This highly interdisciplinary book, covering more than six fields, from philosophy and sciences all the way up to the humanities and with contributions from eminent authors, addresses the interplay between content and context, reductionism and holism and their meeting point: the notion of emergence. Much of todays science is reductionist (bottom-up); in other words, behaviour on one level is explained by reducing it to components on a lower level. Chemistry is reduced to atoms, ecosystems are explained in terms of DNA and proteins, etc. This approach fails quickly since we cant cannot extrapolate to the properties of atoms solely from Schrödinger's equation, nor figure out protein folding from an amino acid sequence or obtain the phenotype of an organism from its genotype. An alternative approach to this is holism (top-down). Consider an ecosystem or an organism as a whole: seek patterns on the same scale. Model a galaxy not as 400 billion-point masses (stars) but as an object inits own right with its own properties (spiral, elliptic). Or a hurricane as a structured form of moist air and water vapour. Reductionism is largely about content, whereas holistic models are more attuned to context. Reductionism (content) and holism (context) are not opposing philosophies in fact, they work best in tandem. Join us on a journey to understand the multifaceted dialectic concerning this duo and how they shape the foundations of sciences and humanities, our thoughts and, the very nature of reality itself.
Setting the Context: Are you content in your context.- The Incremental
Chain of Being.- Does Linguistics Need (Weak) Emergence?.- Contextual Meaning
and Theory Dependence.- Scientific Naturalism and Its Faults.- Scientific
Emergentism and the Mutualist Revolution: A New Guiding Picture of Nature,
New Methodologies and New Models.- Causation in Buddhist Philosophy.- A
realistic view of causation in the real world.- Where Is the Top and What
Might Go Down?.- Multiplicity, Logical Openness, Incompleteness, and
Quasi-ness as Peculiar Non-reductionist Properties of Complexity.-
Micro-latency, Holism and Emergence.- Enactive Realism. A first look at a new
theoretical synthesis.- Holism and pseudoholism.- Explanatory Emergence,
Metaphysical Emergence, and the Metaphysical Primacy of Physics.- Contextual
Emergence: Constituents, Context and Meaning.- Mathematics/Theoretical
Physics: Contents, Contexts, and Basics of Contextuality.- Content, Context,
and Naturalism in Mathematics.- Shared mathematical content in the context of
complex systems.- United but not Uniform: Our Fecund Universe.- Probability,
Typicality and Emergence in Statistical Mechanics.- The metal: a model for
modern physics.- Spacetime Emergence: Collapsing the Distinction Between
Content and Context?.- Topological quantum field theory and the emergence of
physical space-time from geometry: new insights into the interactions between
geometry and physics.- The Electron And The Cosmos: From The Universe Of
Fragmented Objects To The Particle-world, Leonardo Chiatti.- A novel feature
of atomicity in the laws of nature: Quantum theory against reductionism.-
Geometric And Exotic Contextuality In Quantum Reality.- Quantum identity,
content, and context: from classical to non-classical logic.- Contextual
Probability in Quantum Physics, Cognition, Psychology, Social Science, and
Artificial Intelligence.- Cognitive Science/Computer Science: Nothing will
come of Everything: Software Towers and Quantum Towers.- The Quantum-like
Behavior of Neural Networks.- Concepts, Experts, and Deep Learning.- A route
to intelligence: oversimplify and self-monitor.- Context is King: Contextual
Emergence in Network Neuroscience, Cognitive Science and Psychology.- From
Electrons to Elephants: Context and Consciousness.- When two levels collide.-
Biology: Some remarks on epigenetics and causality in the biological world.-
Can agency be reduced to molecules?.- The Epistemology of Life: Understanding
living beings according to a relational ontology.- Holism and Reductionism in
the illness/disease debate.- About Context, Fiction, and Schizophrenia.-
Humanities and Social Sciences: On the Explanation of Social and Societal
Facts .- On the irreversible journey of matter, life and human culture.-
Architecture and Big Data: From Scale to Capacity.- Being or Tea?.- Art is
Critical.
Shyam Wuppuluri is the recipient of the 2020 Albert-Einstein Fellowship at Caputh and is an elected fellow of The Royal Society of Arts. He teaches at Mumbai and has a long standing interest in foundations of sciences and philosophy. As a lead editor, he has published several highly interdisciplinary volumes on various themes including "The Map and the Territory: Exploring the Foundations of Science, Thought and Reality" and "Space, Time and the Limits of Human Understanding".
Ian Stewart FRS is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick and author or coauthor of over 200 research papers on pattern formation, chaos, network dynamics, and biomathematics. He has been a Fellow of The Royal Society since 2001, and has served on Council, its governing body. He has five honorary doctorates. He has published more than 120 books including "Singularities and Groups in Bifurcation Theory", "The Symmetry Perspective", popular mathematics books "Why Beauty is Truth", "Calculating the Cosmos", "Significant Figures", "Whats the Use?", and the four-volume series "The Science of Discworld" with the late Sir Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen. His awards include the Royal Societys Faraday Medal, the Gold Medal of the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications, the Zeeman Medal (IMA and London Mathematical Society), the Lewis Thomas Prize (Rockefeller University), and the Euler Book Prize (Mathematical Association of America).
