Metaphysical Emergence

Abstract

The special sciences and ordinary experience present us with a world of macro-entities trees, birds, lakes, mountains, humans, houses, and sculptures, to name a few which materially depend on lower-level configurations, but which are also distinct from and distinctively efficacious as compared to these configurations. Such appearances give rise to two key questions. First, what is metaphysical emergence, more precisely? Second, is there actually any metaphysical emergence? In Metaphysical Emergence , Jessica Wilson provides clear, compelling, and systematic answers to these questions. Wilson argues that there are two and only two forms of metaphysical emergence making sense of the target cases: ‘Weak’ emergence, whereby a macro-entity or feature has a proper subset of the powers of its base-level configuration, and ‘Strong’ emergence, whereby a macro-entity or feature has a new power as compared to its base-level configuration. Weak emergence unifies and accommodates diverse accounts of realization (e.g., in terms of functional roles, constitutive mechanisms, and parthood) associated with varieties of nonreductive physicalism, whereas Strong emergence unifies and accommodates anti-physicalist views according to which there may be fundamentally novel features, forces, interactions, or laws at higher levels of compositional complexity. After defending each form of emergence against various objections, Wilson considers whether complex systems, ordinary objects, consciousness, and free will are actually either Weakly or Strongly metaphysically emergent. She argues that Weak emergence is quite common, and that Strong emergence, while in most cases at best an open empirical possibility, is instantiated for the important case of free will.

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