materialism, taking mechanism from the materialists and nonreductionism from the vitalists. The debate was interrupted by World War II and largely forgotten after the discovery of the double helix. In this chapter I introduce some of the thinkers involved and articulate the fundamental tenets and aspirations of vitalists and emergent evolutionists, explaining the philosophical debate (and confusion) over the concepts invoked by each side. I draw on philosophers and biologists from 1900 to 1930 in this study.

Psycholinguistics is the scientific study of language acquisition, representation and processing from a psychological point of view. The course will explore issues in these three general areas. After an introduction to the developmental milestones of the field, the course will explore neuron-linguistic issues (language and the brain, aphasia) and the issue of a critical period for language. Then basic psychological mechanisms and processes will be covered, including memory, attention and learning in the light of symbolic vs. connectionist accounts. Several sessions will be devoted to the psycholinguistics of the four language skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing). We finish with discussion of the recent applications to language pedagogy of psycholinguistic analyses of attentional use, in the shape of task-based instruction.

Considers that in ecosystem, landscape and global ecology, an energetics reading of ecological systems is an expression of a cybernetic, systemic and holistic approach. In ecosystem ecology, the Odumian paradigm emphasizes the concept of emergence, but it has not been accompanied by the creation of a method that fully respects the complexity of the objects studied. In landscape ecology, although the emergentist, multi-level, triadic methodology of J.K. Feibleman and D.T. Campbell has gained acceptance, the importance of emergent properties is still undervalued. In global ecology, the Gaia hypothesis is an expression of an organicist metaphor, while the emergentist terminology used is incongruent with the underlying physicalist cybernetics. More generally, an analytico-additional methodology and the reduction of the properties of ecosystems to the laws of physical chemistry render purely formal any assertion about the emergentist and holistic nature of the ecological systems studied.

This article is the second part of a two-part essay. The first part was published as: "Hylomorphic Animalism, Emergentism, and the Challenge of New Mechanisms in Neuroscience" Scientia et Fides 5 (2) /2017, 9-38

Abstract for Part II:
This article, the second of a two-part essay, outlines a solution to certain tensions in Thomist philosophical anthropology concerning the interaction of the human person's immaterial intellectual or noetic operations with the psychosomatic sensory operations that are constituted from the formal organization of the nervous system. Continuing with where the first part left off, I argue that Thomists should not be tempted by strong emergentist accounts of mental operations that act directly on the brain, but should maintain, with Aquinas, that noetic operations directly interact with psychosomatic operations. I develop a Thomist account of noetic-psychosomatic interactions that expands upon the first part's rapprochement between the new mechanist philosophy of neuroscience and psychology and hylomorphic animalism. I argue that noetic-psychosomatic interactions are best understood as analogous to the way diverse higher and lower order psychosomatic powers interact by actualizing, coordinating, and directing the operations of other psychosomatic powers. I draw on James Ross's arguments for the immateriality of intellectual operations as realizing definite pure functions in order to elucidate the way noetic operations uniquely actualize, coordinate, and direct the psychosomatic operations they interact with. I conclude with a conjectural sketch of how this presentation of Thomist philosophical anthropology understands the noetic and psychosomatic deficits brought about by damage to the nervous system.

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

Panpsychism, the view that phenomenal perception is a fundamental property of the universe, is one of the oldest theories in philosophy of mind. While it may seem counter-intuitive at first glance, panpsychism deftly avoids many of the glaring problems in the various forms of dualism and materialism. The central challenge to panpsychism is the combination problem: How to integrate fundamental units of conscious experience, which is usually considered an indivisible property, into one larger individual subject; in other words, how to form a macro-subject from micro-subjects. Several authors consider the combination problem to be insurmountable, and to require a retreat from a strong panphsychist view to a neutral monism. I argue that a reappraisal of the work of Leibniz in this area gives an informative perspective on this problem, and moves us further toward its dissolution.

In this essay I argue that contemporary versions of Aristotelian hylomorphism and the “new mechanist philosophy” in biology, neuroscience, and psychology share significant commitments about the reality of the organized causal components of mechanisms. My aim is to challenge the well-known narrative that hylomorphic and mechanistic ontologies are fundamentally incompatible by establishing that the new mechanist philosophy and Neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism are not only complementary, but are defending many of the same ontological claims.
I begin with a brief sketch of the fundamental claims of hylomorphism (§I). I then situate the new mechanist philosophy (NMP) within recent developments in philosophy of science, before introducing the basic framework of NMP. In the last two sections of the paper I argue for the compatibility of hylomorphism and NMP. I start with the major points of agreement between hylomorphism and NMP (§III). Significantly, I establish that NMP is committed to organization or structure realism (a touchstone of hylomorphism), and neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism is committed to the reality of mechanisms or causal powers that produce, underlie, or maintain the behavior or capacity of (i) phenomena that are constituted through the (ii) spatial, temporal, and active organization of their (iii) component entities and (iv) component activities (the four hallmarks of NMP). In the last section (§IV) I introduce some possible points of disagreement between these two positions pertaining to hylomorphism’s substance–attribute ontology, emergence, downward causation, and teleology. I show that the disagreements about these topics do not distinguish hylomorphists from new mechanists, but represent disagreements among hylomorphists and among new mechanists. I conclude that Neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism should not been seen as fundamentally opposed to mechanisms, but that it can and should embrace the many complementary features of the new mechanist philosophy in biology, neuroscience and psychology.

Abstract for Part 1. "Hylomorphic Animalism, Emergentism, and the Challenge of the New Mechanist Philosophy of Neuroscience"

This article, the first of a two-part essay, presents an account of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism that engages with recent work on neuroscience and philosophy of mind. I show that Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism is compatible with the new mechanist approach to neuroscience and psychology, but that it is incompatible with strong emergentism in the philosophy of mind. I begin with the basic claims of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism and focus on its understanding of psychological powers embodied in the nervous system. Next, I introduce the new mechanist approach to neuroscience and psychology and illustrate how it can enrich the more abstract ontological framework of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism. In the third section of this article I establish in detail the many ways Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism is incompatible with strong emergentism in the philosophy of mind. Based on these fundamental differences I show why a criticism leveled against emergentism by the new mechanist philosophy does not hamper my proposed rapprochement between hylomorphism and the new mechanist philosophy. This conclusion, however, leaves untouched the problem I address in the second article, namely, is the new mechanist philosophy compatible with Aristotelian philosophical anthropology’s contention that intellectual operations are immaterial and interact with the psychosomatic operations of the rational animal?

Abstract for Part 2. "The Interaction of Noetic and Psychosomatic Operations in a Thomist Hylomorphic Personalism"

This article, the second of a two-part essay, outlines a solution to certain tensions in Thomist philosophical anthropology concerning the interaction of the human person’s immaterial intellectual or noetic operations with the psychosomatic sensory operations that are constituted from the formal organization of the nervous system. Continuing with where the first part left off, I argue that Thomists should not be tempted by strong emergentist accounts of mental operations that act directly on the brain, but should maintain, with Aquinas, that noetic operations directly interact with psychosomatic operations. I develop a Thomist account of noetic–psychosomatic interactions that expands upon the first part’s rapprochement between the new mechanist philosophy of neuroscience and psychology and hylomorphic animalism. I argue that noetic–psychosomatic interactions are best understood as analogous to the way diverse higher and lower order psychosomatic powers interact by actualizing, coordinating, and directing the operations of other psychosomatic powers. I draw on James Ross’s arguments for the immateriality of intellectual operations as realizing definite pure functions in order to elucidate the way noetic operations uniquely actualize, coordinate, and direct the psychosomatic operations they interact with. I conclude with a conjectural sketch of how this presentation of Thomist philosophical anthropology understands the noetic and psychosomatic deficits brought about by damage to the nervous system.

This article deals with the philosophical idea of worldmaking pursued through techné, meaning the fusion of the technical means of artistic creation, theorizing, and analysis, but specifically occurring in a feedback loop involving introspection and computation (cybernetic phenomenology). The discussion ranges over a wide variety of topics, including (1) the history of music theory from Ancient Greece to the present (including a rebuttal to Daniel Chua’s (2001) account of music history); (2) emergent properties in music arising from self-organization (explored through the Ancient Chinese abstract strategy board game go); (3) the ontology of musical qualities (properties) and categories (including their relation to visual, tactile, and olfactory qualities and categories). 
Various repertoires, artists, and philosophies are referenced. The essay analyzes aspects of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, Carter’s String Quartet No. 5, and Lachenmann’s Kinderspiel.  Connections to the author’s own previous analytical and theoretical work are also discussed in relation to his interactive algorithmic audio-visual works (such as Fluxations and FluxNOISations). The techné of these is discussed in terms of logistics as well as aesthetic influences, including Wagner, Liszt, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Crawford, Babbitt, Carter, Xenakis, Parker, Reich, Ligeti, Truax, Oliveros, Kandinsky, Miro, Pollock, Pollock, Hofmann, Rothko, Louis, Frankenthaler, Moholy-Nagy, Newman, Richter, and Brakhage.  The essay touches on philosophical ideas of Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Harman, and Bogost, and more fully engages the philosophies of Nelson Goodman and Hannah Arendt in connection with artistic creation as relating to the theorizing and analysis of artistic works.     

Contact the author at [email protected]
Download the article through JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.54.1.0005
or http://tinyurl.com/zdvkllr

Several theories within the philosophy of mind are addressing the phenomenal aspects of consciousness, i.e. focus on the question how the subjective character of our experiences can arise from a physical substrate.
This paper introduces and compares Biological Naturalism by John Searle (1992) and Experiential Physicalism by Galen Strawson (2010), two theories
that reject any supernatural explanation of consciousness, and yet insist on the irreducibility of the mental to the physical. Biological Naturalism defines consciousness as an emerging biological feature of the brain, while Experiential Physicalism explains its phenomenal aspects via panpsychism, i.e. the view that the most basic building blocks of physical reality themselves have experiential properties. The analysis shows that Searle’s
account has to be considered as inconsistent while Strawson’s view – although logically consistent – might not qualify as a foundation for a scientific framework. It is concluded that the problem of the phenomenal aspects of consciousness might turn out to be unsolvable because the human mind may simply be unable to form the required concepts for a sufficient theory.

This is a longer version of what will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming volume on Žižek and his critics.  In it, I raise some problems for Žižek's dialectical materialist rendition of quantum mechanics by elaborating a series of Hegelian criticisms of the Schellingian philosophical framework favored by Žižek in his appropriations of the physics of the extremely small.  Apropos Naturphilosophie and its relations to the natural sciences, both Schelling and Hegel propose what fairly can be characterized as emergentisms avant la lettre.  However, whereas Hegel advances an emergentist layer cake model, in which the upper layers of Spirit arise from the lower layers of Nature, Schelling advances an emergentist layer doughnut model in which the top layer of the autonomous transcendental subject is nothing other or more than the resurgence of the bottom layer of something on the order of Spinoza's Deus sive natura.  Schelling's pseudo-emergentism, by contrast with Hegel's genuine emergentism, explains away free sapient subjectivity through what Lacan would characterize as a conjuring trick in which the rabbit of Spirit Schelling pulls out of the hat of Nature is the one he put there in the first place.  Schelling's hylozoism, panpsychism, pantheism, and vitalism, his spiritualization of nature, is neither dialectical nor materialist.  As such, Žižek would do better to stick to his typical Hegelian guns when engaging with such sciences as quantum physics.

The aim of this paper is to criticize some of the ambitions of the evolutionary explanations concerning the nature of first-person experiences (meanings, values), and to do so in the light of the notion of 'emergent property'. The standard of such evolutionary explanatory models is set by the so-called adaptationist approach in biology, whose corollaries are to be found in contemporary research programs like sociobiology and evolutionary ethics. After making explicit the scope and reach of such an explanatory approach, we take into account S. J. Gould well-known criticism of adaptationism. Since Gould's criticism turns out to be sound, but not radical enough, our argument takes a different route, by introducing the notion of 'emergent property', whose solidity we argue for through a criticism of two auxiliary principles of reductionism: the principle of causal inheritance, and the principle of the causal closure of the physical world. These criticisms allow us to justify a general ontological thesis, which states the necessity to grant ontological reality to irreducible qualities endowed with causal powers (i.e. emergent properties). The cognitive function of emergent properties, and the explanatory limits that they impose, make us conclude that evolutionary explanations are never in a position to meaningfully explain content, possibilities and meaning of first-person experiences.

An emergentist account of subjectivity is interesting for two reasons. On the one hand, emergentism provides a new paradigm to rethink subjectivity, beyond any dualism. On the other hand, the issue of subjectivity seems to put a strain on emergentism itself, and to push it beyond its limits. To show it, in the present paper I address a fundamental question: How can we describe subjectivity from an emergentist perspective? To provide an answer, I will tackle Samuel Alexander"s and Alfred North Whitehead"s emergentist accounts of subjectivity. Alexander locates subjectivity into a consistent emergentist framework, but his model of subjectivity remains grounded in the classical interpretation of subjectivity as mind. Whitehead gives a more innovative model of subjectivity, which implies a radical revision of its temporality and connection to the world, but this leads him beyond emergentism as a whole.

Some claim that the notion of strong emergence as involving ontological or causal novelty makes no sense, on grounds that any purportedly strongly emergent features or associated powers 'collapse', one way or another, into the lower-level base features upon which they depend. Here we argue that there are several independently motivated and defensible means of preventing the collapse of strongly emergent features or powers into their lower-level bases, as directed against a conception of strongly emergent features as having fundamentally novel powers. We first motivate and present the powers-based account (Section 1); we then canvass the two main versions of the collapse objection, show how these apply to the powers-based account, and problematize certain strategies of response (Section 2); we then present and defend four better strategies of response (Section 3).

We try to provide in outline an understanding of emergent properties, which should possibly make the idea of emergence not just plausible but compelling. It is our conviction that the core truth of emergentism is neither especially exotic nor counterintuitive, while its apparent eccentricity is essentially due to some prejudicial ontological assumptions. In the first half of the paper our argument develops through Jaegwon Kim's rejection of emergentism. We argue that Kim's use of both the "causal inheritance principle" and the "causal closure principle" in his criticism of emergence is unwarranted. In the second half of the paper we develop a positive account of emergence through a restoration of the ontological notion of quality. We contend that any monistic ontology, in order to account for experience, must make room for irreducible qualities and that efficaciousness cannot be denied to them. The novelty of emergent properties amounts to a priori unpredictabil-ity, due to the very nature of combination. Their efficaciousness is interpreted in terms of qualifying thresholds modulating the mode of efficaciousness.

In this paper, we put forward a new account of emergence called "transformational emergence". Such an account captures a variety of emergence that can be considered as being diachronic and weakly ontological. The fact that transformational emergence actually constitutes a genuine form of emergence is motivated. Besides, the account is free of traditional problems surrounding more usual, synchronic versions of emergence, and it can find a strong empirical support in a specific physical phenomenon, the fractional quantum Hall effect, which has long been touted as a paradigmatic case of emergence.

The question of the intrinsic nature of concrete reality is one of the most intriguing in all of metaphysics. At its heart lies what has become known as the mind-body problem, a recurrent issue in our attempts to reconcile the notions of mind and body and their characteristics within a single ontology. In recent years, discussions of the mind-body problem have predominantly dealt with qualia and intentionality, the qualitative and representational aspects of mind, respectively. This dissertation, however, shows that a third option is available as well. Named clear awareness, this third aspect of mind is here identified as a central and necessary condition for mentality and, thus, as a novel, relevant player in the ongoing debate.
The main thesis defended in this dissertation is that clear awareness is non-reducible and fundamental in a way that supports a version of panpsychism. Non-reductionism is the view that at least certain mental phenomena are not metaphysically reducible to anything else. The latter, panpsychism, is much stronger, claiming that mind is both fundamental and ubiquitous, that is, present “inside” everything.
To argument for these points, a broad discussion is given. I advance an argument for the fundamentality of clear awareness, which in turn becomes an argument for a clear-awareness-based version of panpsychism. The argument, however, is aimed at supporting only the fundamentality of mind so that the ubiquitousness criterion of panpsychism remains, due to the shortness of this dissertation, only an assumption. The resulting thesis is that of CA-Panpsychism – the view that the clear awareness aspect of consciousness is a metaphysically fundamental and ubiquitous character of concrete reality. This thesis offers an account of the world as a mental realm within which all of our other ideas about nature and its workings are kept safely intact.

Sixteen years after Kim's seminal paper offering a welcomed analysis of the emergence concept, I propose in this paper a needed extension of Kim's work that does more justice to the actual diversity of emergentism. Rather than defining emergence as a monolithic third way between reductive physicalism and substance pluralism, and this through a conjunction of supervenience and (functional) irreducibility, I develop a comprehensive taxonomy of the possible varieties of emergence in which each taxon – theoretical, explanatory and causal emergence – is properly identified and defined. This taxonomy has two advantages. First, it is unificatory in the sense that the taxa it contains derive from a common unity principle, which consequently constitutes the very hallmark of emergentism. Second, it can be shown that the emergence taxa it contains are able to meet the challenges that are commonly considered as being the hot topics on the emergentists' agenda, namely the positivity, the consistency and the triviality/liberality challenges.

Morris's Arc (1988) for String Quartet flows; it flows with substance, and with purpose. By flowing, I don’t just mean in the trivial sense that all music flows because it is unfolding in time and time flows. Rather I mean that there is continuity to its various surges of eventfulness; these surges are not disjunct or sudden. And by substance I mean both that its sound is as a sensuous fluid material and that the unfolding of its constituent events presents a coherent organization, thus binding together into a statement that seems meaningful in retrospect. By purpose I mean not only that there is a local logic to the consequence of one note following another, but also that the flow of events enables the material to organize into processes that forge a trajectory toward a goal.
    The analysis first focuses on local details considered in terms of pitch and pitch-class formations as arising from twelve-tone rows; then it delves into aspects of form, process, and texture. These are considered in terms of emergent properties in flux. The modeling of these properties and their flux employs some mathematical formalisms, but the reader can rely on the fact that every mathematical definition and formula is described carefully in prose as well.
    In Arc, the twelve-tone pitch class details and the surging emergent qualities projecting form are not completely separate from each other. Rather, all these features interact. Thus not only does the article weave together connections between such facets as form, process, and texture, but it also connects these to the twelve-tone rows and pitch-class configurations that are more straightforwardly part of the compositional plan (and more usual in analyses) of Morris’s music.

[Download the pdf below, or contact the author [email protected], for a digital offprint. It can also accessed through JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.52.2.0249 ]

Are there scientifically-reliable experiments about conscious experience? It *seems* obvious we can reliably report e.g. our visual experience. But standard physics says that brain-dynamics, not experience itself, drives report. After discussing numerous attempts to make this observation consistent with reliable collection of data about experience, I argue that what's really needed for reliability is for our Universe to be consistent with a certain kind of non-standard physics. An experiment to identify the science-of-consciousness-relevant physical-basis-of-reality is identified.

By pointing to deep philosophical confusions endemic to cognitive science, Wittgenstein might seem an enemy of computational approaches. We agree (with Mills 1993) that while Wittgenstein would reject the classicist’s symbols and rules approach, his observations align well with connectionist or neural network approaches. While many connectionisms that dominated the later twentieth century could fall prey to criticisms of biological, pedagogical, and linguistic implausibility, current connectionist approaches can resolve those problems in a Wittgenstein-friendly manner. We (a) present the basics of a Vector Symbolic Architecture formalism, inspired by Smolensky (1990), and indicate how high-dimensional vectors can operate in a context-sensitive and object-independent manner in biologically plausible time scales, reflecting Wittgenstein’s notions of language-games and family resemblance; we (b) show how “soft” symbols for such a formalism can be formed with plausible learning cycles u...

Despite major advances in the creation of diagnostic constructs for trauma-related disorders there exists, at present, no comprehensive theoretical model for psychological trauma. Historically, trauma theories have related psychological trauma either to biological or to intrapsychic factors. More recently, trauma is increasingly being related solely to the dysregulation of (neuro)physiological processes. Two recent therapeutic modalities, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and Somatic Experiencing, attribute trauma to the blocking or dysregulation of an innate capacity for self-regulation. This project seeks to critically analyze the growing tendency to reduce psychological trauma to physiological processes; to test the hypothesis that psychological trauma is caused by the blocking of an innate capacity for self-regulation by using a third therapeutic modality that engages this capacity directly; to explore the psychological mechanisms of the processing of traumatic memories; and to prepare an alternative trauma model, based on agency. 
Method. Study 1 uses ontological and epistemological arguments to show that psychological trauma cannot be reduced to physiological processes alone and describes an alternative to physicalist reductionism based on agency and anthroposophy. Study 2 is a survey, based on self-report questionnaires, that screened 61 firefighters from Santa Catarina for exposure to critical incidents and PTSD symptoms. Study 3 is a clinical case study, investigating the use of Rebirthing Breathwork for the treatment of a firefighter with PTSD.
Results. Study 1 proposes the ontological basis for an alternative trauma model, based on the concept of agency and on the fourfold image of the human being developed by Rudolf Steiner. Study 2: the exposure to potentially traumatic events in the sample of firefighters was 100%. Depending on the method used to interpret the results of the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5, 3-5 firefighters obtained a provisional PTSD diagnosis. A correlation was found between the appraisal of critical incidents and several sociodemographic and job-related factors related to age, education and whether or not the participant was on active duty. Study 3: the PTSD diagnosis of only one of the firefighters with a provisional diagnosis was confirmed by a clinical interview; the firefighter diagnosed with PTSD responded well to the treatment and is in remission after 8 sessions of Rebirthing Breathwork. 
Conclusion. Study 1: the fourfold image of the human being developed by Rudolf Steiner may prove a fruitful basis from which a more comprehensive trauma model can be developed; this needs to be explored further. Study 2 confirms previous research that PTSD-symptoms are higher in firefighters than in the general population. In the case study (Study 3) the treatment of PTSD with Rebirthing-Breathwork proved successful. Quantitative and qualitative findings from the treatment support the hypothesis of an innate capacity for self-regulation as well as a processing model proposed by the researchers.

The main contention of the present paper is that current approaches to ontological emergence are not comprehensive, in that they share a common bias that make them blind to some conceptual space available to ontological emergence and, accordingly, to some clear-cut empirical cases of such an emergence. The bias in question is twofold. It consists in considering whatever emerges to be both systematically simultaneous with, as well as belonging to a higher level with respect to, what it emerges from. What I aim at showing in this paper is that putting aside such a twofold postulate allows for devising and exploring the prospects of an alternative perspective on ontological emergence, referred to as "flat emergence". More particularly, I argue that sketching a theory of such an emergence is relevant in two respects: one conceptual, the other empirical. Not only does flat emergence constitute another viable way to fulfill the initial emergentist promise, but it also allows for making sense of some emergence ascriptions that synchronic and/or hierarchical accounts are unable to accommodate.

The structure of the paper is as follows: First, I provide a general sketch of flat emergence (section 2) and justify the claim that it is a bona fide variety of the notion (section 3). I then show that flat emergence is a generalization of some recent accounts of diachronic emergence, among which Humphreys' (2016) and Guay & Sartenaer's (2016) (section 4). In section 5, I highlight some notable features of flat emergence, focusing incidentally on the fact that it vindicates a form of supervenient irreducible causation that is immune to Kim's causal exclusion argument (section 6). Finally, I turn to a comparison of flat emergence with some of its traditional distant cousins, including Wilson's (2015) and O'Connor and Wong's (2005) emergence (section 7).

El tema de este trabajo se encuentra inscrito en la Filosofía de la Mente, rama que se ocupa de la naturaleza de los fenómenos mentales en general y de su conexión con el cerebro, el cuerpo y la conducta. En particular, esta rama de la Filosofía se ocupa de temas como la conciencia, la sensación, la percepción, la acción, el razonamiento, la

Among the very architects of the recent re-emergence of emergentism in the physical sciences, Robert B. Laughlin certainly occupies a prominent place. Through a series of works beginning as early as his Nobel lecture in 1998, a lecture given after having been awarded, together with Störmer and Tsui, the Nobel prize in physics for its contribution in the elucidation of the fractional quantum Hall effect, Laughlin openly and relentlessly advocated a strongly anti-reductionistic view of physics – and, more particularly, of the interface between condensed matter and particles physics – which culminated in what can be considered his emergentist manifesto: A Different Universe. Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (2005). In spite of this prominent role in the vindication of emergentism, rare are the philosophers, among whom even those sympathetic to the idea of emergence, who have paid serious attention to Laughlin’s insights. The subtleties of his view – it is true, often concealed in many technicalities – have accordingly, and somewhat unfortunately, mainly passed unnoticed.
The starting point of this paper is a willingness to somehow remedy this situation by taking Laughlin’s emergentism seriously. More specifically, reflecting on Laughlin’s insight according to which “one of the things an emergent phenomenon can do is create new particles” (1999, 863), we propose an exploration of the way in which emergence can shed light on the ontological status of some quantum entities – more particularly, so-called “quasiparticles” – that would come into being on the occasion of certain physical transformations. On the basis of such an exploration, we will be in a position to claim that a precise and metaphysically kosher way of capturing Laughlin’s insightful emergentism exists, which allows for vindicating the existence of a rich physical world – made of diverse, ontologically irreducible, yet connected physical domains – within the boundaries of a metaphysically sober worldview. Incidentally, we will show that a natural interpretation of quantum electrodynamics turns out to be, perhaps surprisingly, rather hospitable to (a version of) ontological emergence, in favor of the non-reductive physicalists’ greed, pace Kim (2005, p. 22), for “having the cake and eating it too”.

Although both emergentism and skill acquisition theory developed in the same field (cognitive theories) and as an attempt to replace Universal grammar-based approaches, there are some differences between these two theories. The differences lie under their different models of knowledge representation and their diverse degree of emphasis on the role of input. In addition, skill acquisition considers the process of learning while emergentism considers input and output, and what goes on in between has not been considered. Finally it should be mentioned that these two theories take different views towards the learning process.

We argue that researchers interested in language and communication problems in mental retardation or any other developmental disorder should view such problems as emerging within the broader context of the behavioral profile, or phenotype, associated with a particular genetic condition. This will require understanding the direct and indirect effects of genes on the development of language and communication and thereby an understanding of the complex relations that exist between language and other dimensions of psychological and behavioral functioning as well as an understanding of the environments in which the developing person acts and is acted upon. We believe that the dominant model for understanding language and communication problems-the nativist approach, which emphasizes the child's innate capacity for acquiring language and characterizes language as consisting of a set of context-free deterministic rules that operate on abstract representations-is inconsistent with an emphasis on indirect genetic effects. We review recent evidence that undermines the nativist approach-evidence concerning the initial state of the languagelearning child, the role of environmental input, the competence-performance distinction, and modularity. In place of nativism, we argue for Emergentism, which is a model in which language is seen to emerge from the interaction between the child's biological abilities to map statistical properties of the language input into a distributed representation and the characteristics of the language learning environment and for the purpose of engaging in real-time, meaningful language use. I n this article, we set out a framework that can be used to guide research on language and communication in persons who have mental retardation and developmental disorders. We see such research as being part of a broader attempt to describe the behavioral phenotypes that emerge from any genetic condition that places an individual at risk for language (and other developmental) problems, including problems that are not typically thought of as being associated with pervasive cognitive deficits (e.g., specific language impairment). We also see this research as needing to draw on, and be integrated into, research and theory on the development of language in typically developing children. We have organized the article into three major sections. In the first, we discuss the concept of the behavioral phenotype and a framework for thinking about genetic effects on behavioral development, pointing out the implications for research on language and communication problems. In the second section, we describe the nativist model of language development, which has dominated research on language and communication problems. We then use recent research on typical and atypical language development, focusing largely on research published since the 1997 special issue of MRDD Research Reviews on language and communication, to illustrate the limitations of the nativist approach. In the third section, we introduce an alternative to the nativist approach, which is called Emergentism, briefly illustrating its implications for clinical practice.

I aim at explaining the sense in which the notion of improvisation is important for the ontology of art. In the first part, I criticize the widespread assumption of the repeatability of a musical work without transformation of its identity and defend Conversational Improvisational Emergentism (CIE) as the specific contribution of improvisation to musical ontology: in an improvisation, values and meanings of what has been played constrain what follows and are themselves retroactively (trans)formed by what follows; likewise, the performing interpretations of musical works and traditions reinvent their meanings and evaluation criteria, responding to past interpretations and opening up (as well as binding) possibilities for future interpretations. In the second part, I extend the scope of my investigation to art more generally. By critiquing the principle of «no evaluation without identification» and referring to Peter Lamarque's and Joseph Margolis' views about art ontology, I propose a transformative theory of artworks, which is based on the thesis of the improvisational "nature" of artistic practices (a thesis that I conceive of as a particular form of CIE). Its core point is that evaluative and performative interpretations of artworks (re)shape creatively, and retroactively, the meanings and the flexible identities of artworks. Accordingly, the artworks' meanings and identities emerge (and are (trans)formed) through the cultural improvisational interactions in which artworks participate.

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical. But what does it mean to say that everything is physical? Daniel Stoljar has recently argued that no account of the physical is available which allows for a formulation of physicalism that is both possibly true and deserving of the name. As against this claim, I argue that a version of the via negativa – roughly, the view that the physical is to be characterised in terms of the nonmental – provides just such an account.

In this autobiographic essay, the author, already in his eighties, tell us the history of his faith, which moves from a traditional Catholicism, received “with his mother’s milk”, to a radical agnosticism. Through this long journey the a-critical convictions of the faith if his childhood and youth are submitted, late in his life, to a process of critical judgment, leading to a search –in dialogue with theologians, philosophers, biologists, physics, and mystics—which has raised more questions than answers, together with a feeling of wonder and reverent admiration towards the mystery of life and his own existence as human being.