Emergent evolution: do genuinely new properties arise at higher levels of nature, irreducible to the lower?

C. Lloyd Morgan, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.¹²³ 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.⁴

Sources

1. No evolutionist is likely to under-estimate its value. But one may still ask whether there is not at some stage of this process a new emergent character of life, the supervenience of which must be accepted with natural piety and described in suitable terms of vital integration or otherwise. There does seem to be something genuinely new at some stage of the resultant continuity.

   Emergent Evolution, pp. 7–8

2. Thus, for emergent evolution, conscious events at level C (mind) involve specific physiological events at level B (life), and these involve specific physico-chemical events at level A (matter). No C without B, and no B without A.

   Emergent Evolution, pp. 15–16

3. And yet somehow the doing 1s not ours in our cognitive capacity—not ours till it is emergent 1 deeper-level.synthesis, and then ours in that they are one with our deeper nature along a determmate lne of advance Of course this 1s not the end of the matter.

   Life, Mind, and Spirit, pp. 158–159

4. As an expression of its new intrinsic relations the higher entity has new qualities; as expressing its new extrinsic relations it has new properties. Its own qualities and its acquired pro¬ perties, as I use these words (cf. xxxm.), are dis¬ tinguishable though they co-exist inseparably in concrete fact. It may still be asked in what distinctive sense the relations are new.

   Emergent Evolution, p. 65

Where the argument is made

• Emergent Evolution (1923) and Life, Mind, and Spirit (1926), the Gifford Lectures

How the argument was received

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.