Emergence, Reduction and the Identity and Individuation of Powers
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Emergence, Reduction and the Identity and Individuation of Powers Alexander Daniel Carruth1
© The Author(s) 2018
Abstract One recently popular way to characterise strong emergence is to say that emergent entities possess novel causal powers. However, there is little agreement concerning the nature of powers. One controversy involves whether powers are single- or multi-track; that is, whether each power has only one manifestation type, or whether a single power can be directed towards a number of distinct manifestations. Another concerns how powers operate: whether a lone power manifests when triggered by the presence of a suitable stimulus, or whether powers operate mutually such that several powers must ‘work together’ to bring about a particular manifestation. This paper examines how these distinctions—which can be cross-combined to frame four distinct accounts of the nature of powers—bear on the debate between emergentists and reductionists. Keywords Emergence · Reduction · Powers · Single-track · Multi-track · Stimulus · Manifestation · Mutual manifestation
1 Introduction Emergentists hold that higher-level phenomena, such as the mind, are something ‘over and above’ the sum of their most basic parts. This usually involves the emergent phenomena being taken to be both distinct from and novel with respect to the base phenomena from which they emerge, whilst nevertheless being dependent upon the base phenomena. How distinctness and novelty should be understood depends on the kind of emergence being proposed: epistemically emergent higher-level phenomena are indispensable features of certain explanatory or predictive practices; whereas with metaphysically emergent phenomena their ‘over and above-ness’ is a matter of ontology. This division of kinds of emergence into epistemic and metaphysical is neither exhaustive nor maximally specific, but it should be sufficient for the purposes of this paper. For those interested in a more nuanced division, there has been a lot of recent work on varieties of emergence, see for instance: Chalmers (2006), Silberstein (2001), van Gulick (2001) and Wilson (2015). This paper focusses on the ontological debate between emergentists and reductionists, with special attention paid to the thesis that the mind is a strongly emergent entity. To * Alexander Daniel Carruth [email protected] 1
hold that the mental reduces to the neurological or physical ontologically involves commitment to the claim that the mind is nothing over and above some underlying physical entity such as the brain—prima facie distinctively mental phenomena such as thoughts, emotions and experiences are fully constituted by or identical with purely physical phenomena such as electro-chemical brain processes. One popular way to characterise a strong form of metaphysical emergence is to say that emergent entities must possess novel causal powers. For instance, Jaegwon Kim asserts that if emergentism is to be a coherent position, then emergent entities must have distinctive causal powers (1999). Timothy O’Con
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