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…