Emergence And Philosophy

In the consequence of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, the science of complexity which vigorously thrived in the middle of 20th century has brought about revolutionary changes in both science and philosophy. The old scientific paradigm as Newton mechanics characterized by reductionism, mechanism and determinism was being replaced by the new scientific paradigm characterized by holism, intentional-ism, organism and in-determinism.However, the definition of complexity is still remained as an arguable "complex" problem because of lacking a common measure to the degree of complexity. To resolve this problem, Gellman assumed the notion of "effective complexity", i.e. the smallest length necessary to describe the internal pattern of a complex system. This article defines the complexity as one of the characters of the real world which is resulted from nonlinear interactions of elements in a complex system and cannot be managed in terms of traditional science. The two characters of complex systems are of "self-organization" and "representation". In the consequence of "metaphor description" , there are two ways of modeling complex systems: rule-based symbol systems and connectionist models. The former is resulted from the studying of AI and the latter is resulted from the modeling of human brain. The former defines human intellectual by function-ism and the latter models the world by connectionism. The "representation" of a complex system is distributed. The two kinds of models have both advantages and disadvantages for disclosing the actions and natural characters of complex systems. This is determined by the nature of goals we want to achieve. The former is suitable to finish deductive tasks and the latter is suitable to recognize patterns.Emergence is one of the hot fields in the studying of complex systems. The theoretical backgrounds of Emergence are the theories of fractals, chaos and catastrophe. The definition ofEmergence should be related to certain upper or macro level--the new characters (structures orfunctions which none of subsystems ever had) suddenly come out "as a whole".According to the paradigm theory of Kuhn, we try to build the qualitative model of Emergence as follow:l.The basic concepts and categories: attractor, phase-space, internal pattern, order parameter, bifurcation.2.The basic principles (or laws): Servo-principle, Synergetic-principle, Occasional-connection principle, Super-system syntheses principle, Information-control principle, Symmetry-broken principle3.Basic beliefs: holism, the theory of generation, in-determinism4.Examples: three examples given in this article---Servo-principle, Bernard cells, Logisticreflection5.Value: the future is open and infinite, chance and personal freedom are especially important. Both competition and cooperation lie among individuals and intimacy between human-being and nature.The theory of Emergence has caused great influence on ontology of philosophy. The history of approaching ontology can be classified by five stages: the primitive theory of generation of ancientGreece---the cosmic ontology---the Reason ontology---the Analytic philosophy---thecontemporary theory of generation. In the studying of ontology, the theory of Emergence argues against the popular point of regarding existence as "Essence" and "Idea" in the old metaphysics of western philosophy so long since Plato, but returns in a higher level to the point of regarding existence as the processes of "generation" and "condense" in the time of pre-Socrates. Emergence is generation. This article concerns on elucidating the contemporary theory of generation, or the contribution to it of other philosophic schools.As for epistemology, this article replies the long-time question of epistemology---are the objectsreally existent? Yes, the phenomena of Emergence are really existent in complex systems of nature and society instead of the point of "the illusions of epistemology" as some researchers claim. According to the explanation theory of...