Conceptual Foundations of Emergence Theory

On serendipity in science: discovery at the intersection of chance and wisdom

“…An emergent property can be described as novel in the sense that it cannot be reduced to the properties that exist in the underlying process or context from which it arose (Clayton 2006). A popular example is the idea that consciousness "emerges" from the neural networks of the brain.…”

A Critique of Emergent Theologies

“…Philip Clayton describes the difference between weak and strong emergence as follows: “Strong emergentists maintain that genuinely new causal agents or causal processes come into existence over the course of evolutionary history. By contrast, weak emergentists insist, as new patterns emerge, the fundamental causal processes remain, ultimately, physical” (Clayton , 7). Weak emergence is a fairly undisputed natural phenomenon and is largely (though not entirely) uninteresting to theology.…”

Constrained dynamics both orthograde and contragrade

“…For more than a century, emergence theorists have argued that scientific accounts of life and of mind are incomplete so long as the approach to these phenomena relies exclusively on reducing them to merely a summation of their parts in determined and mechanistic interactions with each other (for reviews, see Clayton, 2006;McLaughlin, 1992). Traditionally, emergentists have adopted one of two strategies toward filling this explanatory gap, appealing either to undiscovered causal forces or to the organizational distinctiveness of life and mind.…”