What is emergentism? My answer is that it is a big word for a not-so-big concept. Emergentism is simply the idea that the sum is greater than the parts. The common example goes:
- We can all agree that water has the property of “wetness.”
- Water is made solely of H₂O.
- H₂O is not wet in itself.
- The property of wetness emerges from water.
But who cares about water. This idea can be applied to so many things, like the table you are leaning on or the chair you are sitting on. All of them are constructed from particles that are mostly empty space at their most fundamental state. Yet, they support your weight, acting like a solid. There are countless ideas of this. The point one should take away is that counterintuitive properties have a way of emerging from complex systems.
In philosophy, emergentism is primarily talked about in discussions regarding the philosophy of the mind, soul, and identity. Emergentism holds a niche spot in the philosophical community—serving as a bridge between the contrasting perspectives of materialism and dualism. For background knowledge, materialism is the belief that everything that exists, including the mind, consciousness, and identity, can be explained in terms of physical states. In other words, the conception of a metaphysical soul is bogus, and mental states are reducible to physical states. Dualism, on the other hand, argues that reality is made up of two substances, usually the physical and the metaphysical. This distinction often manifests itself in dualities such as mind and body, or body and soul. Dualists hold that mental phenomena cannot be fully reduced to material processes, while materialists insist that they can.
Now, both theories have their respective problems. While materialism is the easier explanation, it faces a difficult problem, known as the hard problem of consciousness. In his article What is it Like to Be a Bat?, Nagel described the existence of qualia—or the subjective experiences of life, such as redness, the taste of wine, or the feeling of sunlight hitting one’s face. While a materialist would say that all of these experiences can be eventually discovered/modeled as physical triggers, Nagel rejects this view—stating that there is an impenetrable gap between what science can discover and what one’s subjective existence signals to them.
On the other hand, dualist theories by definition have little proof—at least empirical proof—to support them. To many, the idea of a “soul” is something that can be easily dismissed, a belief that is not found through logic but through faith. If the soul exists, it must be a metaphysical thing, and therefore we have no way of accessing it or proving it is out there. While materialist theories can be disproved through logic, it is much harder to disprove the existence of a soul. The stronger argument against the theory, in my opinion, is to treat it like a solipsist or skeptic theory: a belief that is technically true, but so irrational or absurd that little time should be spent taking it seriously.
Now, of course, both materialism and dualism are more complicated than that. There are also other theories in the realm of philosophy of mind, such as functionalism (the mind is similar to software on hardware → reducible to the belief that AI could possibly think) and idealism (that the entire world, reality as a whole, is comprised of consciousness → similar to panpsychism). For the sake of this blog post, I’m not going to go deep into the two theories, because to an extent, they face the same fundamental problems that materialism and dualism do.
Like I mentioned before, emergentism attempts to bridge the uncomfortable gap between dualism and materialism. Under the simple doctrine “the sum is greater than all of the parts,” an emergentist would attempt to display that consciousness is just something that arises out of the complex, physical, neural system that is the mind. In this way, emergentism provides a kind of middle path. It lets one escape the reductionist problem of subjective experience and qualia, while also steering clear of dualism’s metaphysical leap into a separate soul-like substance by grounding consciousness firmly in reality. It also provides an answer to the debate about whether animals have consciousness, identity, and therefore rights: if animals have a less complex neural structure than the human race, they aren’t entitled to the same moral structures as us. Just as wetness arises from H₂O molecules or solidity from mostly empty particles, so too might consciousness arise from the interactions of physical systems.
Of course, this doesn’t mean emergentism solves all the puzzles. Critics point out that simply saying “consciousness emerges” risks being little more than a placeholder answer, kicking the hard questions down the road. Some say it’s just a cover for epiphenomenalism: the belief that consciousness is nothing more than a shadow off a tree, or wisps of smoke from a fire—something that exists but has no relation to our actual processes. To truly prove emergentism, we need to find what exactly it is about complexity that gives rise to subjectivity, and why neural firing patterns develop anything like feeling in the first place. Then, we still need to discover the now somewhat easier question of how this consciousness then affects our daily lives—like making the return journey from physical to metaphysical back to the physical. These are still open questions. Yet emergentism has a certain intuitive appeal: it allows us to maintain a naturalistic worldview without dismissing the unique, irreducible qualities of conscious experience.
In short, emergentism reminds us that reality often surprises us: new, higher-level properties can appear that change the way we see the world. Whether this fully explains the mystery of the mind is still debated, but it captures an important truth—that sometimes, the whole really is simply more than the sum of its parts. And if we see this all the time in the physical world, what’s to say it doesn’t occur in our own minds?