The Emergence of Mind in a Physical World by Juan Diego Morales Otero

Author:Juan Diego Morales Otero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sede Bogotá, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Departamento de Filosofía
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

In this chapter, I developed a general characterization of ontological emergence whereby this phenomenon should be understood as a special organization or relational structure that the constituents of a system acquire, and which introduces a causal and dynamical difference that is not completely determined by the causal factors of these constituents. This understanding is articulated following the idea that an entity is emergent if it is metaphysically fundamental and dependent on its constituent parts, without being in principle or theoretically explainable from them. Then, I argued that emergentism should be treated as a clear kind of non-reductive physicalism. The basic line of the argument consisted in showing the logical independence of the concepts of metaphysical determination and metaphysical dependence. Although it is true that both emergentism and property dualism deny the metaphysical supervenience between the microphysical level and the higher levels of our world, there exists a crucial difference between these perspectives: emergentism affirms, while property dualism denies a metaphysical dependency connection between the higher levels and the level of microphysics. I explained the reason why this must be so. Finally, I distinguished two general types of ontologically emergent entities, value and kind emergence. I said that while both phenomena involve a failure of supervenience, explanation, and prediction from the lower bases, in one of the cases we would have the appearance of a different and irreducible value, while in the other we would have the appearance of a completely new kind of existent: one case implying a quantity emergence and the other, a quality emergence.

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