A thought for emergence
The physicist Carlo Rovelli makes a strong case in this essay that consciousness is “of the same nature” as everything else in the universe, but in the course of doing that, he often writes as if the alternatives to dualism — the view that the body and the mind are irreducibly separate — don’t include the concept of emergence, at least to a meaningful degree. For example, his statement that “the mind is the behaviour of the brain, properly described in a high-level language” is compatible with emergence, as in that neuroscience and the philosophy of science often both describe consciousness as a property that emerges from extremely complex neural organisation. Instead, Rovelli often presents the debate about the nature of consciousness as though critics of his physicalist view are demanding ‘magic’ rather than just asking how complex organisation can give rise to new domains of organisation.
Rovelli also says, “Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics”, which is not synonymous with the emergentist position but is in fact close: mental states supervene on physical states and depend on physical organisation yet they possess informational or computational properties that deserve their own, or autonomous, explanation. Put differently, while Rovelli makes a solid case that consciousness isn’t supernatural, he also argues from time to time that there’s nothing especially interesting about how/why it emerges. The former is an agreeable position (at least to me) but the latter seems uncharacteristically dismissive.
In fact, he also makes the classic anti-reductionist point early in his piece when he writes, “We shouldn’t expect particle physics alone to explain bicycles, brains or thunderstorms”, but then he doesn’t follow through on the philosophical consequences of that statement: if mechanics is indispensable for bicycles, say, why couldn’t there also be an indispensable science (or sciences) of emergence — e.g. one/those combining complex systems, neuroscience, cognitive science, and so on — to explain consciousness? To use a metaphor from a branch of physics I’m more familiar with: temperature arises from a complex organisation of particles that are governed by the rules of statistical mechanics. But nobody who is concerned with the physics of temperature, which is fertile in its own right, also believes statistical mechanics is therefore trivial. In fact the irony is that microscopic laws often don’t suffice to make sense of the macroscopic world, and emergence is the bridge.
Of course, Rovelli’s aim with the essay is to dispel dualist intuitions, not piece together a theory of emergence, and introducing such a thing would have admittedly needlessly complicated the narrative. I also think Rovelli would probably agree about the relevance of emergence vis-à-vis a physicalist conception of consciousness if pressed. His own work as a physicist is sympathetic to the relational descriptions that emergence requires. Yet in this essay, he seems reluctant to afford emergence much philosophical weight, probably because he’s worried it could be mistaken for dualism. Either way it seems like a needless concession — if that’s what it is, to be sure — because it’s not hard to consistently hold that consciousness is entirely physics, there’s no metaphysical (explanatory) gap, there’s no supernatural soul, and consciousness is an emergent phenomenon requiring explanatory principles that are unavailable at the level of particle physics alone.
