Speaker: Sam Fletcher (Dept of Philosophy, University of Minnesota)
Title: 'Emergence and scale’s labyrinth’
Abstract:
I give precise formal definitions of a hierarchy of emergence concepts for properties described in models of physical theories, showing how some of these concepts are compatible with reductive (but not strictly deductive) relationships between these theories. Besides applying fruitfully to a variety of physical examples, these concepts do not in general track autonomy or novelty along a single simple dimensional scale such as energy, length, or time, but can instead involve labyrinthine balancing relationships between these scales. This complicates the usual view of emergence as relating linearly (or even partially) ordered levels.
