To understand this better, we can look at the distinction between emergent and resultant effects made by the philosopher George Henry Lewes in his Problems of Life and Mind (1875). What does emergentism consist of?Ī property is said to be emergent if it arises from the interaction of other system properties, and is itself different. This can’t be reduced to any of the components involved in the process, since none of the neurons is conscious on its own. In this case, it would emerge from the distributed interaction between various neural processes.
Therefore, emergent phenomena are novel entities and ontologically different from the elements from which they were created.Īn example of an emergent phenomenon would be the human mind. Emergentism is a scientific and philosophical paradigm that defends that everything that exists doesn’t derive solely from the sum of its constituent elements, but emerges or arises from interaction – as a whole that’s irreducible to its parts.
