CONTENTS

1   INTRODUCTION - THE PROBLEM

2   ONTOLOGICAL DEPENDENCE

3  EMERGENT PROPERTIES AND EMERGENT OBJECTS

4   TRANSCENDENCE

5   CONCLUSIONS

1   INTRODUCTION - THE PROBLEM

 If we believe in a naturalistic theory of the human person then we want to say that there is no extra, supernatural component, in addition to physical body and brain, which makes up the person, which enables them to become a person. This simplest way to implement naturalism is to adopt monism, and say that the person is identical to the body, or perhaps to the brain alone.

Monism however brings its own difficulties and implausibilities. There are things we want to say about the person – for example its moral responsibilities – that seem well outside the scope of the physical description of the body, or even the biological description. As a middle way between monism and dualism, which is still however perfectly consistent with naturalism, we want to say something like: the person is not the same as its body, but is ontologically dependent on it. By ontologically dependent we mean that the person cannot exist without the body. We want to say more than in the relation “the living organism can not exist without water”. We are looking for a more intimate connection. The existence of the person does not depend through some efficient causation relation on the existence of the body, but the two existences are in some sense the same. If the body goes out of existence then this transition is the same as the going out of existence of the person.

To establish this middle way as a coherent possibility we need to give a clearly articulated sense to the relational expression:

“x  is ontologically dependent on  h”.

This task is the objective of the present essay.

The person has distinctive properties that were not there in the ontological substrate; this is our reason for denying the person-body identity thesis. Properties like this which are not there in the original fundamental description but in certain circumstances make their appearance as consequences of the fundamental description are called emergent. A sub-objective of this essay is to examine the question of when are emergent properties sufficiently distinct from the original properties that we have to treat them as being properties of a new, emergent objects. When this happens, the fact of the emergent origin of the object is evidenced by ontological dependence; this is the umbilical link to the substrate which is not broken.

Sometimes the emergent properties are so different from the fundamental ones that they constitute a whole new causal framework. In this case we have not just new objects, but a new realm in which they exist. This is what we want to say about persons; they exist in a new, moral, universe. To describe this special form of emergence we recycle the, perhaps overused, word “transcendence”. This must be distinguished from supernatural ideas of transcendence. However much we transcend our origins, in the naturalistic account we are still linked to them via ontological dependence.

This is just the briefest sketch of the ideas to be developed at greater length in this essay. Even so, we can discern in what was said above a structure, a chain of increasing generality:

            transcendence   Ì   emergence   Ì   ontological dependence.

Although the problem of emergent objects and ontological dependence has been introduced here in the specific context of the problem of the ontology of persons, the investigation in this essay will be carried out at a more general level. It will use and illuminate a range of examples, each interesting in its own right. Among these examples is the status of Darwinism as a transcendence and the nature of biological entities.

Another strong theme running through this essay can be summed up as: “the equal status of the emergent”. The ontological dependence relation, expressed in the words “... is more fundamental than ...”, does not entail, “... is more real than...”, or, in the case of values, “... is more important than ...”. This latter contention about values is the central thesis of Humanism - that emergent values are just as valid as any that might have been present in the world from its foundation. Similarly in ontology, the thesis is that we need to take seriously the existence of emergent objects. This does not mean we should embrace an anti-Occamist extravagance with new objects, but neither should we be strongly prejudiced against their possibility. Moreover the ontology of emergent objects is meant to be a realist ontology: the things that appear in it do so as a matter of fact, not as a matter of our choice about what objects we want to recognise in the world.

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