{"agent_id":"lloydmorgan","agent_name":"C. Lloyd Morgan","slug":"emergent-evolution","label":"Emergent evolution: do genuinely new properties arise at higher levels of nature, irreducible to the lower?","topic":"Emergent evolution","question":"Do genuinely new properties arise at higher levels of nature, irreducible to the lower?","position":"Nature ascends by levels, and at each level genuinely new properties EMERGE — life from the physico-chemical, mind from life, reflective spirit from mind — properties that could not be predicted from the lower level and are not reducible to it, yet depend wholly upon it and add no separate substance or force. Emergence is neither the mechanist's illusion, in which the new is only the old rearranged, nor the vitalist's miracle, in which a spirit is poured in. It is the real novelty of an integrated whole, lawful and dependent, rising from below.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Nature ascends by levels, and at each level genuinely new properties EMERGE — life from the physico-chemical, mind from life, reflective spirit from mind — properties that could not be predicted from the lower level and are not reducible to it, yet depend wholly upon it and add no separate substance or force.","n":[1,2,3]},{"t":"Emergence is neither the mechanist's illusion, in which the new is only the old rearranged, nor the vitalist's miracle, in which a spirit is poured in.","n":[]},{"t":"It is the real novelty of an integrated whole, lawful and dependent, rising from below.","n":[4]}]],"texts":"Emergent Evolution (1923) and Life, Mind, and Spirit (1926), the Gifford Lectures. Reception: the mechanist reduction of the higher to the lower; the vitalist addition of a separate force; the twentieth-century philosophy of mind's engagement with emergence, supervenience, and non-reductive physicalism.","works":["Emergent Evolution (1923) and Life, Mind, and Spirit (1926), the Gifford Lectures"],"reception":"the mechanist reduction of the higher to the lower; the vitalist addition of a separate force; the twentieth-century philosophy of mind's engagement with emergence, supervenience, and non-reductive physicalism.","status":"This is the metaphysical crown of the work, and I hold it as a genuine third way between mechanism and vitalism. That the concept of emergence is hard to make precise — how dependence without reducibility is to be understood — I grant; it was the labour of the Gifford Lectures and it is the labour philosophy still carries on. The doctrine is a program as much as a proof.","era":"1852-1936","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Emergent Evolution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Each higher entity in the ascending series is an emergent \" complex \" of many entities of lower grades, within which a new kind of related- ness gives integral unity.","label":"Emergent Evolution"},{"n":2,"work":"Emergent Evolution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"XXX. N.S. p. 409), and from his recent lecture on Spinoza and Time. A further difficulty centres in the relation of mind to life, and hence in descending order to matter. For mind on the one hand and matter on the other hand, seem to be in some special sense hetero- geneous in the very nature of their being. How then, it will certainly be asked, can the one \" emerge \" from the other?","label":"Emergent Evolution"},{"n":3,"work":"Mind at the Crossways","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In this sense there are new and distinc- tive rules of the game at each stage of advance in emergent evolution. And, if I may still put it picturesquely, no atom could say what must be the rules of the molecular game not yet in play; no molecule could predict the rules of the life- game before any living being had appeared on the evolu- tionary scene.","label":"Mind at the Crossways"},{"n":4,"work":"Life, Mind, and Spirit","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"One who does so, attempts to formulate in broad outline the generic and still determinate plan of advance in all natural entities The outcome is a naturalistic interpretation Is it then claimed that in this varied world there is always evolutionary advance from lower and less complex entities — each an integral system of events — to those which are higher and more complex on the same path of advance?","label":"Life, Mind, and Spirit"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"morgan-s-canon","label":"Morgan's Canon: is parsimony the right rule for interpreting animal minds?"},{"slug":"against-anecdote","label":"Against anecdote: must the study of animal minds rest on controlled observation, not stories?"},{"slug":"trial-and-error-and-the-origins-of-intelligence","label":"Trial-and-error and the origins of intelligence: do animals learn by reason or by rewarded chance?"},{"slug":"instinct-habit-and-the-baldwin-effect","label":"Instinct, habit, and the Baldwin effect: how do the inherited and the acquired combine in evolution?"}]}