Emergence

The concept of emergence and emergent properties, referring to novel entities, structures, functionalities, behaviors, or risks, plays a central role in nanotechnology. The sudden appearance and the “fulguration” of new properties at the nanoscale is considered to define nanotechnology. In addition to the unspecific scale/ size-oriented understanding of nanotechnology, that is, dealing with objects whose dimensions are less than 100 nanometers (nm), and above the dimensions described by quantum physics solely, the concept of emergence is supposed to give substance to nanotechnology: not only related to the size of the objects, but also size-dependency of properties matters. Although the term emergence is hardly used in the current discourse, its implied content is omnipresent: self-organization, complexity and emergence are often used interchangeably. The focus of this entry will be dedicated to a critical assessment of concepts of emergence in the realm of nanotechnology. A distinction is made between (1) top-down or miniaturization emergence, and (2) bottom-up or self-organizational emergence. These two types of technological emergence will be contrasted with the rich concept of emergence in our thought tradition.

Although the term and concept of emergence appeared late in the scientific-philosophical debate—it was coined by George H. Lewes in 1875 and made popular in the first decades of the 20th century by the scholars of so-called British Emergentism: Conwy Lloyd Morgan, Samuel Alexander, Roy W. Sellars, and William McDou-gall—the content of this term has a fairly long history. [Page 181]Since ancient Greek times, the appearance, creation and perception of novelty and the fulguration of new systemic properties have been ongoing topics of philosophical inquiry. Natural philosophy is concerned with the tension between mind and matter, and with whether and to what extent mind can be regarded as emerging from matter. The current shift in the term's extension and intension is indeed very striking. Traditionally, based on Aristotle's understanding of nature as the power of motion and rest out of itself, the concept of emergence referred to nature or to human action imitating nature's action.

Emergent properties were thought to exist in nature and not in technology: emergence and technology were thought to be like fire and ice. The rapid progress of technology in the 20th century is blurring traditional dichotomies. The advocates of nanotechnology underline that nature and nanotechnological artifacts are—with regard to emergence and self-organization—phenomenologically indistinguishable: technology and biology merge in a way that makes technology appear as life (“hybridization”). Interlaced with this thesis is the nanoresearchers' claim to harness the self-organizing power of nature for technological design: learning from nature and advancing technology by “exploiting the principles of automatic self-organization that are seen in nature.”

The current nanodiscourse on the concept of emergence is intertwined with the notion of self-organization. In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant coins the term self organizing beings. Similar ideas can be found in the works of J. Goethe and F. Schelling. Since Charles Darwin's 1859 Origins of Species, it has become scientifically evident that there is newness under the sun. Since the 1960s, theories of self-organization and complexity, such as nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, synergetics, dissipative structures, fractal geometry, catastrophe theory, hypercycle theory, and autopoiesis, have explicitly addressed emergent behavior, self-structuring, pattern formation, growth processes, information generation and, also, the arrow of time.

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