SWIF Philosophy of Mind updated: 30 August 2001. http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/mind/topics/emergenge.htm

Topics

Emergenge in Philosophy of Mind

Tullio Tinti
lupomarsino@tin.it

Introductions

Antonietti, A. (1996), Il luogo della mente: un’introduzione alla psicologia attraverso il mind-body problem, Angeli, Milano 2000, Chapter 6. An introduction to the emergentism in the late seventies (the early “neo-emergentism”).

Huemer M. (1992), “The Philosophical Complaint against Emergence” (1992)

Tinti, T. (1998), “La ‘sfida della complessità’ verso il Duemila”, Novecento, 12, 1998, pp.7-12 & p.25

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (Editors), The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, MIT Press, 1991, Part III (it. tr.: La via di mezzo della conoscenza, Feltrinelli, Milano 1992, parte terza). The emergentism between cognitivism and enactionism.

Waldrop, M. M. (1992), Complexity: the Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, Touchstone (it. tr.: Complessità: uomini e idee al confine tra ordine e caos, Instar Libri, Torino 1996). The emergentism in the new science of complexity: the story of the Santa Fe Institute.

Books and Papers

Babloyantz, A. (Editor), Self-Organization, Emerging Properties, and Learning, NATO Asi Series B. Physics, vol. 260, Plenum, 1991

Beckermann, A., Flohr, H. & Kim, J. (Editors), Emergence or Reduction?, de Gruyter, Berlin 1992, part I. The most influent work about early emergentism (the so called “British Emergentism”).

Bickhard, M. H. (1999), “The Biological Foundations of Cognitive Science”, Dialogues in Psychology,13.0, 1999.

Bickhard, M. H. (with Campbell, D. T.), “Emergence”

Bologna, M., “L’emergere della mente: come un mandala o come una sinfonia?”

Bonabeau, E., Dorigo, M. & Theraulaz, G. (1999), Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems, Oxford University Press, 1999. An updating on the researches about the collective behavior of multi-agent systems, almost ninety years after Wheeler’s studies.

Broad C. D. (1925), The Mind and its Place in Nature, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1968. A systematic look at emergence by the most important theorist of the British Emergentism.

Bunge, M. (1980), The Mind-Body Problem, Pergamon, Oxford 1980. In this work, Bunge provides a brilliant formalization of Donald Hebb’s connectionist model. Though here the mind is described as an emergent phenomenon, Bunge’s emergentism is not really distinguishable from materialist monism.

Campbell, D. T. (1974), “’Downward Causation’ in Hierarchically Organized Biological Systems”, in Ayala, F. J. & Dobzhansky, T. (Editors), Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, University of California Press, 1974, pp.179-186. Early neo-emergentist philosophers took the controversial concept of “downward causation” from this essay.

Freeman, W. J. (1991), “The Physiology of Perception”, Scientific American, 264, pp. 78-85 (it. tr.: “La fisiologia della percezione”, Le Scienze Quaderni, 101, I misteri della mente, aprile 1998, pp.32-39)

Freeman, W. J. (1999), How Brains make up their Minds, Columbia University Press, 1999 (it. tr.: Come pensa il cervello, Einaudi, Torino 2000); Italian review: Borrelli Eugenio, "Come il cervello genera la coscienza")

Garson, J. W. (1998), “Chaotic emergence and the language of thought”, Philosophical Psychology, 11, pp.303-315.

Gell-Mann, M. (1994), The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, Freeman (it. tr.: Il quark e il giaguaro: avventure nel semplice e nel complesso, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1997). The famous book by the founder of the Santa Fe Institute.

Havel, I. M., “Artificial Thought and Emergent Mind”

Hofstadter, D. R. (1979), Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Basic Books (it. tr.: Gödel, Escher, Bach: un’Eterna Ghirlanda Brillante, Adelphi, Milano 1984). The work which inspired the emergentist philosophy of the PDP Research Group.

Hofstadter, D. R. (Editor), Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Basic Books (it. tr.: Concetti fluidi e analogie creative, Adelphi, Milano 1996). A very interesting book by one of the most important contemporary emergentist cognitive scientists; here are a lot of models that exhibit the same emergent architecture as the insect societies.

Holland, J. H. (1998), Emergence: from Chaos to Order, Oxford University Press, 1998. The “Bible” of emergence in the contemporary science of complexity.

Hopfield, J. J. (1982), “Neural Networks and Physical Systems with Emergent Collective Computational Abilities”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 79, 1982. The historic meeting of philosophy of emergence with scientific research on neural networks and complex systems.

Jarvilehto, T. (1999), “Mental Activity and Consciousness” (1999)

Jensen, H. J. (2000), Self-Organized Criticality: Emergent Complex Behavior in Physical and Biological Systems, Cambridge Lecture Notes in Physics, 10, 2000. A formal introduction to the theory of catastrophes.

Johnson, S., The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software; to be published.

Kauffman, S. (1995), At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press (it. tr.: A casa nell’universo. Le leggi del caos e della complessità, Editori Riuniti, Roma 2001). In this work, Kauffman describes his theory of the emergent “order for free” at the edge of the chaos.

Kelly, K. (1995), Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Addison-Wesley (it. tr.: Out of Control, Urra, Milano 1996)

Kim, J. (1993), Supervenience and Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Similarities and differences between emergence and supervenience in philosophy of mind.

Kim, J. (1998), Mind in a Physical World, MIT Press (it. tr.: La mente e il mondo fisico, McGraw-Hill, Milano 2000; Italian review: Armezzani, F., “Kim, Jaegwon, La mente e il mondo fisico”)

Margolis, J. (1978), Persons and minds, Reidel, Dordrecht 1978. The emergence from the point of view of the “continental philosophy”: an approach very near to the Cartesian dualism.

Mikes, J. A. (1998), “The Emergent: Conceptual/Semantic Gleaning about Emergence in Complexity” (1998)

Mitchell, M. (1996), An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, MIT Press (it. tr.: Introduzione agli algoritmi genetici, Apogeo, Milano 1999). An introduction to Holland’s models.

Morin, E. (1977), La Méthode I: La Nature de la Nature, Éditions du Seuil, Paris (it. tr.: Il metodo. Ordine, disordine, organizzazione, Feltrinelli, Milano 1983). The famous book by the most important theorist of the emergentist “continental philosophy”.

Nagel, E. (1961), The Structure of Science, Harcourt, Brace & World, Chapter 11 (it. tr.: La struttura della scienza, Feltrinelli, Milano 1968, cap.11). The most interesting work about emergence in the time after the British Emergentism but before the neo-emergentism.

Newman, D. V. (1997), “Chaos, Emergence, and the Mind-Body Problem”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, June, 2001

Palombo, S. R. & Kauffman, S.(1999), The Emergent Ego: Complexity and Coevolution in the Psychoanalytic Process, International Universities Press, 1999. A recent attempt to apply the theory of complexity to the psychoanalytic ideas.

Popper, K. R. (1977), The Self and Its Brain, Springer-Verlag (it. tr.: L’io e il suo cervello - Materia, coscienza e cultura, in Popper, K. R. e Eccles, J. C., L’io e il suo cervello, Armando, Roma 1992). In this book, Popper presents his version of emergentism, which is definable as “substantial-like”: according to Popper, the emergent phenomena are processes and not substances, but they causally work like substances.

Rockwell, T., “A Defense of Emergent Downward Causation”

Rumelhart, D. E. & McClelland, J. L. (Editors), Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, MIT Press, 1986 (it. tr.: PDP. Microstruttura dei processi cognitivi, Il Mulino, Bologna 1991). The “Bible” of connectionism; here is the manifesto of emergence according to the PDP Group.

Sperry, R. W. (1978), “Mentalist monism: Consciousness as causal emergent of brain processes”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1978, pp.365-367. In this paper, Sperry subscribes the main points of the British Emergentism.

Sperry, R. W. (1991), “Il problema della coscienza a una svolta: un nuovo paradigma per la causazione”, in Giorello, G. & Strata, P. (Editors), L’automa spirituale. Menti, cervelli e computer, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1991. Another paper in which Sperry defends the ideas of the early emergentism.

Streatfield, P. J., The Paradox of Control in Organizations: Complexity and Emergence in Organizations; to be published.

Tinti, T., “Il concetto di emergenza tra dualismo e materialismo”

Van Hemert, J., “The Convergence of Actor-Network and Emergence Theories”

Walleczek, J. (Editor), Self-Organized Biological Dynamics and nonlinear Control: Toward Understanding Complexity, Chaos and Emergent Function in Living Systems, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Wheeler, W. N. (1911), “The Ant-Colony as an organism”, Journal of Morphology, 22, 1911, pp.307-325. The theory of the emergent collective phenomena which inspired Wilson.

Wilson, E. O. (1971), The Insect Societies, Harvard University Press (it. tr.: Le società degli insetti, Einaudi, Torino 1976). In this book, the model of “swarm intelligence” that inspired the emergent architecture of Hofstadter’s models.

 

Conferences

“The Emergence of the Mind”, by Fondazione Carlo Erba in cooperation with Montedison, Milan (Italy), March 30-31, 2000.

“Consciousness and Emergence”, by Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, Ontario (Canada), April 20-22, 2001

 

Institutes

Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence

Santa Fe Institute

University of Michigan

 

© 2001 Tullio Tinti