Materialism (Emergent)

Materialism arguments

They are against reductionism and micro-physicalism:

• Physical reality is not flat, and does not really consists of only the most elementary micro-level physical phenomena

They believe that it consists of multiple levels of physical organization, that are built upon each other. The different levels have lower/higher levels that have different causal powers, and equally real! This concepts is used in the different fields within biology.

Hierarchy of levels of organization

The higher level can do something that the lower level could not do.

When we talk about emergence — it has to be something surprising, unpredictable, and difficult to explain, in comparison to the lower level.

Weak emergence (Biological realism):

A phenomenon is considered weakly emergent if it arises from the interactions of lower-level components in a way that can, at least in principle, be explained or predicted by analyzing those components and their interactions.

• Predictable

  is often viewed as unproblematic within a scientific framework because it aligns with the idea that all phenomena can eventually be understood as arising from fundamental rules.

Multi-Level explanation of consciousness

1. Consciousness - the phenomenal level of organization in the brain

2. However the difficult part is explaining where is comes from (the constitutive explanation)

   1. Integrates top-down and bottom-up constraints into one coherent cross-level model

   2. Seeks explanatory relationship between features (levels)

The challenge

• Can we empirically discover the neural constituents of consciousness?

• Can emergence bring something genuinely novel into the physical world?

Strong emergence

It doesn’t have a clear explanation for the process — it more miraculous appears.

• We will never be able to understand or explain the mechanism of emergence

• It will always seem to us like magic, even if we knew everything about the lower level phenomena