Philosophy and simulation: the emergence of synthetic reason

233 Pages·2015·0.703 MB·English

by  De Landa, Manuel

PHILOSOPHY AND SIMULATION
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PHILOSOPHY AND
SIMULATION
The Emergence of Synthetic
Reason
Manuel DeLanda
Continuum International Publishing Group
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London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Manuel DeLanda, 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from
the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-7028-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Landa, Manuel.
Philosophy and simulation: the emergence of synthetic reason /
Manuel Delanda.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-7028-6
1. Emergence (Philosophy) 2. Science–Philosophy. I. Title.
Q175.32.E44D4 2010
003–dc22
2010020325
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt Ltd
Contents
Introduction
Emergence in History 1
Chapter One
The Storm in the Computer 7
Chapter Two
Cellular Automata and Patterns of Flow 22
Chapter Three
Artifi cial Chemistries and the Prebiotic Soup 36
Chapter Four
Genetic Algorithms and the Prebiotic Soup 48
Chapter Five
Genetic Algorithms and Ancient Organisms 65
Chapter Six
Neural Nets and Insect Intelligence 80
Chapter Seven
Neural Nets and Mammalian Memory 94
Chapter Eight
Multiagents and Primate Strategies 111
Chapter Nine
Multiagents and Stone Age Economics 128
v
CONTENTS
Chapter Ten
Multiagents and Primitive Language 146
Chapter Eleven
Multiagents and Archaic States 166
Appendix
Links to Assemblage Theory 184
Notes 204
Index 223
vi
INTRODUCTION
Emergence in History
The origin of the modern concept of emergence can be traced to the
middle of the nineteenth century when realist philosophers fi rst
began pondering the deep dissimilarities between causality in the
fi elds of physics and chemistry. The classical example of causality in
physics is a collision between two molecules or other rigid objects.
Even in the case of several colliding molecules the overall effect is
a simple addition. If, for example, one molecule is hit by a second one
in one direction and by a third one in a different direction the com-
posite effect will be the same as the sum of the two separate effects:
the fi rst molecule will end up in the same fi nal position if the other
two hit it simultaneously or if one collision happens before the other.
In short, in these causal interactions there are no surprises, nothing
is produced over and above what is already there. But when two
molecules interact chemically an entirely new entity may emerge, as
when hydrogen and oxygen interact to form water. Water has proper-
ties that are not possessed by its component parts: oxygen and hydro-
gen are gases at room temperature while water is liquid. And water
has capacities distinct from those of its parts: adding oxygen or hydro-
gen to a fi re fuels it while adding water extinguishes it.1
The fact that novel properties and capacities emerge from a causal
interaction was believed to have important philosophical implications
for the nature of scientifi c explanation. In particular, the absence of
novelty in physical interactions meant that explaining their effects
could be reduced to deduction from general principles or laws.
Because deductive logic simply transfers truth from general sentences
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PHILOSOPHY AND SIMULATION
to particular ones without adding anything new it seemed like an
ideal way of modeling the explanation of situations like those involv-
ing rigid collisions. But the synthesis of water does produce some-
thing new, not new in the absolute sense of something that has never
existed before but only in the relative sense that something emerges
that was not in the interacting entities acting as causes. This led some
philosophers to the erroneous conclusion that emergent effects could not
be explained, or what amounts to the same thing, that an effect is
emergent only for as long as a law from which it can be deduced has
not yet been found.2 This line of thought went on to become a full
fl edged philosophy in the early twentieth century, a philosophy based
on the idea that emergence was intrinsically unexplainable. This
fi rst wave of “emergentist” philosophers were not mystical thinkers
but quite the opposite: they wanted to use the concept of emergence
to eliminate from biology mystifying entities like a “life force” or the
“élan vital.” But their position toward explanation gave their views
an inevitable mystical tone: emergent properties, they said, must be
accepted with an attitude of intellectual resignation, that is, they must
be treated as brute facts toward which the only honest stance is one
of natural piety.3
Expressions like these were bound to make the concept of emer-
gence suspect to future generations of philosophers. It was only the
passage of time and the fact that mathematical laws like those of
classical physics were not found in chemistry or biology—or for that
matter, in the more historical fi elds of physics, like geology or clima-
tology—that would rescue the concept from intellectual oblivion.
Without simple laws acting as self-evident truths (axioms) from which
all causal effects could be deduced as theorems the axiomatic dream
eventually withered away. Today a scientifi c explanation is identifi ed
not with some logical operation but with the more creative endeavor
of elucidating the mechanisms that produce a given effect. The early
emergentists dismissed this idea because they could not imagine any-
thing more complex than a linear clockwork mechanism. But there
are many other physical mechanisms that are nonlinear. Even in the
realm of human technology we have a plurality of exemplars to guide
our imagination: steam engines, thermostats, transistors. And outside
technology the diversity is even greater as illustrated by all the differ-
ent mechanisms that have been discovered in chemistry and biology.
2
EMERGENCE IN HISTORY
Armed with a richer concept of mechanism the emergent properties
of a whole can now be explained as an effect of the causal interactions
between its component parts. A large portion of this book will be
dedicated to describe the wide variety of mechanisms of emergence that
have been elucidated in the decades since the original emergentists
fi rst wrote.
Thus, what is different today from the early twentieth century
views is the epistemological status of emergence: it does not have to be
accepted as a brute fact but can be explained without fearing that it
will be explained away. What has remained the same is the ontological
status of emergence: it still refers to something that is objectively
irreducible. But what kinds of entities display this ontological irreduc-
ibility? The original examples of irreducible wholes were entities like
“Life,” “Mind,” or even “Deity.” But these entities cannot be consid-
ered legitimate inhabitants of objective reality because they are noth-
ing but reifi ed generalities. And even if one does not have a problem
with an ontological commitment to entities like these it is hard to see
how we could specify mechanisms of emergence for life or mind in
general, as opposed to accounting for the emergent properties and
capacities of concrete wholes like a metabolic circuit or an assembly of
neurons. The only problem with focusing on concrete wholes is that
this would seem to make philosophers redundant since they do not
play any role in the elucidation of the series of events that produce
emergent effects. This fear of redundancy may explain the attach-
ment of philosophers to vague entities as a way of carving out a niche
for themselves in this enterprise. But realist philosophers need not
fear irrelevance because they have plenty of work creating an onto-
logy free of reifi ed generalities within which the concept of emer-
gence can be correctly deployed.
What kinds of concrete emergent wholes can we legitimately believe
in? Wholes the identity of which is determined historically by the
processes that initiated and sustain the interactions between their
parts. The historically contingent identity of these wholes is defi ned
by their emergent properties, capacities, and tendencies. Let’s illus-
trate the distinction between properties and capacities with a simple
example. A kitchen knife may be either sharp or not, sharpness being
an actual property of the knife. We can identify this property with the
shape of the cross section of the knife’s blade: if this cross section has
3