Emergentism

Emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. ^[1] Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism. ^{[1] [2]}

In British philosophy

See also: Reductionism

In his 1843 book A System of Logic , John Stuart Mill stated that "All organised bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state", including all forms of life, but that the "phenomena of life" are quite different to those of non-living matter. ^{[3] [1]}

In 1925, C. D. Broad published The Mind and its Place in Nature. He addressed the question of whether biology could be reduced to chemistry and onwards to physics. He suggested this could involve a mechanist answer, that all material is alike and all science is as well; or an emergentist view, that while material is all alike, there could be levels of organisation with what were later called emergent properties at each level. ^[1]

Samuel Alexander proposed that a (human) mental process emerges from a neural process and that living systems, and those with mind, have "new emergent qualit[ies]" that do not occur at lower levels. ^[1] Later philosophers have taken up Alexander's epistemological position, arguing either that the properties of higher levels (complex systems) cannot be predicted from understanding of lower levels, or that the properties can be described at the higher level (such as biology) but are not reducible to the concepts and behaviour of the lower level (such as physics). ^[1]

Objections

Jaegwon Kim states that an emergent property is an epiphenomenon, and that therefore emergentism is not a coherent position. ^[4]

References

1. O'Connor, Timothy; Wong, Hong Yu (3 June 2015). "Emergent Properties". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
2. Kistler, Max (2006). "New Perspectives on Reduction and Emergence in Physics, Biology and Psychology". Synthese. 151 (3): 311–312. doi:10.1007/s11229-006-9014-3. JSTOR   20118808. S2CID   36301964 . Retrieved 3 September 2021.
3. Mill, John Stewart (1843). A System of Logic . book 3, ch. 6, §1.
4. Kim, Jaegwon (1999). "Making Sense of Emergence". Philosophical Studies (95): 3–36.

Further reading

• Cahoone, Lawrence, The Orders of Nature SUNY Press (2013).
• Clayton, Philip and Paul Davies, eds., The Re-emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion. Oxford University Press (2008).
• Gregersen Niels H., eds., From Complexity to Life: On Emergence of Life and Meaning. Oxford University Press (2013).
• Jones, Richard H., Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books (2013).
• Laughlin, Robert B., A Different Universe Basic Books (2005).
• MacDonald, Graham and Cynthia, Emergence in Mind. Oxford University Press (2010).
• Morowitz, Harold J., The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. Oxford University Press (2002).

External links

• Emergent Properties in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Emergentism in the Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, 2007.
• Reduction and Emergence in Chemistry, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.