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ABSTRACT
This paper argues that emergent conscious properties can't bestow emergent causal powers. It supports this conclusion by way of a dilemma. Necessarily, an (allegedly efficacious) emergent conscious property brings about its effects actively or other than actively (in senses explained in the paper). If actively, then, the paper argues, the emergent conscious property can't have causal powers at all. And if other than actively, then, the paper argues, the emergentist finds himself committed to incompatible accounts of causation.
Notes
1 Throughout this paper, ‘causal powers’ also refers to causal susceptibilities.
2 ‘Basic’ means what ‘not built of anything’ means.
3 For epiphenomenalist emergentism about consciousness, see Jackson [Citation1982], Chalmers [Citation1996], and Kim [2005]. For emergentism about consciousness with emergent conscious powers, see Lowe [Citation1996]. Some thinkers still allow for a broad range of emergent properties; some still accept widespread downward causation. See Sperry [Citation1986]. Some philosophers interpret quantum entanglement as a kind of emergence. See Ladyman, Ross, Spurrett, and Collier [Citation2007] (who would dispute this characterization of their views) and Bedau and Humphreys [Citation2008].
4 Kim endorses what he calls Alexander's dictum—the claim that an entity can't exist unless it can make a causal difference.
5 Note that Crane and Shoemaker dismiss emergentism on other grounds and therefore have no stake in defending it.
6 The paper adapts this discussion from Lewtas [Citation2013].
7 Some claim that emergence does involve metaphysical necessitation. See Stoljar [Citation2010], for example. Lewtas [Citation2013] offers further arguments to the contrary.
8 This oversimplifies and over-generalizes, but serves the purpose at hand. Although the paper presupposes here a particular theory of causation, it does this only to prepare for the distinction between active and non-active causation. No questions get begged. Please see the third objection in section 5 if you doubt this.
9 Emergentists don't offer a new characterization of physical reality. They accept the standard story but supplement it with non-physical emergents.
10 Might manifested dispositions have non-dispositional properties where dispositions don't? It doesn't matter. Even if non-dispositional manifestings occur, science can know nothing of them. The scientist can only learn about entities disposed to affect the senses. This last bottleneck winnows out all information about non-dispositional entities.
11 The paper adapts this paragraph from Lewtas [Citation2015]. Nothing here begs any questions about whether physical causal relations can result in something else—not least because emergentism accepts that physical entities can't result in emergents.
12 The arguments in this paragraph and the next build upon Lewtas [Citationmanuscript].
13 Unless the consciousness-role outstrips the wherewithal of the physical. In this case the physical realizes many roles, but something else, something neither conscious nor physical, realizes consciousness. A related possibility: something non-physical realizes the role even though the physical could do so. This paper ignores these possibilities because the same difficulty arises with them. We still end up with a conscious property and a distinct causal power only contingently related to it—in a word, two separate properties. The next paragraphs spell this out.
14 The emergentist understands physical nature to include spatio-temporal properties, too. This changes nothing.
15 Lewtas [Citationmanuscript] offers a model of interactionist mental causation along these lines.
16 The paper adapts most of this from Lewtas [forthcoming].
17 It follows that transference, probabilistic, and primitivist accounts fall into our three groups, depending on their specific elaborations. The paper's three-way division ignores hybrid theories. These do provide additional (if uninteresting) possibilities. But none bears on the paper's arguments.
18 More precisely, the actual pattern has features such that we can describe some of the spatio-temporal relations between some of the entities of which it holds, and other such entities, using some dependency relation.
19 Humean works abound. See, for example, Lewis [Citation1973], Mackie [Citation1980], Prior, Pargetter, and Jackson [Citation1982], and Psillos [Citation2002]. Ellis Citation[2001], Mumford [Citation2004], and Strawson [Citation2008] give good but harsh overviews of the Humean account.
20 Today's favoured quasi-Humean accounts understand concrete entities’ monadic properties as instances of first-order universals. They then postulate second-order universals that relate the first-order universals. These second-order universals serve as the laws that stamp the otherwise inert concrete world with causal links. See, for example, Dretske [Citation1977], Armstrong [Citation1983], and Tooley [Citation1987].
21 Their other claims follow from powers [Lewtas Citationforthcoming].
22 Some strong accounts also allow that these natures have non-causal qualitative properties.
23 Mumford [Citation1998, Citation2004, Citation2009], Ellis [Citation2001, Citation2002], Molnar [Citation2003], Bird [Citation2007], Martin [Citation2008], and Mumford and Anjum [Citation2011] offer accounts of this kind.
24 The paper adapts this paragraph and the next from Lewtas [Citationforthcoming].
25 If you still dispute this, then you believe that emergentism entails only a Humean account. So much the better for the paper's argument!
26 See O'Connor and Wong [Citation2006] for discussion of the synchronic and diachronic outlooks on emergence.
27 This speaks loosely about the exact identity of the cause and effect. That doesn't matter here.
28 Leslie [Citation1989] argues at length that improbable good luck can't warrant a metaphysical theory.
29 The author thanks an Associate Editor for this objection and the next, as well as for part of the reply to this objection.
30 See Bird [Citation2007] for a metaphysics of this kind.
31 We thus require that grounding take a form analogous to strong causation, whereas the objection assumes that grounding takes a form analogous to weak causation.
32 See Ellis [Citation2001, Citation2002] for a metaphysics of this kind.