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Author: F. Heylighen, C. Joslyn, V. Turchin,
Date: Jun 29, 1995 (modified); Aug 1993 (created)
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Metaphysics is supposed to answer the question "What is the nature of things?". But we cannot answer this question without first understanding what is the meaning of this question, if any.
Our ontology starts from elementary actions or processes, rather than from static objects or particles. Relatively stable "systems" are constructed by such processes through the mechanism of variation and selection. This leads to the spontaneous emergence of more complex organizations during evolution: from space-time and elementary particles, to atoms, molecules, crystals, DNA, cells, plants, animals, humans, and human society and culture. Events of emergence are the "quanta" of evolution. They lead to the creation of new systems with new identities, obeying different laws and possessing different properties. In such systems, the behaviour of the whole depends on the behaviour of the parts (a "reductionistic" view), but the behaviour of the parts is at the same time constrained or directed by the behaviour of the whole (a "holistic" view).
A fundamental type of emergence is the "meta-system transition" , which results in a higher level of control while increasing the overall freedom and adaptivity of the system. Examples of metasystem transitions are the emergence of multicellular organisms, the emergence of the capacity of organisms to learn, and the emergence of human intelligence.
See also Turchin's paper on Cybernetic Metaphysics.
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