Claudio Gnoli gives an updated view on emergence in “Foundations of Science“
Emergence can be described as a relationship between entities at different levels of organization, that looks especially puzzling at the transitions between the major levels of matter, life, cognition and culture. Indeed, each major level is dependent on the lower one not just for its constituents, but in some more formal way.
Although different philosophers use the term emergence with different shades of meaning,
[w]e might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them.
(For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.)O’Connor and Wong, 2015, Emergent properties.
In Zalta, E.N. (Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.
A passage by François Jacob suggests that all such evolutionary transitions are associated with the appearance of some form of memory–genetic, neural or linguistic respectively. This implies that they have an informational nature.
What especially characterizes the living bodies, as opposed to the inanimate bodies, is their attitude to keep track of the past experience and to transmit it. As a matter of fact, the two break points of evolution, the appearance of life first, and that of thought and language later, each correspond to the formation of a memory system, that of heredity and that of the nervous system.
Jacob, F. (1975). Évolution et réalisme.
Based on this idea, we propose a general model of informational systems understood as combinations of modules taken from a limited inventory.
In the famous phrase by Gregory Bateson, information is described as “a difference that makes a difference”. Difference is identified by Floridi as the most basic among relationships, as it is the only relationship whose meaning does not depend on the nature of the entities it connects. In his terms, any discontinuity in reality is “data”, and the way data affect other entities is “information”. Several authors are now considering information as a most fundamental entity, even prior to energy and matter: indeed, matter could come from information–“it from bit”, in John Wheeler’s words–rather than the other way around.
Some informational systems are “semantic” models, that is reproduce features of their environment.
Among these, some are also “informed”, that is have a pattern derived from a memory subsystem. The levels and components of informed systems can be listed to provide a general framework for knowledge organization, of relevance in both philosophical ontology and applied information services.
We can call an advanced systems informed systems (λ), as their form is the result of some “instructions”.
That is, in informed systems the core semantic system τ (the model of the environment) is informed by the memory subsystem (μ).
Additionally, more subsystems (ε) are often there which specialize in mediating the relationships of the model with its environment, like with peripheral devices in computers: these are sensors (think of sense organs in organisms, or the thermometer in a thermostat) and effectors (think of muscles in organisms or devices in an artifact).
To sum up, an informed system λ is a set of three kinds of subsystems:
𝜆=(𝜇,𝜏,ε)
where the core model system τ
(1) is informed by a memory μ and
(2) interacts with environment E in both directions, often through sensors and effectors ε:
- (1) μ → τ
- (2) τ ↔ ε
Major levels of informed systems
| Memories (μ) | Models (τ) | Sensors and effectors (ε) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| λ1 | Physical laws? | Matter | Forces |
| λ2 | Genomes | Life forms | Vital functions |
| λ3 | Neural systems | Cognition | Senses, behaviour |
| λ4 | Languages | Cultures | Works |
only meant as a draft, leaving various questions open.
For example, it is not clear whether such material systems as atoms or crystals are also informed by any hypothetical kind of memories–we have tentatively identified these as “physical laws”, which should be understood here as intrinsic laws of nature, whose way of storage remains to be identified, rather than creations of human research
The ontology that can be developed is of twofold interest.
In first instance, it may be relevant in itself as a model of the world, to satisfy our intellectual need of understanding reality (pure ontology).
In second instance, it can be the source of the schemes that are used to organize our knowledge of the world, to find and reuse such information as part of our scholarly activities (applied ontology).
Such schemes are known as knowledge organizations systems (KOS).
Any KOS must ultimately be based on some conceptual ordering of the world. Providing such order, and continuously refining it, is up to philosophical ontology. This approach, taking information and memory as generalized concepts to explain the emergence of the different levels of entities, can offer a contribution in this direction.
Surtil : 