The best example of emergence is consciousness.  How do billions of neuronal connections create the unified and whole experience of consciousness?  Recall the EconTalk podcast with Dr. Azra Raza from Cancer.  Dr. Raza had asked a neurosurgeon, Dr. Ayub Ommaya, “Where are we going to find consciousness in the brain? Is it over here? Is it over there? … Is it the frontal cortex?”  Dr. Ommaya replied “Azra, taking apart the Taj Mahal brick by brick to discover the source of its beauty will yield only rubble. It is the same with the brain. The emergent complexity from simple individual parts accounts for its essential mystery.”

 

We educated moderns tend to think from parts to whole: it’s the foundational image of materialist causation.  We believe that the behavior of the parts will add up to fully explain the whole.  And because we’re law-abiding people who don’t accept magical creatures flying in and out of our system, the sum of the parts should equal the whole.  But, Houston, we have a problem: materialist causation doesn’t bridge through from a pre-emergent to a post-emergent state.  With emergence, something mysterious happens and now the whole is more than the sum of its parts.  The parts don’t add up, like something new snuck into our equation and something qualitatively different came out.

 

With every level of complexity, we see a new qualitative actor emerge that we could not have predicted from the lower level.  For example, we all know that atoms are the constituent parts of molecules, but new properties emerge at the molecular level that we can’t predict from an analysis of atoms.  At the molecular level, the causal actors are molecules, not atoms, and molecules require explanation based on the rules for molecules, not the rules for atoms.  Which is why the language of physics is different from the language of chemistry, which is different from the language of biology.

 

How can a new qualitative actor emerge from the same old parts?  That’s the materialist conundrum.  Emergence is materialism’s best explanation of complexity, and it also shows the failure of reductive materialism.  When pressed to show the mechanism of how new properties arise from the same old parts, like how consciousness arises from a brain, the believer in materialism will say “emergence” as if that word was an explanation.  It’s not.  “Emergence” is a cool new word for the same old mystery: why is the whole more than the sum of its parts?  In prior centuries we talked of spirit, or Aristotelean forms, and now we have a new word. 

 

Pixie-magic is a better word than emergence.  And so is mind.  Recall Dr. Mitchell’s definition above, that a complex system adapts through learning or evolution.  Living beings adapt through learning and evolution, and it’s a function of our agency, our mind, which itself is a function of the whole living being.  I discuss this in later essays, but for now, I say that explaining reality is a two-way street.  Modern theories of causation focus on the behavior of the parts, which is great, but we also must see the power of the whole to organize and direct the parts, much like Aristotle did a couple of millennia ago with his theory of forms. 

 

We engage in irrelevancy when we inflict on the whole a causal theory that works only for parts.  Think back to Dr. Raza, who begged cancer researchers to stop doing cute little experiments on minor intra-cellular pathways.  Even if we could understand the causal mechanics of the pathway, we still can’t bridge the causation up to explain the whole of cancer. 

 

Speaking in moral terms, I believe it’s hubris to engage in irrelevancy, to explain one thing as another thing.  Respect the thing itself.  I’ll give an example that’s dear to my heart: the hubris of parents in the face of household emergence.  I believed I could control how my children grew up, right until I realized that a child’s relationship with a close sibling or a peer group is an emergent thing, and sometimes it’s more important than me.  I find sibling relationships the most interesting.  As parents, the relationship is right under our noses but we never see how intensely intense it is.  The relationship is made up of the individual children, yes, but more than that, it’s a whole thing in the home that develops by itself and lives by its own internal rules.  In the end, what can we do but respect the relationship; we can’t control it.  That’s why respect for wholes is an I-and-Thou ethical position.  I fear the person who is blind to the whole, who would dissect it into parts and explain it with objective but meaningless abstractions, like Mrs. Coulter in The Golden Compass, who tried to separate children from their souls, to better analyze each.