View source for Contextual emergence

==Philosophy of mind==


<strong><nowiki>Intentionality</nowiki></strong>

According to Dennett (1989), the ''intentional stance'' can be applied to the prediction of any system's behavior that is too complex to be treated as either a physical or a designed system. Intentional systems in this sense are systems whose behavior is predictable upon ascribing beliefs and desires to their internal states. Examples for intentional systems range from thermostats and chess computers over "magnetic snakes" (Snezhko et al. 2006) to "true believers", e.g. human beings.

In order to make meaningful predictions of a system, several necessary and sufficient conditions on the system's dynamics must be fulfilled (beim Graben 2014). First of all, the system's dynamics must be non-trivial, thus excluding most kinds of linear systems with periodic oscillations or damped relaxations. The class of putative intentional systems can be embedded into an "intentional hierarchy" ranging from the general case of nonlinear nonequilibrium dissipative systems to more specific intentional systems and "true believers" as a subclass.

Being a physical system is necessary for being a nonlinear dissipative nonequilibrium system; being a nonlinear dissipative nonequilibrium system is necessary for being an intentional system; and being an intentional system is necessary for being a true believer. Moreover, sufficient conditions within the intentional hierarchy implement contextual stability conditions. 

The most general case corresponds to the transition from equilibrium thermodynamics to fluid dynamics: The phenomenal laws of fluid dynamics (the Navier-Stokes equations) emerge from statistical mechanics under the assumption of "local equilibrium". At the next level, several sufficient boundary conditions must be selected to give rise to processes of self-organization, nicely illustrated by means of "magnetic snakes". Then, a rationality constraint is imposed for optimal dissipation of pumped energy (Tschacher and Haken 2007). Finally, "true believers" are contextually emergent as intentional systems that are stable under mutual adoption of the intentional stance.


<strong><nowiki>Symbol Grounding</nowiki></strong>

Another application of contextual emergence refers to the ''symbol grounding problem'' posed by Harnad (1990). The key issue of symbol grounding is the problem of assigning meaning to symbols on purely syntactic grounds, as proposed by cognitivists such as Fodor and Pylyshin (1988). This entails the question of how conscious mental states can be characterized by their neural correlates, see Atmanspacher and beim Graben (2007). Viewed from a more general perspective, symbol grounding has to do with the relation between analog and digital systems, the way in which syntactic digital symbols are related to the analog behavior of a system they describe symbolically. 

An instructive example for this distinction is given by dynamical automata (Tabor 2002, Carmantini et al. 2017). These are piecewise linear (globally nonlinear) time-discrete maps over a two-dimensional state space which assume their interpretation as symbolic computers through a rectangular partition of the unit square. Interestingly, a single point trajectory, i.e. the evolution of microstates (at a lower level description) is not fully interpretable as symbolic computation. Therefore, one has to consider (higher-level) macrostates, based on ensembles of state space points (or probability distributions of points) that evolve under the dynamics. 

Beim Graben and Potthast (2012) showed that only uniform probability distributions with rectangular support exhibit a stable dynamics that is interpretable as computation. Thus, the huge space of possible probability distributions must be contextually restricted to the subclass of ''uniform'' probability distributions in order to obtain meaningfully grounded symbolic processes. In this sense, symbol grounding is contextually emergent.


<strong><nowiki>Mental causation</nowiki></strong>

It is a long-standing philosophical puzzle how the mind can be causally relevant in a physical world: the ''problem of mental causation'' (for reviews see Robb and Heil 2009 and Harbecke 2008, Ch.~1). The question of how mental phenomena can be causes is of high significance for an adequate comprehension of scientific disciplines such as psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Moreover, mental causation is crucial for our everyday understanding of what it means to be an agent in a natural and social environment. Without the causal efficacy of mental states the notion of agency would be nonsensical. 

One of the reasons why the causal efficacy of the mental has appeared questionable is that a horizontal (intralevel, diachronic) determination of a mental state by prior mental states seems to be inconsistent with a vertical (interlevel, synchronic) determination of that mental state by neural states. In a series of influential papers and books, Kim has presented his much discussed ''supervenience argument'' (also known as ''exclusion argument''), which ultimately amounts to the dilemma that mental states either are causally inefficacious or they hold the threat of overdetermining neural states. In other words: either mental events play no horizontally determining causal role at all, or they are causes of the neural bases of their relevant horizontal mental effects (Kim 2003). 

The interlevel relation of contextual emergence yields a quite different perspective on mental causation. It dissolves the alleged conflict between horizontal and vertical determination of mental events as ill-conceived (Harbecke and Atmanspacher 2012). The key point is a construction of properly defined mental states from the dynamics of an underlying neural system. This can be done via statistical neural states based on a proper partition, such that these statistical neural states are coextensive (but not necessarily identical) with individual mental states.   

This construction ''implies'' that the mental dynamics and the neural dynamics, related to each other by a so-called intertwiner, are topologically conjugate (Atmanspacher and beim Graben 2007). Given properly defined mental states, the neural dynamics gives rise to a mental dynamics that is independent of those neurodynamical details that are irrelevant for a proper construction of mental states. 

As a consequence, (i) mental states can indeed be causally and horizontally related to other mental states, and (ii) they are neither causally related to their vertical neural determiners nor to the neural determiners of their horizontal effects. This makes a strong case against a conflict between a horizontal and a vertical determination of mental events and resolves the problem of mental causation in a deflationary manner. Vertical and horizontal determination do not compete, but complement one another in a cooperative fashion. Both together deflate Kim's dilemma and reflate the causal efficacy of mental states. Our conclusions match with and refine the notion of ''proportionate causation'' introduced by Yablo (1992); see also Bishop (2012).
 
In this picture, mental causation is a horizontal relation between previous and subsequent mental states, although its efficacy is actually derived from a vertical relation: the downward confinement of (lower-level) neural states originating from  (higher-level) mental constraints. This vertical relation is characterized by an intertwiner, a mathematical mapping, which must be distinguished from a causal before-after relation. For this reason, the terms ''downward causation'' or ''top-down causation'' (Ellis 2008) are infelicitous choices for addressing a ''downward confinement'' by contextual constraints.


<strong><nowiki>Dual-aspect monism</nowiki></strong>

Within the tradition of dual-aspect thinking, one can distinguish two different, in a sense opposing base conceptions. In one of them, psychophysically neutral elementary entities are ''composed'' to sets of such entities, and depending on the composition these sets acquire mental or physical properties.
The other base conception refers to a psychophysically neutral domain which does not consist of elementary entities waiting to be composed, but is conceived as one overarching whole that is to be ''decomposed''. In contrast to the atomistic picture of compositional dual-aspect monism, the holistic picture of the decompositional variant is strongly reminiscent of the fundamental insight of entanglement in quantum physics. 

The contextual emergence of both the mental and the material from a psychophysically neutral whole requires a fresh look at the conceptual framework, both technically and in terms of the underlying metaphysics. At the technical level, we do now refer to the contextual emergence of multiplicity from unity, fine grains from coarse grains, rather than the other way around (Atmanspacher 2017). The basic idea here is that a "primordial" decomposition of an undivided whole generates (under a particular context) different domains that give rise to differentiations, e.g. the mind-matter distinction.

In the decompositional variety of dual-aspect monism, refinement by symmetry breakdown is conceptually prior to its opposite of generalization, where the restoration of symmetries generates equivalence classes of increasing size. The basic undivided, psychophysically neutral reality is the trivial partition where nothing is distinguished. There is full symmetry and, hence, the corresponding reality is "ineffable",  or "discursively inaccessible".
Successive decompositions give rise to more and more refined partitions, where symmetries are broken and equivalence classes beome smaller and smaller. Phenomenal families of mental states (Chalmers 2000) illustrate this for the mental domain. 

At the metaphysical level, the mental and the physical remain epistemic, but the undivided whole is added as an ontic dimension. This reminds one of Plato's ''ideas'' or Kant's ''things-in-themselves'', which are empirically inaccessible in principle and, in this sense, scientificallly mute. Indeed, an undivided whole cannot be further characterized without introducing distinctions that break up the wholeness. Yet, it provides one asset in the metaphyscis of the mind-matter problem that no other philosophical position provides: the emergence of mind-matter correlations as a direct and immediate consequence.