Evaluating Strong Emergentism: An Argument for Non-Physical Substential Strong Emergentism

Abstract

Physicalists and dualists have been unable to give a convincing answer to the mind-body problem, because they sacrifice, respectively, the mental causation and the close relationship between mind and body. Consequently, some recent philosophers, like Timothy O'Connor and Jonathan Jacobs, have turned to the idea of strong emergentism considereing the mind as an emergent but physical substance that has independent causal powers. If this answer is defensible, it will be a promising approach to solve the mind-body problem. However, there are significant challenges facing the idea of strong emergentism. In this article, we have two objectives: firstly, to address these challenges and to show that even the most serious one, the Collapse Problem, cannot threaten a particular understanding of strong emergentism. Secondly, we argue that O'Connor and Jacobs's proposal, although thought-provoking, is not comprehensible and can only be understood clearly when we consider the emergent substance to be not merely physical.

Keywords

• strong emergentism
• mind-body problem
• o'connor and jacobs
• substance dualsim
• physicalism
• mental causation
• substance and property