It’s taken me a while to get this done because life. Also, I lost some text when I posted Angels and Zombies. I will see if any of it survived and notify you when I get it published. [Late note: No I didn’t]
What we call the operations of the mind are functions of the brain, and the materials of consciousness are products of cerebral activity. Cabanis[1] may have made use of crude and misleading phraseology when he said that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; but the conception which that much-abused phrase embodies is, nevertheless, far more consistent with fact than […] the popular notion that the mind is a metaphysical entity seated in the head, but as independent of the brain as a telegraph operator is of his instrument. [T. H. Huxley, Hume, with Helps to the study of Berkeley: Essays, Macmillan & Co. 1894, page 94.]
Not a trace of the properties of hydrogen or of oxygen is observable in those of their compound, water. [J. S. Mill, A System of Logic, Bk III ch VI §1]
It is time to get metaphysical again. I saved this for last. Thank me later when the headache subsides.
At some point in our evolutionary past, we were not aware of our environment, even if we need to take things back to the origin of single-celled eukaryotes. This implies that being aware is a novelty (at least in our lineage — there may be other such novelties) that arose at some point. So we do need an account of novelties that is consistent with monism. When undergraduates do a philosophy of mind course, they tend to go through the stages as the -isms developed historically – dualism, mechanism, monism, physicalism and so on. At the end of the subject, however, they are given a brief foray into modern (often analytic) philosophy, and at the end of that, they get modern metaphysics. Terms like downward causation, supervenience, and the widely used emergence get bandied about. Emergence also appears a lot in scientific discussions as well as philosophy. The simplest and simplistic formulation is in the slogan “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, often ascribed to Aristotle, or a scribe’s interpolation in Euclid’s Elements.[2] More recently, emergence has been presented as follows:
The theory of emergence involves three propositions: (1) that there are levels of existence defined in terms of degrees of integration; (2) that there are marks which distinguish these levels from one another over and above the degrees of integration; (3) that it is impossible to deduce the marks of a higher level from those of a lower level, and perhaps also (though this is not clear) impossible to deduce marks of a lower level from those of a higher. [Pepper 1925, 241]
and even more recently
Emergence, despite its ubiquity and importance, is an enigmatic, recondite topic, more wondered at than analyzed. The hallmark of emergence – “much coming from little” – gives it a paradoxical, almost fraudulent, character smacking of “get rich quick” schemes. There are also philosophers, and some scientists, who take emergence seriously but think that it cannot be explained in scientific terms. Scholars of this persuasion hold that emergent phenomena are holistic phenomena irreducible to the interactions of well defined mechanisms. Specifically, this view holds that a machine cannot generate extensions and improvements unless they are explicitly designed into the machine at the time of its construction. [Holland, 1997, 12f]
Holland is quite right. The use of emergent properties as an explanation of complex systems is about as recondite as it is possible to get in philosophy and science, assuming that one knows what “recondite” means.[3]
The relevance here is that mind, along with thinking and emotions and so forth, is often thought to be, as Huxley said quoted above, a “secretion” of the brain, and yet thoughts seem to be a first intention, as the older scholastic philosophers referred to it, real things that the mind perceives. Today, this is held to be a mistake by physicalists like me, who hold that thoughts are just an activity of a dynamic cognitive system (and we are generally the right kind of system). Many would say that thoughts are emergent from the microstructural activities of brain cells and their parts, the way water (to use Mill’s example) has properties of fluidity and its various phases (ice, water, steam) that are not the properties or activities of the singular atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. Emergentism itself comes in two kinds, an epistemic version and an ontological version. Here I will discuss these two flavours and how they play out.
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