Symbolic Control and the Epistemic Cut: A Structural Criterion for Strong Emergence

Strong emergence is meant to mark higher-level organization that differs in kind from the patterns complex dynamics produce on their own. On its current readings it requires new causal powers or in-principle non-deducibility, which makes it hard to reconcile with physicalism. This article argues that the difference is physical and can be stated precisely. Following Pattee, it locates the difference in an epistemic cut, the point at which a physical state begins to function as a rule. A system with such a cut uses a physical marker to specify an outcome that the marker's own physics leaves open, and it repairs the marker and the link to its outcome when noise disturbs them. The article states what this requires as three jointly necessary conditions. The account adds no causal powers and answers the exclusion argument, since the enforced constraint is efficacious only through the physical mechanisms that maintain it. It reserves the name strong emergence for the sharp division these conditions draw among physically acceptable systems. Applied to candidate cases, the criterion sorts them as the intuition behind strong emergence suggests, and it indicates why the systems that meet it accumulate organization across generations and transform their surroundings. It also states what would have to hold of cognition, and what would have to be added to learned artificial systems, for either to count as strongly emergent.