Nothing behaves concretely as it does apart from context. The most basic laws of physics, for instance, establish the space of possibilities for material behavior, but stability conditions defining a context are required for specific concrete actualities (e.g., water flowing from a faucet). Concrete contexts are at least as important–as fundamental–as the most basic particles and forces for the existence of physical systems and their behaviors. The interplay between the constituents of a system and the context for the system's behavior and existence is captured by contextual emergence. Such emergence allows for meaningful system behavior. I will explain and illustrate how contextual emergence captures the interplay between constituents and context. Drawing on examples from physics, biology, and neuroscience, contextual emergence avoids the problematic reduction of everything to the play of forces on elementary particles or the mysterious and disunifying “radical emergence” of ontologically given brute factors coming from nowhere.

About Robert Bishop

Dr. Bishop is professor of Physics and Philosophy at Wheaton College. He is interested in the foundations of the physical and social sciences. In particular, he explores determinism, irreversibility in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, nonlinear dynamics and its implications for modeling, hidden cultural and ethical ideals in the social sciences, and the implications of science and its assumptions for theories of mind, free will, and consciousness.

Sponsored by the DeVries Institute and the West Michigan Chapter of the American Scientific Affiliation, along with Calvin's Departments of Physics and of Philosophy.

Discussion and pizza after his talk will be hosted by Calvin's Science and Religion Forum (ScARF) in the Chapel Undercroft.