1 The Ionian school describes "the process of evolution combines quantitative development with qualitative leaps" - from the world to man to society (Greek Science, Farrington)

2 "the rise of human culture, which is a contribution of the Ionian school to science of absolutely first-class importance" from the history of Diodorus - which goes on to give an account (a likely story) of the world "emerging" from a beginning into human beings. (Greek Science, Farrington)

3 The early contemporary developers leading to this field include Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Nietzsche - and on into Derrida (DC)

4 C Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936) wrote Emergent Evolution, Life, Mind and Spirit and The Emergence of Novelty. He focussed on the interaction of physical and psychical events - the twofold story was really about one natural order of events. Moreover, that one order of events has a progressive natural history designated by the word evolution. ... evolution has not been uniformly continuous, as Darwin believed, but has involved from time to time with major discontinuities or critical turning points. These turning point are marked by the abrupt appearance of certain phenomena which Morgan called "emergents", a term used by Lewes in 1874. An emergent (1) supervenes upon what already exists, (2) arises out of what already exists, (3) is something genuinely new in the history of the universe, (4) occurs in a manner that is unpredictable in principle since it conforms to no general laws, and(5) cannot be naturalistically explained but must be accepted. ... The full signficance of emergent evolution cannot be gasped as long as one remains at the level of a philosophy based on the procedure sanctioned by the progress of scientific thought. (He acknowledges a universal correlation of physical and psychical events (structure?) and goes on to say that "mind is emergent" (Dictionary of Philosophy)

5 In contrast to idealist or dualistic view, Alexander (1859-1938) regarded mind as, in one sense, identical with an organised structure of physiological and neural processes, there being no animistic or purely "mental" factor over and above these. But in another sense, mind could be looked on as a new "emergent" - when neural processes are organised in a certain way, they manifest a new quality, consciousness, or awareness.(DoPh)

6 By "emergents" Alexander designated certain organised patterns which, he held, produce new qualitative syntheses that could not have been predicted from knowledge of the constituent elements of the pattern before they were so organised. ... characteristics of those syntheses where some strikingly new quality can be discerned. He generalised the idea that new qualities emerge from patterns of subvening elements of certain degrees of complexity, so as to look on the world as a hierarchy of qualities, a hierarchy in which those higher in the scale depend on the lower but manifest something genuinely new. (DoPh)

7 Emergent Evolution (DoPh) is a doctrine designed in part to cope with the influence of Darwinism on philosophy by providing a way of interpreting evolution without having recourse to mechanistic, vitalistic, reductionist, and preformationsit ideas. ... The central problem is to describe or explain how a temporal succession of phenomena marked by an increase of variety, diversity, and compexity has come about. The main concepts employed are emergence, levels, and novelties. ... Classical Darwinism assumed that all changes in living things take place gradually. This assumption of the continuity of organic changes made it difficult to understand how any single modification or group of coadapted modifications could first arise. Emergent evolutionsts maintain that such events must be discontinuous with what went before. Whatever comes to be for the first time must do so suddenly or abruptly. One function of the concept of emergence is to express this contention. ... Another function is to provide a more acceptable interpretation than has hitherto been offered of the evolution of organic variety, diversity and complexity. It rejects four theories - vitalism which has mysterious "life forces", mechanistic attributions to chemical, preformationist which says there are potentialities waiting to happen, reductionist ideas of mere reshuffling of fundamental units which themselves remain unchanged. In opposition to these views the concept of emergence implies that the variety, diversity, and complexity engendered by evolution are irreducible, cumulative features of the creative advance of nature - it produces brand new stuff.

8 This view of emergence requires the distinction "levels". A level is defined as a portion of the world that is marked by a set of closely related characteristics (qualities, regularities, structures) peculiar to it and emergent from other levels that existed previously. Thus living things form a level that emerged a couple of thousand million years ago form the nonliving, physicochemical level. Artifacts form a level that emerged from human culture in relatively recent times. The general scheme of levels is not to be envisaged as akin to successive geological states or to a series of rungs on a ladder. Such images fail to do justice to the complex interrelations that exist in the real world.

9 It is unnecesary to suppose that there must be some bottom level out of which everything has evolved, and it is misleading to think that the scheme as a whole is a static heirarchy like the Aristotelian scale of nature or the Plotinian great chain of being. (see reference to levels of higher and lower where the characteristics of one are not those of the other.) The demonstration shows that the more levels of a system the more characteristics that system has.

10 Life and mind are so amazingly complex and comprise so many heterogeneous processes that their blanket designation as two emergent levels cannot seem very illuminating. The insistence on levels become therefore, largely a matter of descriptive emphasis, and should not conceal the necessity for detailed scientific knowledge of every emergence and the peculiar constellations and interactions of the parts which immediately determine it.

11 Every genuine emergent introduces novelty into the world. To say that an emergent characteric is novel means that it is not simply a rearrangement of pre-existing elements, although such rearrangement may be one of its determining conditions. The characteristic is qualitatively, not just quantitativly, unlike anything that existed before in cosmic history and it was unpredictable not only on the basis of the knowledge availabe prior to its emergence but even on the basis of ideally complete knowledge of the state of the cosmos prior to its emergence. These points permit a distinction to be made between what is new in the sense of being a fresh combination of old factors - the only sort that can occur in the world dealt with physics - and what is novel in the sense of being qualitatively unique and unpredictable.

12 The unpredictability of novel characteristics has been taken to imply that their occurrence is unintelligible - since these characteristics cannot be predicted, they cannot be explained - for prediction and explanation are two sides of the same coin.

13 Where a new level of being has emerged, there must also be an emergence of new laws. We grant that living organisms are, relatively speaking, late arriveals on the cosmic scene and if we reject reductionism, then we must agree that distinctively biological laws are emergents. Before the appearance of life they might have been formulated theoretically by some mathematical archangel but they would then have applied to nothing.

Mainly from the Dictionary of Philosophy