The
British emergentists were not substance-dualists; they held that all
particulars are physical entities wholly constituted out of physical entities
as their parts. But they were not full-fledged materialists either, because
they denied that physics is a causally complete science. They maintained that
at various junctures in the course of evolution, complex physical entities came
into being that had certain non-physical, "emergent", properties. These
properties, they claimed, are fundamental force-generating properties, over and
above the force-generating properties of physics; when such a property is
instantiated by an individual, the total causal forces operative within the
individual are a combination of physical and non-physical forces, and the
resulting behavior of the individual is different from what it would have been
had the emergent force(s) not been operative alongside the lower-level forces…
Furthermore, there is no explanation for why emergent properties come into
being, or why they generate the specific non-physical forces they do. These
facts are metaphysically and scientifically basic, in much the same way that
fundamental laws of physics are basic; they are unexplained explainers, which
must be accepted (in Samuel Alexander's striking phrase) "with natural
piety". Putative examples of emergent properties included (i)
chemical-bonding properties of molecules, which were held to be emergent from
physical properties of atoms or their constituents; (ii) self-maintenance and
reproductive properties of living things, emergent from physical and chemical
properties; and (iii) mental properties of creatures with consciousness,
emergent from physical, chemical, and biological properties.11
1 comment:
If reductionism were correct we would only have one science: physics. It is because of the emergence of biotic from abiotic matter that we have at least one other science from physics:biology.
The fact that the British emergentists misunderstood or failed to understand how everything emerges does not negate the fact that many new things with many new properties have emerged since the big bang.
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