The Spirit Of Nature In Accordance With The Reduction And Emergence,

The relationship and debate between emergence, reduction andsupervenience is an important issue in the field of philosophy ofcomplex systems science. It has aroused heated discussion amonginternational academia and many scholars have presented their ownviews on it. The American philosopher Jaegwon Kim advocatessupervenient reduction and presents the functional model of reductionto explain mind-body supervenience and further eliminate emergentproperty, which is taken seriously by domestic scholars, but few havesystematically studied his thoughts. This paper first introduces Kim'sthoughts of supervenient reduction and his functional model ofreduction, then make further analysis to make clear their main problemsand limitations, and finally tries to give reply and evaluation from thepoint of view of emergence and downward causation.The paper contains five parts. Introduction states the academic positionof Kim's thoughts and explains the gist and sense of this paper. Chapter1 introduces Kim's view on supervenient reduction. He believes theintra-level relationship is a one-way supervenience with thehigher-level properties supervenient on the lower-level properties, andthe supervenience can only be explained by physical realizationism.Chapter 2 analyzes Kim's functional model of reduction, making senseof the reason why he presents this new model is that he consider EarnestNagel's model ineffective in reducing mental properties, while throughthe three steps in his functional model of reduction, which includesfunctionalizing the mental property, finding realizers at the lower-level,and finding a theory to explain how realizers perform the causal task,Nagel's problems can be avoided. Nagel's "bridge law" is replaced by Kim's property "identities" to explain multiple realization. Chapter 3discusses Kim's elimination of emergence, explaining the process of hislogical inference. Chapter 4 is made up of three sections to corespondwith and further analyze the train of Kim's thoughts introduced inChapter One to Three so as to find the main problems and give reply tosome of the problems. Section 1 summarizes Kim's thoughts ofsupervenience and points out its essence is an "bottom-up" one-way"constitutive way of thinking" and one-way supervenience, and thenargues that it is incomplete to understand the hierachical structure ofthe universe by this kind of supervenience. Section 2 further analyzesthe first two steps of Kim's functional model of reductio——functionalizing the mental property, finding realizers at the lower-level——and introduces the idea of professor Ausonio Marras in Universityof Western Ontario, pointing out that Kim's model is only superficiallydifferent from Nagel's model, he does not essentially avoid Nagel's"bridge", and the "identification" of intra-level properties he advocatesis also problematic. Then the author presents the intra-levelco-evolution and multi-level realization to give reply. Section 3 arguesthe premise of Kim's elimination of downward causation is not tenable,presents three reasons why downward causation exists——downwardcausation as the supervenient cause, downward causation as theconstraint cause, and downward causation as fusion cause——and findssupport to downward causation in the new development of modernsciences.It finally concludes that Kim's supervenient reduction and thefunctional model of reduction is enlightening in understanding the issueof emergence and reduction, but his view of supervenient reduction isincomplete, his functional model has limitations and supervenientreduction can not completely eliminate emergent properties. So it is incomplete to understand the world only through reduction, and thethoughts of emergence is a supplement and surpass to reduction.