Invariances in transformational emergence
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Invariances in transformational emergence Paul Humphreys1 Received: 25 August 2019 / Accepted: 10 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper examines some possibilities for the laws of nature changing over time. This is done within the context of recent literature on transformational emergence. Transformational emergence is a diachronic account of emergence that does not require the invariance of fundamental objects, properties, and laws. The requirement that no new laws are introduced after the first instance of the universe seems to indicate that all the laws of the universe are present from the outset. By using a dispositional approach to fundamental properties, this restriction can be avoided. An argument appealing to quantitative laws of nature is then used to show that such laws are not, contrary to dispositional essentialism, metaphysically necessary. Further arguments are given to support the possibility of change of laws across time rather than across worlds and why the identity conditions for properties are different in the two cases. The paper is framed by an analysis of John Stuart Mill’s reasons for imposing the invariance requirement on fundamental laws. Keywords Transformational emergence · Dispositional essentialism · Changing laws · John Stuart Mill
1 Introduction Uncongenial intellectual environments can hinder discovery. For example, in January 1613, Galileo observed what we now know to be Neptune but failed to identify it as a planet, perhaps because the scientific environment was not conducive to recognizing
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Paul Humphreys [email protected] Corcoran Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia, 120 Cocke Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4780, USA
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new planets.1 Over 200 years later, we see a similar phenomenon when John Stuart Mill gave us a glimpse of a transformational approach to emergence2 : ‘Where two phenomena, between the laws or properties of which, considered in themselves, no connection can be traced, are thus reciprocally cause and effect, each capable in its turn of being produced from the other [Mill is considering here synthesizing and analyzing water from/into hydrogen and oxygen], and each, when it produces the other, ceasing itself to exist (as water is produced from oxygen and hydrogen, and oxygen and hydrogen are reproduced from water); this causation of the two phenomena by one another, each being generated by the other’s destruction, is properly transformation. The idea of chemical composition is an idea of transformation, but of a transformation which is incomplete since we consider the oxygen and hydrogen to be present in the water as oxygen and hydrogen, and capable of being discovered in it if our senses were sufficiently keen…’ (Mill 1843, Book III, Chapter X, section 4, my italics). This is tantalizing and Mill goes on to explain why the transformation is only apparent: ‘… if the combined agents had not, in this one particular of weight, preserved their own laws, and produced a joint result equal to the sum of their separa
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