Abstract
This paper examines the ontological aspects of emergent behaviour, specifically cases of ‘universal’ behaviour and why it violates the reductionist picture typically used to characterize physical phenomena. Although others have addressed these issues (e.g. Batterman 2002, 2011) the emphasis has been primarily on epistemological or methodological aspects of emergence and reduction. However, in order to substantiate the ‘more is different’ claim and to illustrate the difficulties with reduction, the ontological problem of how to construe the physical relation between the micro and macro levels needs to be addressed. This is especially crucial for differentiating emergent phenomena from straightforward aggregates. I begin by reviewing some of the difficulties with contemporary arguments that address ontological aspects of emergence. From there I go on to discuss superconductivity as an emergent phenomenon and show why microphysical features such as Cooper pairing are not necessary in deriving the characteristic features of superconductivity (e.g. infinite conductivity). My focus is on the ontological/dynamical treatment of emergence via its connection with the physics of symmetry breaking associated with phase transitions. Although this approach brings its own problems related to the thermodynamic limit in explaining phase transitions, those difficulties can be countered by showing how renormalization group (RG) techniques facilitate an understanding of the physics behind the mathematical abstractions. In other words, I claim that RG techniques extend beyond their role as simply predictive tools by providing us with new physical information that can help to clarify both the epistemic and ontological aspects of emergent phenomena.
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- 1.
Rueger’s (2000) account of emergence involves a notion of supervenience defined in terms of stability or robustness. An emergent phenomenon/property is produced when a change in the subvenient base produces new behaviour that is both novel and irreducible. The causal powers that emergent phenomena have are simply those that “structural properties have in virtue of being configurations of their lower level constituents” (2000, p. 317). My difficulty with this view is that even if the emergent properties are novel and irreducible they are still the result of the system configured in a certain way. Consequently the causal powers of the whole are no different from those of the parts, making emergent properties similar to resultant properties.
- 2.
See Beckermann, Flohr and Kim (1992) for various discussions.
- 3.
If we identify emergent properties as resulting from the interaction of the constituents then it isn’t immediately clear how to motivate the “more is different” claim characteristic of emergent phenomena.
- 4.
Humphreys also discusses examples of emergent phenomena that aren’t of this sort, namely those that occur in ideal macroscopic systems containing an infinite number of particles (1997b, p. 342). His point is that the emergent properties cannot be possessed by individuals at the lower level because they occur only with infinite levels of constituents. Since these are exactly the sorts of examples I will have more to say about below.
- 5.
A Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of mater formed by bosons confined in an external potential and cooled to 0 kelvin or −273.15 °C. This causes a large fraction of the atoms to collapse into the lowest quantum state of the external potential.
- 6.
Although entanglement is undoubtedly operating here my use of the term ‘identified’ is meant to indicate that I don’t subscribe to the view that emergent phenomena are explained via an ontolotical identification with entangled states, nor does the association with entanglement serve as an example of the supervenience relation where the basal property is associated with the higher level property.
- 7.
Howard cites Davidson’s (1970) definition where supervenience is described as an ontic relationship between structures.construed as a set of entities. The higher level (B) entities supervene on the lower level (A) ones iff the former are wholly determined by the latter such that any change in (B) requires a corresponding change in (A).
- 8.
Infinite conductivity is one of the properties, along with flux quantization and the Meissner effect, that are exact regardless of the type of metal that comprises the superconductor.
- 9.
This is especially true in the philosophy of science literature. Sklar has written extensively on the problems of reduction and the relation between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. See his (1999) for a pointed discussion of these issues.
- 10.
The symbols Zα and Mα are the atomic number and mass of the αth nucleus, Rα is the location of this nucleus, e and m are the electron charge and mass, r j is the location of the jth electron, and h is Planck's constant.
- 11.
Localization involves the absence of diffusion of waves in a random medium caused by a high concentration of defects or disorder in crystals or solids. In the case of electric properties in disordered solids we get electron localization which turns good conductors into insulators.
- 12.
This is necessary especially as an answer to Howard (2007).
- 13.
The former is a quantum phenomenon in which the magnetic field is quantized in the unit of h/2e while the latter simply refers to the explusion of a magnetic field from a superconductor.
- 14.
The order parameter is a variable that describes the state of the system when a symmetry is broken; its mean value is zero in the symmetric state and non-zero in the non-symmetric state.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
My discussion follows Weinberg (1986).
- 18.
In earlier versions parameters like mass, charge etc. were specified at the beginning and changes in length scale simply changed the values from the bare values appearing in the basic Hamiltonian to renormalized values. The old renormalization theory was a mathematical technique used to rid quantum electrodynamics of divergences but involved no “physics”.
- 19.
The equivalence of power laws with a particular scaling exponent can have a deeper origin in the dynamical processes that generate the power-law relation. Phase transitions in thermodynamic systems are associated with the emergence of power-law distributions of certain quantities, whose exponents are referred to as the critical exponents of the system. Diverse systems with the same critical exponents—those that display identical scaling behaviour as they approach criticality—can be shown, via RG, to share the same fundamental dynamics.
- 20.
Although there are arguments for the claim that supervenience needn’t entail reduction my argument rests on the fact that even the requirements of supervenience fails in the case of universal phenomena.
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Morrison, M. (2015). Why Is More Different?. In: Falkenburg, B., Morrison, M. (eds) Why More Is Different. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43911-1_6
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