Mind & Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness

Abstract

[1] Philip Clayton (Ingraham Professor at Claremont School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Claremont Graduate University) is a well-known author among scholars active in the field of science and theology. A well-known translator of some of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s works into English, his most recent works are God and Contemporary Science1 and The Problem of God inModern Thought.2 In recent years, Clayton has expressed a growing interest in the concept of emergence, of which Mind & Emergence is a result. In this book, Clayton does nothing less than developing a complex and multifaceted argument for a worldview based on ‘strong emergence’: the view that novel and irreducibly complex systems can come into existence, with their own structures, laws, and causal mechanisms. Clayton considers the consequences of this view not only for the philosophy of science, but also for biology, the neurosciences and, ultimately, theology. [2] In the first chapter, ‘From Reduction to Emergence’ Clayton pictures the fall of reductionism in science and the contemporary struggle between ‘physicalism’ (i.e. the ontological claim that everything that exists is physical in nature, coupled with an explanatory claim that everything should be explained with reference to lower-level physical entities) and ‘dualism’ (i.e. the claim that at least humans, but possibly also other organisms, consist both of physical components and non-physical or mental components). Emergence, for Clayton, represents a tertium quid and is preferable to both physicalism and dualism. Clayton argues that his concept of emergence contains four elements: ontological monism (the claim that reality is ultimately composed of one basic kind of stuff, though the concepts of physics are insufficient to explain the different forms this stuff can take), property emergence (the view that there are genuinely novel properties in nature), the irreducibility of emergence to lower-level phenomena and interactions, and downward causation (i.e. causal influences of the whole on the parts). Clayton admits that the concept of emergence is not entirely new, though in recent years science has been able to come up with many more examples of emergence in nature. Clayton sketches the history of emergence and argues that the major