While reductionism collapses phenomena downward, emergentism inflates them upward. Both share the same architectural flaw: the metaphysics of layered things, stacked like floors of a house. Emergentism simply adds a second storey and calls it progress.
Let’s expose the load-bearing errors.
1. The Parts–Whole Hierarchy Is Smuggled In as Foundational
Emergentism begins by assuming that the world is fundamentally composed of parts, whose interactions create wholes. It then declares that wholes possess novel properties.
But the parts–whole distinction is already a perspectival cut. It is not an ontological given.
In relational ontology:
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Parts are construed limits of potential,
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Wholes are construed envelopes of potential.
Neither precedes the relation; both are the relation. Emergentism, however, treats them as things and then marvels that the things, when combined, produce “more.”
This is like admiring a shadow and forgetting that you placed the lamp.
2. Emergent “Properties” Are Just Misrecognised Construals
Emergentist novelty is merely misconstrued construal—second-order meaning mislabelled as first-order phenomenon.
3. It Builds an Ontology of Two Worlds: The Bottom and the Top
Even when emergentists deny dualism, their models depend on it. They rely on:
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base-layer mechanisms,
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upper-layer behaviours,
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rules that “scale,”
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properties that “bubble up,”
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constraints that “push down.”
This is the standard representationalist fantasy: a two-storey metaphysics with a machinery basement and a behaviour lounge.
Relational ontology refuses the architectural metaphor entirely. There is no upstairs/downstairs. There are only relations actualising in perspective.
Put differently: emergentism talks like architecture; relational ontology talks like topology.
4. It Confuses System Potential with Ontological Depth
Emergentism reads systemic potential as though it were a metaphysical verticality:
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Simple things give rise to complex things,
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Lower levels give rise to higher levels,
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Micro gives rise to macro.
This narrative mistakes the evolution of possibility for a staircase.
But potentials are not levels. They are envelopes of relational capacity. When something “emerges,” nothing climbs; a different slice of potential is actualised.
Emergentism sees height; relational ontology sees orientation.
5. It Cannot Escape Representationalism
Emergentist models inevitably require:
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a base description (mechanism),
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a higher-level representation (pattern).
The connection between the two must be described, mapped, or explained.
This reintroduces the representational fallacy: the belief that one description is “fundamental” and the other “derivative.”
In relational ontology, every description is a construal: an activity, not an ontology. There are no “fundamental” levels—only different relational cuts.
Emergentism, in contrast, performs representational ventriloquism: the model speaks, but the world is blamed.
The Emergentist Mood
If reductionism is the mood of collapse, emergentism is the mood of elevation. Both are architectural fantasies attempting to stabilise a relational weave that refuses to stand still.
It gestures at complexity while smuggling in the very metaphysics that complexity dissolves.
Emergentism offers transcendence without relational accountability. It is not wrong; it is timid.
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