Knowledge Tree
emergence
Also known as: Emergenz
Facts (41)
Sources
Panpsychism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2015 Edition) plato.stanford.edu May 23, 2001 11 facts
claimThe argument that emergence is strictly impossible is rooted in the ancient dictum 'ex nihilo, nihil fit,' which Wilhelm Wundt appealed to in his 1892/1894 work.
claimAnaxagoras (c. 500-425 B.C.E.) rejected the possibility of emergence and instead proposed that everything is in everything.
perspectiveAlfred North Whitehead supported panpsychism while embracing the necessity of emergence, describing it as "the destiny of the many to enter into a novel unity, an additional reality," which implies an emergent or creative synthesis as a principle of reality.
claimModern physicalistic theories of mind implicitly rely on a theory of emergence, though none have yet provided a fully satisfactory account of the emergence of consciousness.
claimMichael Silberstein and James McGeever argue that quantum mechanics supports a theory of emergence where mind develops from non-mental aspects of nature.
claimPanpsychism faces a potential problem of emergence if it ascribes only unconscious mental properties to fundamental entities, as this necessitates an explanation for how conscious mental states arise.
claimPanpsychism faces a significant objection regarding how it accounts for the emergence of states of consciousness without implying an implausible and indiscriminate broadcasting of mental characteristics throughout the world.
perspectivePanpsychism disputes the intelligibility of emergence and instead attributes mentalistic properties to physically fundamental entities.
perspectiveWilliam James supported panpsychism, arguing that consciousness should be conceived in a way that avoids it appearing as the sudden emergence of a new nature that did not previously exist in the universe.
claimWilliam James raised the 'combination problem' as an objection to panpsychism, arguing that it still faces a problem of emergence.
perspectiveTo avoid the problem of emergence, panpsychists must postulate that simple elements of nature possess states of consciousness, even if those states have impoverished content.
Panpsychism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 18, 2017 7 facts
claimThomas Nagel argued that adopting a view like panpsychism is the only way to avoid what he termed 'emergence'.
quoteEmergence can’t be brute. It is built into the heart of the notion of emergence that emergence cannot be brute in the sense of there being absolutely no reason in the nature of things why the emerging thing is as it is (so that it is unintelligible even to God). For any feature Y of anything that is correctly considered to be emergent from X, there must be something about X and X alone in virtue of which Y emerges, and which is sufficient for Y.
referenceThe article "The Real Combination Problem: Panpsychism, Micro-Subjects, and Emergence" was published in the journal Erkenntnis in 2014, volume 79, issue 1, pages 19–44.
referenceBrian P. McLaughlin authored 'The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism', published in the book 'Emergence or Reduction?: Prospects for Nonreductive Physicalism' (edited by A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Jim) by De Gruyter in 1992 (pages 49–93).
claimPanpsychist emergentists are committed to a less radical form of emergence than non-panpsychist emergentists because the emergent entities are of the same kind as the micro-level entities from which they emerge.
referenceA. Mourelatos authored 'Quality, Structure, and Emergence in Later Pre-Socratic Philosophy', published in the 'Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy' in 1986 (Volume 2, pages 127–194).
perspectiveHedda Hassel Mørch (2014) defends a form of panpsychism involving partially intelligible emergence, arguing that it is preferable to fully brute emergence.
Panpsychism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu May 23, 2001 4 facts
claimIf panpsychists ascribe only unconscious mental properties to fundamental entities, they face the problem of explaining how conscious mental states emerge from those unconscious states, which undermines the panpsychist goal of avoiding emergence.
claimThe claim that emergence is strictly impossible is rooted in the ancient dictum 'ex nihilo, nihil fit' (out of nothing, nothing comes), a principle to which Wilhelm Wundt explicitly appealed.
claimProponents of emergence are required to explain the mechanism by which new features emerge from fundamental features.
perspectiveAlfred North Whitehead embraced the necessity of emergence within his panpsychist framework, viewing reality as a process of creative synthesis.
Quantum Approaches to Consciousness plato.stanford.edu Nov 30, 2004 4 facts
referenceThe framework for studying reduction, supervenience, or emergence relations between material brain states and mental states of consciousness is discussed by Kim (1998) and Stephan (1999).
claimIn Carl Jung's depth psychology, the conscious and unconscious mental domains are connected by the process of emergence, where conscious mental states emerge from the unconscious, a process analogous to physical measurement.
referenceA. Stephan authored the 1999 book 'Emergenz', published in Dresden by Dresden University Press.
claimAchim Stephan defined emergence in 1999 as a framework where mental states or properties are considered emergent if the material brain is neither necessary nor sufficient to explore and understand them.
Panpsychism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2025 Edition) plato.stanford.edu May 23, 2001 3 facts
claimGalen Strawson argues that an emergent feature and the source from which it emerges must be capable of being described using a set of conceptually homogeneous notions.
perspectiveGalen Strawson argues that intelligible emergence requires that the relationship between the product of emergence and its producer be characterized by a single set of conceptually homogeneous concepts.
perspectiveGalen Strawson defines emergence as requiring a reason in the nature of things, rejecting the idea of 'brute' emergence where the emerging thing is unintelligible.
Quantum Approaches to Consciousness plato.stanford.edu Nov 30, 2004 2 facts
formulaThe minimal framework for studying reduction, supervenience, or emergence relations between material brain states [ma] and mental states [me] is represented by the relation [ma] ↔ [me].
claimLiane Gabora and Diederik Aerts proposed a model for the emergence and evolution of integrated worldviews in a 2009 paper published in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology.
A Survey on the Theory and Mechanism of Large Language Models arxiv.org Mar 12, 2026 2 facts
referenceThe paper 'Training on the test task confounds evaluation and emergence' was published in The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations.
claimWu and Lo (2025) suggest that emergence is the result of two competing scaling patterns: difficult problems exhibit U-shaped scaling (worsening before improving), while simple problems show inverted-U scaling, with the emergent threshold appearing where these trends interact.
Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2025 ... plato.stanford.edu Jun 18, 2004 2 facts
GWT: A Leading Consciousness Theory Depends on Information ... mindmatters.ai Oct 15, 2021 1 fact
perspectiveIntegrated Information Theory may be part of a scientific trend where emergence and panpsychist theories are replacing materialist and physicalist theories.
Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 1 fact
claimProposals made in the 2020s suggest that a cognitively inspired form of representationalism can reconcile neuroscience and the philosophy of mind by bridging gaps regarding concepts such as intentionality, emergence, consciousness, and qualia.
Cross-Cultural Approaches to Consciousness: Mind, Nature, and ... books.google.com 1 fact
claim'Cross-Cultural Approaches to Consciousness: Mind, Nature, and Ultimate Reality' analyzes debates regarding consciousness, ultimate reality, emergence, mental causation, realism, idealism, panpsychism, and illusionism through the lens of East and South-East Asian philosophies, specifically Buddhism and Vedanta.
Quantum Approaches to Consciousness plato.stanford.edu Nov 30, 2004 1 fact
claimThe view that mental states are emergent leads to a dualistic picture where residua remain when attempting to reduce the mental to the material.
Consciousness, Physicalism, and Panpsychism - R Discovery discovery.researcher.life May 1, 2013 1 fact
perspectivePanpsychists could potentially avoid the combination problem by endorsing an intelligible form of emergence, such as Sydney Shoemaker's account of emergence or realization, which posits the existence of 'micro-latent' powers alongside 'micro-manifest' ones.
Quantum information theoretic approach to the hard problem of ... sciencedirect.com 1 fact
claimThe authors of the paper "Quantum information theoretic approach to the hard problem of consciousness" propose a quantum information theoretic approach to the hard problem of consciousness that avoids all drawbacks of emergence.