Synchronic and Diachronic Emergence
This chapter discusses a number of different kinds of diachronic emergence, noting that they differ in important ways from synchronic conceptions. It argues that Bedau’s weak emergence has an essentially historical aspect, in that there can be two indistinguishable states, one of which is weakly emergent, the other of which is not. As a consequence, weak emergence is about tokens, rather than types, of states. The chapter concludes by examining the question of whether the concept of weak emergence is too weak and notes that there is at present no unifying account of diachronic and synchronic concepts of emergence.