Metaphysical emergence has often been used to help understand the relationship between the entities of physics and the entities of the special sciences. What are the prospects of using metaphysical emergence within physics, to help understand the relationship between three-dimensional physical entities, and the non-three-dimensional entities that have been recently posited in certain interpretations of quantum mechanics and quantum gravity? This paper explores Jessica Wilson’s (2021) analysis of certain cases of metaphysical emergence in terms of degrees of freedom and raises several questions that need to be answered in order to better understand whether this analysis can be used to handle cases of metaphysical emergence within physics.
In broad strokes, metaphysically emergent entities are characterized by being both in some sense dependent on some base entities, while also being in some sense autonomous from those base entities. Moreover, both the relevant notions of dependence and autonomy are supposed to be suitably metaphysical. It isn’t enough for the emergent entities to either depend on or be autonomous from the base entities in some merely epistemic or pragmatic sense. Instead, the relevant kind of dependence and autonomy must be understood independently of the kinds of creatures we are, the kind of things we care about, and how we go about investigating the…
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