Emergence , Supervenience , and Personal Knowledge Philip Clayton

Michael Polanyi was perhaps the most important emergence theorist of the middle of the 20 th century. As the key link between the British Emergentists of the 1920s and the explosion of emergence theory in the 1990s, he played a crucial role in resisting reductionist interpretations of science and keeping the concept of emergence alive. Polanyi's position on emergence is described and its major strengths and weaknesses are analyzed. Using Polanyi as the foundation, the article surveys the major contemporary options in the philosophy of mind and defends a particular understanding of the relationship of mental properties to brain states. What, if anything, does recent work on emergence in the sciences, in the philosophy of mind, and in theology have to do with the thought of Michael Polanyi? The connection could, of course, be purely external and ad hoc: perhaps the coming few minutes will be one of those polite but pointless academic exercises where the speaker nods his head in the direction of the Polanyi Society and then proceeds to trot out some old paper that advances his well-worn ideas on some completely different topic. To be honest, I wasn't sure in advance of being able to avoid such a charade. But the intuitions of Philip Rolnick, who organized this session, were right on the mark. It is a new paper, and it is about Polanyi. " About " does not mean uncritical. Polanyi's work is important for contemporary emergence theory in part because he is so right and in part because he is so wrong. Very recent work on emergence has developed metaphysical resources that now avoid what Polanyi thought was a forced choice between accepting reduction-ism, which leaves no place for the genuinely personal, and accepting what Polanyi called " finalistic " causes. Moreover, some of what Polanyi thought was good science turned out to be bad science, and it served him badly. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let's begin the story at the very beginning. Once upon a time there was a century dominated by the ideal of reductionism. It was a century in which some of the deepest dreams of science were fulfilled. Building on Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations, scientists achieved a structure capable of handling the very small (quantum physics), the very fast (special relativity, for speeds approaching c), and the very heavy (general relativity, or what you might call gravitational …