Hylomorphism

The chapter provides a discussion of hylomorphism, a doctrine associated with Aristotle and his medieval followers according to which objects are compounds of matter and form. Two strands of contemporary hylomorphism are examined, one of which invokes a kind of downward causation. Another ‘modest’ strand regards forms as essences, the what it is to be (what it takes to be) something of a particular kind: a tree, a rabbit, an electron. This leaves open the nature of matter. Aristotle might or might not have embraced ‘prime matter’, but his account of change appears to call for a material something underlying changes among the elemental stuffs. The upshot is a seamless ‘blancmange’ universe apparently inhospitable to motion and to causal interaction among distinct objects.

Emergence and Downward Causation

Emergence and downward causation are best understood in light of one another. Downward causation would occur when a whole, which includes various parts, influences the behavior of those parts. A whole, or a property of a whole, is emergent when it is capable of exercising downward causation. Although ‘emergence’ is by no means univocal, this would be one way to distinguish ‘weak’ or explanatory emergence from robust ‘ontological emergence’. The intelligibility of emergence in this sense is questioned, and it is noted that proponents of emergence appear to be committed ill-advisedly to a corpuscularian universe. This chapter foreshadows a theme running through the remaining chapters: the Aristotelian picture of objects interacting and influencing one another could turn out to be best suited to the manifest image.

The strong emergence of molecular structure

One of the most plausible and widely discussed examples of strong emergence is molecular structure. The only detailed account of it, which has been very influential, is due to Robin Hendry and is formulated in terms of downward causation. This paper explains Hendry’s account of the strong emergence of molecular structure and argues that it is coherent only if one assumes a diachronic reflexive notion of downward causation. However, in the context of this notion of downward causation, the strong emergence of molecular structure faces three challenges that have not been met and which have so far remained unnoticed. First, the putative empirical evidence presented for the strong emergence of molecular structure equally undermines supervenience, which is one of the main tenets of strong emergence. Secondly, it is ambiguous how the assumption of determinate nuclear positions is invoked for the support of strong emergence, as the role of this assumption in Hendry’s argument can be interpreted in more than one way. Lastly, there are understandings of causation which render the postulation of a downward causal relation between a molecule’s structure and its quantum mechanical entities, untenable.

Effects of Antimodularity and Multiscale Influence in Random Boolean Networks

We investigate the effects of modularity, antimodularity, and multiscale influence on random Boolean networks (RBNs). On the one hand, we produced modular, antimodular, and standard RBNs and compared them to identify how antimodularity affects the dynamical behaviors of RBNs. We found that the antimodular networks showed similar dynamics to the standard networks. Confirming previous results, modular networks had more complex dynamics. On the other hand, we generated multilayer RBNs where there are different RBNs in the nodes of a higher scale RBN. We observed the dynamics of micro- and macronetworks by adjusting parameters at each scale to reveal how the behavior of lower layers affects the behavior of higher layers and vice versa. We found that the statistical properties of macro-RBNs were changed by the parameters of micro-RBNs, but not the other way around. However, the precise patterns of networks were dominated by the macro-RBNs. In other words, for statistical properties only upward causation was relevant, while for the detailed dynamics downward causation was prevalent.