Textbook in PDF format

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 today’s 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 can’t 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.
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
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
Bibliography
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
“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