Emergence in the Philosophy of Mind
The concept of emergence has found its way back to the mainstream of
philosophy. The air of mysticism that earlier surrounded the concept has disappeared,
and it is no longer considered dubious to use expressions like "emergent properties" or
"emergent phenomena".
The tradition of British Emergentism that began with John Stuart Mill faded
before the middle of the 20th century when positivist and reductionist ideas started to
dominate the field of philosophy. However, by the 1970s it was becoming clear that
the reductionist approaches could not convincingly account for mental phenomena.
This lead to the development of different nonreductive theories and the return of
emergentism.
The most central concept in this new emergentism is irreducibility. The idea is
that although mental properties depend on physical properties and supervene on them,
they can never be reduced to them. This idea is also evident in the works of the British
Emergentists, particularly in C. D. Broad's The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925).
The high-flown evolutionary and cosmological theories of the classic emergentists
that are probably the reason for the bad reputation of emergentism are not a part of the
current debate.
The most difficult problem that a current emergentist has to face is the
problem of mental causation. The problem is this: if the world is fundamentally
physical, as emergentism supposes, how can emergent mental properties have causal
powers? If they have a role in causing physical events, it seems that physical events
have causes that are outside the scope of physics, and physics alone is not enough to
explain all physical events. This is an unacceptable outcome. If emergent mental
properties don't have causal powers, it is not clear in what sense they exist at all.
There is no solution to this problem in sight.
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