Can the Emergent Self Reemerge? An Exploration of Emergent Dualism and Phenomena of Unconsciousness

In his book The Emergent Self, William Hasker outlines his theory of emergent dualism. Here, I will attempt to prove that Hasker’s emergent dualism and certain phenomena involving hiatuses in consciousness are inconsistent. As I will show, even the best resolution of this inconsistency is highly problematic and calls into question the coherence of Hasker’s emergent dualism. According to Hasker, emergent dualism “requires us to maintain, along with the materialists, that the potentiality for conscious life and experience really does exist in the nature of matter itself” (194). However, this constraint requires Hasker to address two apparent features of consciousness for which materialism does not allow: unity and free will (190). In regard to the former, Hasker claims that consciousness cannot be based solely in physical matter due to the unity-of-consciousness argument; because the physical is ever changing, materialism implies that an “individual” is actually a series of distinct individuals, each created by continual alteration of the physical constituents of the brain (144, 190). Hasker, therefore, concludes that there must exist an immaterial, unified subject of experience (190). By that same token, the deterministic nature of the physical and the apparent existence of libertarian free will associated with consciousness are incompatible: “It seems clear that [libertarian free will] cannot be a property that consists of the properties of, and relations between, the parts that make up a system of objects...It seems we shall need to recognize persons, or minds, or souls, as unitary subjects, not analyzable as complexes of parts” (178).