Emergence and Mental Causation

Abstract

This chapter deals with the question of how emergent mental events or properties can have ‘downward’ causal efficacy without violating the causal closure of the physical world. It claims that ‘emergence’ needs to be defined in terms of the denial of causal reductionism. Causal antireductionism amounts to the affirmation of top-down or downward causation. The discussion defines ‘downward causation’ in terms of the selection among lower-level causal processes on the basis of their higher-level properties. The mental properties of events have an irreducible role to play in causal processes, in that it is only by virtue of the supervenient mental properties that neural processes become subject to the selective pressures of the environment.