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WillowOne's Positions

Emergentism

My Positions

  1. I accept weak emergence and reject strong emergence. The distinction carries the whole position, so I state it first. A property is weakly emergent when none of a system's parts has it, it arises from their organisation, and it is fixed by and in principle derivable from the behaviour of the parts: wetness, traffic jams, the price of bread, and in my view consciousness (Emergence). A property is strongly emergent when it arises from the parts but is not fixed by them, or has causal powers of its own that the parts in their arrangement do not have, so that a complete physics of the parts would leave it out.
  2. When I say under Consciousness that the mind is "an emergent property of the brain", I mean the weak kind. It is a claim about where to look, not about a new ingredient. It commits me to physicalism, not to emergentism as a rival to it.
  3. Emergentism as a metaphysical position, the view that there are strongly emergent properties and that mind is one of them, I reject. There is no confirmed case of strong emergence anywhere in nature, the idea has never been given a mechanism, and when it is spelled out it turns into one of two things I already reject: a dualism with a longer name, or a physicalism that has mislabelled its own ignorance.
  4. It is nonetheless the most respectable of the alternatives to physicalism, because it is the only one that is at least trying to say something that could be checked.

Notes

  1. The history, briefly. The British emergentists of the early twentieth century, above all C. D. Broad in The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925), following John Stuart Mill's "heteropathic laws" and Samuel Alexander's Space, Time, and Deity, held that chemistry was strongly emergent from physics. The properties of a compound, Broad argued, could not even in principle be derived from those of its elements and had to be learned by observation case by case; his example was silver chloride. Within five years quantum mechanics had shown in outline how the chemical bond follows from the physics of electrons, and by the 1930s chemistry was, in principle, physics. The one case the emergentists were sure of turned out to be weak emergence with the derivation not yet done. That is the pattern I expect for the mind, and it is why the view is a historical curiosity in the philosophy of chemistry and survives only in the philosophy of mind, where the derivation is still outstanding.
  2. Strong emergence has two horns. Either the emergent property makes a difference to what the parts do, or it does not. If it does, then at the level of the parts there are events without sufficient physical cause: a neuron fires because of "the mind" and not because of its inputs. That is interactionist dualism under another name, and it inherits the interaction problem and the conservation laws whole. If it does not, the property is causally idle, and I am back with epiphenomenalism and Popper's Razor. "Downward causation", the emergentist's favoured phrase, has to pick a horn. In every case where it is cashed out (a whirlpool "constraining" its water molecules, a cell "regulating" its chemistry) it turns out to be weak: the higher-level description is a convenient summary of what the lower-level facts were going to do anyway. Jaegwon Kim's exclusion argument makes the point formally: if the physical cause is sufficient, the emergent cause is either identical to it or redundant.
  3. "Not derivable even in principle" is a claim about us, not about the world. When someone says that experience could not be derived from a complete account of neurons, I ask how they know. The honest answer is that they cannot see how it would go. Neither could Broad see how the properties of silver chloride would go. The inference from "I cannot derive it" to "it is not derivable" is the argument from incredulity, and it has been made and lost at every previous level: life from chemistry, chemistry from physics, heredity from molecules. The emergentist is entitled to say the derivation has not been done. He is not entitled to say it cannot be.
  4. Emergence is a description, not an explanation. This is the point of the Emergence note and it bears repeating here, because emergentism trades on the opposite impression. "Consciousness emerges from complexity" says nothing about which complexity, why that one, or what the mechanism is; it marks where an explanation would go. Complexity on its own is not the answer, since the weather is complex and does not, as far as anyone can tell, feel like anything. Something specific about the organisation matters (my own bet is self-modelling for the purpose of regulation, see Consciousness), and finding out what is the work. Calling the result "emergent" before the work is done is a way of sounding finished.
  5. Where I could be wrong. If physics itself turned out to be non-reductive, if there were genuinely new laws at higher levels of organisation that could not be derived from the lower ones even with unlimited computation, that would be strong emergence and I would have to accept it. Some physicists have argued for something like this about thermodynamics or condensed matter ("more is different"), and I take the argument seriously. But in every worked case the "new" law has turned out to be a consequence of the old ones plus boundary conditions and statistics, hard to derive and in principle derivable, which is weak emergence. Were a genuine case found, it would be a discovery in physics and would move the boundary of the physical (Physicalism and Materialism note 7); it would not be evidence for a second kind of stuff.
  6. Why the word keeps the view alive. Emergentism sounds like a middle way: not the hard reductionism that says we are "nothing but" atoms, and not the dualism that posits spirits. The appeal is rhetorical. Weak emergence already gives you everything the middle way wanted, including the irreducibility of higher-level descriptions (you cannot say what a traffic jam is in the vocabulary of pistons) and the reality of higher-level patterns. The only thing strong emergence adds is the claim that the pattern pushes back on the parts, and that is the one thing it cannot show.

Sources

  • Broad, C. D., The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925), chapter 2
  • Mill, J. S., A System of Logic (1843), Book III, chapter 6, on heteropathic laws
  • McLaughlin, B. P., "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism", in A. Beckermann, H. Flohr and J. Kim (eds), Emergence or Reduction? (1992)
  • Kim, J., "Making Sense of Emergence", Philosophical Studies 95 (1999)
  • Chalmers, D., "Strong and Weak Emergence", in P. Clayton and P. Davies (eds), The Re-Emergence of Emergence (2006) — https://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf
  • Bedau, M., "Weak Emergence", Philosophical Perspectives 11 (1997)
  • Anderson, P. W., "More Is Different", Science 177 (1972)
  • O'Connor, T., "Emergent Properties", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

Also see