In the meantime I have been reading The Metaphysics of Emergence by Richard Campbell…
His main thesis, underlying emergence, is that “generic processes” ought to replace talk of entities in metaphysical taxonomies. It was a thorough and well-argued book, yet in the end didn’t fully convince me because of one niggling underlying thought — generic processes of what?
I don’t think that this simple niggle can be easily dismissed: I don’t think process knocks entity out of the metaphysical equation. Indeed, running with the equation analogy, I’m now even more convinced that we need to retain a dynamic concept of ‘entity/process’ as balanced couplet at the core of our metaphysics, where an emphasis may err on one side or other — entirely dependent on our level of analysis — but there’s never pure entity without process nor pure process bereft of entity — the ‘entity-process’ concept ought to be held as an integral duplexity (and not a contradictory dichotomy).
I’m not sure whether we necessarily need a new word for this ‘entity-as-process’ concept, all we need to do is bear in mind that ‘entity’ is never a 100% stable thing — given enough time. But, like Newtonian mechanics, it works well enough in localised contexts — indeed it's impossible for us to think about processes without positing relatively stable entities: our epistemology constrains our metaphysics and that's actually perfectly fine and dandy.
There is still a presumption in some quarters that the universe can be ultimately atomised, in the original sense of the term, into irreducibly discrete ‘particles’ and thus these would be the true entity ingredients prior to any subsequent processes, therefore entity would ultimately, metaphysically, be prior to any processes acting upon them.
But it seems that the physical sciences point in the other direction: continuous fields on boundless scales. Our notion of a fundamental level/scale is probably false: there are no ultimate spacial or temporal bounds. If you like, that's one epistemological constraint that our metaphysics ought to challenge — and Campbell is right to do so.
Anyone else read Campbell's book and has another take?