16. Emergent Causality in Complex Films and Complex Systems

For an analytic description of these five stages through examples such as The Magic Swan-Geese fairy tale (also analyzed by Vladimir Propp) and Henry James’s In the Cage, see Todorov (1971).

With regard to the static and dynamic nature of motifs, Todorov draws on the Russian Formalist Boris Tomashevsky.

Strong emergence holds that the new properties of a system are not connected to the system’s previous states but rather consist in ontologically novel properties. Thus, although it shares the attributes of “supereminence” and “downward causation” with weak emergence, strong emergence denies the existence of any kind of link between “the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities” and “the supervenient downward causal powers” upon them (Bedau 1997, p. 377). However, as Jaegwon Kim stresses (2006, pp. 200–201), talking about human consciousness as an emergent property (based on the complex interactions of the brain’s neural network), this negative—because of the absence of causal links—definition of irreducible, “strong” emergence tells nothing about what emergence is, and about the relations that connect the different levels with each other. Thus he poses the challenge for researchers of emergence “to show that emergent properties do not succumb to the threat of epiphenomenalism, and that emergent phenomena can have causal powers vis-à-vis physical phenomena.”

Chalmers (2006) has suggested the term “intermediate emergence” to describe systems “in which high-level facts and laws are not deducible from low-level laws (combined with initial conditions)”, and, in this case, a change of level is necessary in order to understand the emergent procedure, a level in which combinations not deducible from the basic laws but only effectuated with a change of initial conditions occur.

This mathematical model is an alternative to the thermodynamical model of Ilya Prigogine.

This wave has attracted both popular and theoretical attention (by scholars like Thomas Elsaesser (2009), Warren Buckland (2009), Allan Cameron (2008) and others). Films like Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarrantino 1994), Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer 1998), The Matrix (Andy and Lana Wachowski 1999), The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan 1999), Memento (Christopher Nolan 2000), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry 2004) are among the most oft-cited examples.

Research in the field of nonequilibrium thermodynamics contributed to a paradigm shift with regard to entropy, which was initially considered to indicate the gradual disorganization and “death” of a system. Out-of-equilibrium processes maximize entropy but also create—in open systems—an order that is different from the one of systems in equilibrium. This order is produced by the self-organization of a system in a “state of increased complexity” (Prigogine and Stengers 1997, p. 64). Thus nonequilibrium and entropy can be considered forms of organization.

According to Bailey, there are four main currents in systems theory: nonequilibrium thermodynamics (established through the work of Prigogine on entropy), cybernetics, information theory and general systems theory (GST). These currents with their combined principles generate the transdisciplinary field of “new”, as Bailey calls it, complex systems theory (Bailey 1994, p. 121).

Albert Einstein and Josiah Willard Gibbs used the word “ensemble”, although they ended up with a model of “superimposition of trajectories”, as Prigogine and Stengers note (1997, p. 34).