Mark A. Bedau
American philosopher; Professor of Philosophy at Reed College, longtime affiliated researcher at the Santa Fe Institute. Works on weak emergence, artificial life, and the philosophy of biology. Editor of the journal Artificial Life (MIT Press). 1
Weak Emergence
His 1997 paper “Weak Emergence” (Noûs 31, suppl.: 375–399) defines the most scientifically respectable form of emergence:
- A macrostate is generated by the system’s microdynamics — there is no new force, no violation of physics, no extra ontological substance
- BUT the macrostate can only be obtained by actually running the system forward — by allowing the causal dynamics to unfold — rather than by a compact analytical shortcut (deduction from the microstate)
- Paradigm examples: cellular automata (Conway’s Game of Life, gliders), connectionist networks, the evolutionary dynamics of artificial life
His own summary of the position’s credentials: weak emergence is “metaphysically innocent, consistent with materialism, and scientifically useful.” 1
Why This Matters Against “Emergence = Ignorance”
The standard reductionist retort to emergence is: “emergence just means we don’t understand it.” Bedau’s answer is that there are systems where:
the lower-level rules are completely known, but the higher-level behavior nevertheless cannot be obtained by a simple reductionist derivation.
This is an objective feature of certain nonlinear systems — a mathematically analyzable phenomenon, not an epistemic magic trick. It is probably the best response to the “emergence as a stop-sign” objection. 1
Context
- Complements cd-broad’s classical criterion: Broad’s “not deducible even in principle” becomes Bedau’s “not derivable by any compact shortcut, though simulable”
- Contrasts with the strong emergence of jessica-wilson and timothy-o-connor: no novel causal powers are posited
- His artificial-life work connects to the MIT Press Emergence in Artificial Life literature noting that “X is emergent” is not by itself an explanation
Relationship to This Wiki
- Pillar of emergence — the materialist’s safest form of emergence is the formal analogue of multi-level neural theories in which brain-wide dynamics are not recoverable from single-neuron properties in isolation
- The cellular-automata paradigm makes him directly relevant to computational approaches catalogued in spiking-neural-networks (micro-rules → macro-patterns without new forces)
See Also
- emergence — The concept his weak emergence grounds
- cd-broad — Classical antecedent of the non-deducibility criterion
- p-w-anderson — The physicist’s version (“More Is Different”)
- jaegwon-kim — The critic his position is designed to sidestep
References
- Bedau, M. A. (1997). “Weak Emergence.” Noûs 31(s11): 375–399. Reed College PDF 1
- Bedau, M. A. (2003). “Downward Causation and the Autonomy of Weak Emergence.” Principia 6(1): 5–50.
- Wikipedia: Weak emergence