Metaphysical Emergence within Physics: Wilson’s Degrees of Freedom Account [Book Symposium]
Issue: Issue 19 • Author/s: Nina Emery
Topics: Metaphysics, Ontology, Philosophy of physics, Philosophy of science
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…