DeLanda on Temporal Beings

Manuel De Landa on temporal flows and the "hardenings" of reality:

"In terms of the nonlinear dynamics of our planet, the thin rocky crust on which we live and which we call our land and home is perhaps the earth's least important component. The crust is, indeed, a mere hardening within the greater system of underground lava flows which, organizing themselves into large "conveyor belts"(convective cells), are the main factor in the genesis of the most salient and apparently durable structures of the crusty surface. Either directly, via volcanic activity, or indirectly, by forcing continental plates to collide, thereby creating the great folded mountain ranges, it is the self-organized activity of lava flows that is at the origin of many geological forms. If we consider that the oceanic crust on which the continents are embedded is constantly being created and destroyed (by solidification and remelting) and that even continental crust is under constant erosion so that its materials are recycled into the ocean, the rocks and mountains that define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would merely represent a local slowing down of this flowing reality. It is almost as if every part of the mineral world could be defined simply by specifying its chemical composition and its speed of flow: very slow for rocks, faster for lava. 

Similarly, our individual bodies and minds are mere coagulations or decelerations in the flows of biomass, genes, memes, and norms. Here, too, we might be defined both by the materials we are temporarily binding or chainging to our organic bodies and cultural minds and by the time scale of the binding operation. Over the millennia, it is the flow of biomass through foodwebs, as well as the flow of genes through generations, that matters, not the bodies and species that emerge from these flows. Our languages may also be seen overtime as momentary slowing downs or thickenings in a flow of norms that gives rise to a multitude of different structures. And a similar point applies to our institutions,which may also be considered transitory hardenings in the flows of money, routines,and prestige, and, if they have acquired a permanent building to house them, in the mineral flows from which the construction materials derive.  

This book has concerned itself with a historical survey of these flows of "stuff," as well as with the hardenings themselves, since once they emerge they react back on the flows to constrain them in a variety of ways."

[ From: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 1997, p. 257-259 - Swerve edition ]

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Manuel DeLanda on Emergence, Causality and Realism

From The Speculative Turn (p.381-392):

Emergence, Causality and Realism

By Manuel DeLanda

"If a body is propelled in two directions by two forces, one tending to drive it to the north and the other to the east, it is caused to move in a given time exactly as far in both directions as the two forces would separately have carried it; and it is left precisely where it would have arrived if it had been acted upon first by one of the two forces, and afterwards by the other. [...] I shall give the name of the Composition of Causes to the principle which is exemplified in all cases in which the joint effect of several causes is identical with the sum of their separate effects. [...] This principle, however, by no means prevails in all departments of the field of nature. The chemical ombination of two substances produces, as is well known, a third substance with properties different from those of either of the two substances separately, or both of them taken together. Not a trace of the properties of hydrogen or of oxygen is observable in those of their compound, water."  — John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic

With these words John Stuart Mill began the modern debate on the question of emergence. While he himself did not use the term, one of its definitions, that of a property of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, is clearly stated in this quote. Mill goes on to qualify this statement because two joint causes may interfere with each other and subtract rather than add their effects: a reservoir may be fed by a stream of water on one side while a drain empties it on the other side, the joint product being no change in the amount of water stored. Yet, for Mill, this is just another version of the Composition of Causes. So the real distinction between physical and chemical interactions is not so much that a joint effect is a mere sum but that it is entirely different or novel, ‘as in the experiment of two liquids which, when mixed in certain proportions, instantly become, not a larger amount of liquid, but a solid mass’. The term ‘emergent’ was introduced in 1875 by another philosopher, George Henry Lewes, also in the context of a discussion of joint causes and their effects. When two separate causes simply add or mix themselves in their joint effect, so that we can see their agency in action in that effect, the result is a mere ‘resultant’ but if there is novelty or heterogeneity in the effect then we may speak of an ‘emergent’.

Both authors viewed the difference between physics and chemistry as pivoting on the possibility of explanation: while in physics to explain an effect is to deduce it from a law, in chemistry deduction is not possible because of the existence of novelty in the effect. To know what effect the combination of two causes will have, what molecule will be synthesized from the interaction of two different atoms, for example, one needs to actually carry out an experiment. Mill did not think that this was a cause for despair: in due time chemical laws could be discovered that made the properties of water, for instance, deducible from those of oxygen and hydrogen. But to Lewes this possibility implied that water would cease to be an emergent and would become a resultant. As he wrote: ‘Some day, perhaps, we shall be able to express the unseen process in a mathematical formula; till then we must regard the water as an emergent’. In other words, something is an emergent only to the extent that we cannot deduce it from a law, and it ceases to be so the moment a law becomes available. This is an unfortunate conclusion, one that involves a serious misunderstanding of the nature of explanation in general and of causal explanation in particular.

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