![]() The weak version is intended to characterize a non-epiphenomenalist nonreductive physicalism, and its official formulation is: As mentioned, Wilson argues there are exactly two kinds of metaphysical emergence, weak and strong. The sense of ontological and causal autonomy at issue will depend on the kind of metaphysical emergence involved. Wilson’s requirement of cotemporal material dependence is meant to capture the sense in which emergent phenomena somehow arise from a physical base, whether that be by some sort of synchronic metaphysical determination or some causal activity of the base that takes place over a temporal interval. The emergence is thus metaphysical because it depends on the existence of such objective relations between the emergent phenomenon and its base and not, for example, merely on how we think about or what we can know about these phenomena. Wilson argues that any account of metaphysical emergence, worthy of the name, must hold that some phenomenon is “cotemporally dependent” on some (material) base phenomena, and yet ontologically and causally autonomous with respect to those base phenomena. However, let’s first see how Wilson understands these varieties of metaphysical emergence. I will also question whether Wilson’s account of weak emergence provides a sufficient condition for a version of metaphysical emergence. In what follows, I will express skepticism that Wilson’s two options are truly exhaustive. ![]() Since these options are exhaustive, if Wilson is successful, then any philosophical or scientific claim that some phenomenon is metaphysically emergent must, to be correct, fit into some place in Wilson’s taxonomy, being metaphysically emergent in either her weak or strong sense. If they are not consistent with physicalism, then they will be strongly emergent. If they are consistent with physicalism, then they will be weakly emergent. According to Wilson, assuming a metaphysics in which the base-level entities are all physical, views that say some phenomenon is metaphysically emergent may either be consistent with physicalism, or not consistent with physicalism. Most of my discussion in what follows will concern the first part of the book, in which Wilson proposes an exhaustive taxonomy of the varieties of metaphysical emergence. The reality of strong emergence is a bit more controversial, but the most plausible instances of it come, in Wilson’s view, from libertarian free will. ![]() The short answer is that yes, there is plausibly a lot of what Wilson calls weak metaphysical emergence at our world. The second part applies these accounts to determine whether it is plausible that any phenomena actually are metaphysically emergent in either of these senses. ![]() The first part of this book consists in an argument that these are the only two accounts of emergence that are viable and coherent. They may be emergent in her weak sense, which is compatible with physicalism, or another strong sense, which is not. In this book, she argues that there are really only two senses in which phenomena may be metaphysically emergent. In a series of papers starting in 1999, Wilson has defended a rightly influential account of what she deems to be one species of metaphysical emergence, weak emergence, based on a causal powers metaphysics. Despite its wide-ranging discussion of subjects from complexity science and nonlinear systems to the hard problem of consciousness and free will, Jessica Wilson’s first monograph is a coherent, clear, and tightly-argued defense of her approach to the topic.
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