EMERGENCE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

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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.