Duality, Fundamentality, and Emergence

Dualities offer new possibilities for relating fundamentality and emergence. In particular, as this chapter aims to show, it may happen that the relations of fundamentality and emergence between dual theories are inverted. In other words, the direction of emergence typically found in these cases is opposite to the direction of emergence followed in the standard accounts: that is, while the standard emergence direction is that of decreasing fundamentality—in that there is emergence of less fundamental, high-level entities, out of more fundamental, low-level entities—in these cases of duality, on the contrary, a more fundamental entity can emerge out of a less fundamental one. In fact, this possibility can be traced back to the existence of different classical limits in quantum field theories and string theories.