The Emergence of Mind: A Dualistic Understanding

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to show that emergentism in the philosophy of mind should be understood as a dualistic position. Before exposing my thesis I would like to say something about emergentism. It is a philosophical movement that was initiated in Great Britain in the first quarter of the twentieth century by thinkers such as S. Alexander (1920), C. Lloyd Morgan (1923), C.D. Broad (1925) and others. From a methodological viewpoint, emergentism strives to safeguard the autonomy of the so-called special sciences. It also supports an image of reality as structured into hierarchical levels of increasing complexity. According to British Emergentism, there are properties of complex systems, the emergent ones, that cannot be reduced to those of less complex systems. The concept of irreducibility can be traced back at the ontological level by and large to the concept of non-deducibility. By saying that a property of an emergent system, for example liquidity, is non-deducible, we mean that the belonging of that property to the emergent system cannot be logically deduced from the laws governing lower-level components, that is to say the atomic micro-structure. This implies that the theory which describes the properties at the lower-lever is incomplete as regards the properties occurring at the higher-level.