Must strong emergence collapse?

Abstract

There have recently been complaints from various quarters that strong emergence doesn't make sense, on grounds that any purportedly strongly emergent features or associated powers can be seen to 'collapse', one way or another, into the lower-level base features upon which they depend. On one version of this collapse objection, certain ways of individuating lower-level physical features entail that such features will have dispositions to produce any purportedly strongly emergent features, undermining the supposed metaphysical novelty of the emergent features and the physical acceptability of the base features (see Howell 2009 and Taylor 2015). On another, certain ways of assigning powers to features entail that lower-level physical features will inherit any powers had by purportedly strongly emergent features (see Kim, 1998 and others). Here we present and defend four different responses that might be given to the collapse objection as directed against a 'novel power' approach to strong emergence: first, distinguishing between direct and indirect having of powers; second, distinguishing between lightweight and heavyweight dispositions; third, taking strong emergence to be relative to sets of fundamental interactions; fourth, taking strongly emergent features to be 'new object entailing', in ways that block lower-level inheritance of powers.

Power Emergentism and the Collapse Problem

“…Baysan and Wilson (2017) do not argue that strong emergentism is true. Instead, they argue that the collapse problem does not undermine strong emergentism, and so strong emergentism makes sense (2017,52).…”

“…Accordingly, my view and other responses to the collapse problem that involve metaphysically neutral conceptions of emergence do not deliver the kind of strong, metaphysical emergence that many argue is needed to make sense of phenomena like consciousness, free will, or the apparent autonomy of nonfundamental sciences. Baysan and Wilson (2017) argue that a powers-based view of emergence can avoid the collapse problem, and so we can face down the collapse problem without abandoning a metaphysics of emergence.…”

“…Baysan and Wilson's (2017) first response to the collapse problem targets the baselevel power inheritance version, the objection that because there are nomological connections between higher-and lower-level properties the emergence base inherits any purportedly emergent power (2017, 78). Baysan and Wilson argue that we can defend SE against this problem because even if the emergence base inherits the powers associated with the emergent feature, it does so only in an indirect way.…”

“…In the analogy with the set-subset distinction, Baysan and Wilson (2017) claim that just as we can distinguish between a set and subsets, so we can fund a distinction between direct and indirect powers on the basis of the direct power being associated with one set of circumstances, and the indirect power being associated with a subset of those circumstances. This seems like a promising resource for a deeper basis for the distinction between direct and indirect powers.…”

“…I have argued that the correct response to the collapse problem is to abandon strong emergentism and embrace a metaphysically neutral, explanatory account of emergence in its place. Recently, Baysan and Wilson (2017) have defended a different approach, arguing that a powers-based version of strong emergentism can avoid the collapse problem, and so a genuinely metaphysical approach to emergence is viable.…”