We examine the phenomenon of emergence, referring particularly to Arthur Peacocke’s ideas on emergence, the self, and spirituality. He believes that the whole of an emergent structure influences the way its parts cohere and that emergent structures (including minds and persons) and their effects are very important. He thereby hopes to remove the reductionist challenge that seeks to understand a whole fully in terms of its parts. We argue that emergent phenomena are not influential in the above sense. The holistic (...) completeness of these structures at their own theoretical level does not substitute for the causal independence Peacocke suggests by the idea of influence. Some computer simulations that generate emergent complexity follow simple and self-contained sets of rules. Peacocke also adheres to a hierarchical account of reality as a series of levels into which matter is organized, running from atoms through molecules to cells and eventually to whole ecosystems. But influential behavior does not respect this ordering. Further, Peacocke’s opposition to reductionism is unnecessary; any “completeness‘ of lower-level models does not imply the redundancy of higher-level descriptions. Emergence transforms reductionism into a constructive and positive principle. (shrink)

If education is to make a difference it is widely acknowledged that we must aim to educate for understanding, but this means being clear about what we mean by understanding. This paper argues for a concept of personal understanding, recognising both the commonality and individuality of each pupil's understandings, and the relationship between understanding and interpretation, analysis and synopsis, and the quest for meaning. In supporting this view, the paper advocates an emergentist notion of person‐hood, and considers the neurophysiological reasons (...) for asserting the individuality of human minds, brains, and the creation of personal meanings. The notion of personal meanings would, however, seem to run counter to the post‐modern denial of the autonomous self, and the tradition in philosophy, most recently stemming from Wittgenstein, that insists that meanings and understandings are essentially social, and not personal—a view also advocated by John White in regard to education. In contrast, this paper argues that meanings and understandings are both social and personal. Once we reinstate the notion of personal minds and personal understandings, alongside the social, we may see more clearly what it means to educate for understanding, and why this might begin to make a difference. (shrink)

This paper is framed as a continuation of a 12th century debate over whether a ‘profane’ account of nature without reference to arbitrary divine acts in its workings (secundum phisicam) threatens the unity of scriptura et natura that was assumed in the natural philosophy which developed out of the Platonic/Augustinian tradition. Currently this issue takes the form of either a commitment to or circumvention of the protocol of ‘methodological naturalism’ in the explanation of natural history, most clearly with regard to (...) evolutionary theory. The focus of the paper is on the latent disagreement over this issue between two poles of the steering committee which oversaw a series of conferences co‐sponsored by the Vatican Observatory. One sidei was willing to make a sustained commitment to ‘methodological naturalism’, arguing that while nature was not self‐explanatory, its inherent characteristics were sufficient for explaining the course of natural history. The other sideii was initially willing to concede the protocol, but ultimately saw the unity of scriptura et natura threatened. After the introduction, Section II analyzes specific disagreements between the two groups over theological epistemology, theological language, and God as a necessary factor in the explanans of natural history. That analysis becomes the basis in Section III for the assertion that the strategy of the second group involves returning to an older form of natural philosophy with a doxa‐episteme progression that allows it to augment the ‘profane’ epistemology of ‘methodological naturalism’ with an esoteric insight in order to recognize what is ‘objectively’ the case. Natural philosophies of this sort permit a ‘semantic variability’ such that the designation of a claim as ‘theological’ can mean that it both is and is not a semantic alternative to claims that follow the protocol of ‘methodological naturalism’. The strength given the claim will depend on the discourse context. The paper concludes with a chart of the multiple and significant differences between the two groups. (shrink)

. Philosopher-theologian Bernard J. F. Lonergan defines emergence as the process in which “otherwise coincidental manifolds of lower conjugate acts invite the higher integration effected by higher conjugate forms” (Insight, [1957] 1992, 477). The meaning and implications of Lonergan’s concept of emergence are considered in the context of the problem of reductionism in the natural sciences. Examples are taken primarily from physics, chemistry, and biology.

Abstract This essay explores what it means to be human in an age of infomedia. Appropriating Niklas Luhmann's systems theory/media theory in dialogue with other resources, I propose a post-Luhmannian paradigm of (1) extended media/meaning that conceives the world as world multimedia systems processing variegated meanings, and (2) an embodied, contextualized soft posthumanist anthropology that conceives the human as emergent collective phenomena of distinct meaning making by body-mind-society-technology media couplings. I argue: (1) Homo sapiens is Homo medialis distinct with mediatic (...) communication that emerged to cope with contingencies. (2) Evolution is the mediatization/codification of the world that culminated with the outcome of Homo medialis uniquely equipped to process transcendent meanings and to mediatize the world via diverse media—Mediatized Co-Mediatizer or Codified Co-Codifier. (3) This anthropic universe is possibly the most “meaningful” (full of meaning possibilities) of all possible worlds. (4) Social fragmentation could be an optimization; science-and-religion is an infomedium optimizing religion's manifest and science’ latent observation of divine manifestations. (shrink)