Sven Hirsbrunner
University of Bern
In my talk, I would like to introduce a connection between Mark Bedau’s (1997) concept of weak emergence and the notion of future indeterminacy. A property E of a system S is weakly emergent if E’s instantiation at a future time t’ can be predicted at an earlier time t from the (relative to E) lower-level parts of S, which are materially constitutive of E, only by means of simulation (following Bedau 1997). (Here, I take “”levels”” to denote levels of reality.) This future-oriented element of weak emergence resonates with the idea of future indeterminacy, that is, with the notion that while claims about how the future will be are determinately true or false, it is indeterminate which of those two truth values holds exactly (cf. Barnes & Cameron 2009). According to Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron, future indeterminacy can be understood as metaphysical indeterminacy, insofar as the world itself has not yet settled what will be the case. However, their approach does not allow for the modeling of level-specific future indeterminacy, since it simply renders all claims concerning future states indeterminate. I therefore argue for the following equivalence, which would allow for the modeling of level-specific future indeterminacy:
Level-Relative Future Indeterminacy (LRFI)
A property E of a system S is weakly emergent IFF
(a) it is metaphysically indeterminate whether E will be instantiated by S in the future;
and (b) the parts of S that are materially constitutive of E belong to a level L that is lower than E, and L does, by assumption, not display future indeterminacy.
Then E and the level E belongs to are future indeterminate relative to L.
I use Christian List’s (2019; 2024) approach, according to which, roughly speaking, levels of reality are sets of possible worlds that represent ways in which the (actual) world could be in a certain respect. If we are interested in indeterminacy at a certain level L*, then we can check whether we can assume a lower level L to be future determinate (by taking any possible world from the set of possible worlds corresponding to L to be L proper) and still speak of future indeterminacy at L* (formaly: whether, given that the cardinality of the set corresponding to L is equal 1 [by assumption], the cardinality of the set corresponding to L* is greater than 1). And, if (LRFI) holds, we can also verify (level-relative) future indeterminacy at L* by asserting that some E belonging to L* is weakly emergent.
Chair: tba
Time:
Location:
SOPhiA 2026 