Emergentism

 

A sophisticated discussion of emergentism as a solution to the mind-body problem may be found in an article by Timothy O'Connor and Hong You Wong.

It is called "The Metaphysics of Emergence" and it may be found at NOUS, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1990).

Another important work on the subject, a little older, is that of Roger Sperry. "Mind-brain interaction: Mentalism, yes; dualism, no." NEUROSCIENCE Vol. 5, Issue 2 (1980). 

Sperry seems to have disposed of the issue of downward causation with the simple image of a wooden wheel rolling downhill. The wheel has emergent properties, at least in a broad understanding -- it is not made up of circular parts, but it is a circular whole.

What about downward causation? Reductionists might want to say that the parts create the whole, rather than the reverse. But does the whole not affect the parts? The atoms of the wheel are going downhill because the wheel is going downhill, and it is going downhill because of its holistic, circular, character.

The downward movement of the wheel doesn't change the position of the wheel particles against each other, but it does reconfigure them against the rest of the planet. 

"Microdeterminism is not so much refuted or falsified as it is complemented" by such top-down or macrodeterminism, Sperry said.

O'Connor and Wong seem to go further when they say that "emerging states will work in tandem with the underlying micro-states to determine later micro-states" and therefore a change in the emerging state.