Emergence
Faced with the puzzle of how life might emerge from dead matter or how conscious beings might evolve from microbes, philosophers of science have developed the theory of emergence.
The argument here is that once a certain level of complexity is reached, there is a kind of qualitative leap where completely new sorts of physical laws can “emerge”—ones that are premised on, but cannot be reduced to, what came before. In this way, the laws of chemistry can be said to be emergent from physics: the laws of chemistry presuppose the laws of physics, but can’t simply be reduced to them. In the same way, the laws of biology emerge from chemistry: one obviously needs to understand the chemical components of a fish to understand how it swims, but chemical components will never provide a full explanation. In the same way, the human mind can be said to be emergent from the cells that make it up.1
See Emergent Strategy, et. al. And is emergence enough?
David Graeber, What’s the point if we can’t have fun? ↩︎