The historical and philosophical roots of emergentism in the neurosciences

ABSTRACT

Understanding and characterizing the relationship between mental phenomena and the brain is a huge challenge for modern neuroscience. No doubt, the conservative orthodox view of this relationship can be described as physicalist. Physicalism is the idea that, no matter how enigmatic mental phenomena may seem, they are nevertheless completely describable in physical and material terms. Still, despite centuries of effort, aspects of mind, such as the qualitative nature of subjective experience, have defied physical characterization. In the early 1920s, emergentism was advanced to explain the relationship between physical reality and higher-order phenomena, including life and mind. According to emergentism, such higher-order phenomena are derivative of and, at the same time, autonomous to underlying physical reality. This article describes the historical and philosophical development of emergentist theses, particularly as they have been treated in the neurosciences.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergentism
• mentalism
• philosophy of mind
• physicalism
• Roger Sperry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity was published in 1920. Subsequent references to this source use page numbers from the third printing (1934).

² There is evidence that Sperry was aware of earlier works on emergentism. In 1957, he reviewed a book by C. Judson Herrick titled, The Evolution of Human Nature, which discussed the idea that consciousness is an emergent feature of evolution (see Herrick 1956, 279, 307; Sperry 1957).

³ For a complete bibliography of Sperry’s works, see http://people.uncw.edu/puente/sperry/sperrypapers.

Additional information

Funding

The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.