Sean Carroll and Emergentism
With excitement a Catholic physicist friend pointed me to a recent paper by Sean Carroll Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space. Carroll, as you may know, is a prominent atheist. My friend says Carroll's paper shows he is turning toward a more realistic metaphysics, and singles out this paragraph:
Nothing in this perspective implies that we should think of spacetime or quantum fields as illusory. They are emergent, but none the less real for that. As mentioned, we may not be forced to invoke these concepts within our most fundamental picture, but the fact that they play a role in an emergent description is highly non-trivial. (Most Hamiltonians admit no local decomposition, most factorizations admit no classical limit, etc.) It is precisely this non-generic characteristic of the specific features of the world of our experience that makes it possible to contemplate uniquely defining them in terms of the austere ingredients of the deeper theory. They should therefore be thought of as equally real as tables and chairs.
I haven't read the paper, but for my part, I'm rather cautious about reading too much into Carroll's claims. Feser has a concise paragraph that captures my general reservations about emergentism:
Second, the Aristotelian resists the language of “emergence” because, despite its anti-reductionism, it gives the impression of conceding to the reductionist the thesis that the micro-level is ontologically fundamental or privileged. It is as if the emergentist allows that the macrolevel is problematic in a way that the micro-level is not, so that we should concede the reality of macro-level phenomena only to the extent that we can make sense of them somehow “emerging” from the micro-level. As I have said, the Aristotelian rejects any such privileging of the micro-level. From an Aristotelian point of view, modern emergentist arguments, though salutary, are at best only partial rediscoveries of the correct, hylemorphist account of nature.
I may be misreading the paragraph, but it doesn't sound like Carroll concedes much, or anything really. I think he would do well to read the introduction of A.S. Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World.
Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Editiones Scholasticae, 2019), 337-8.
