Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

and emergence and downwards causation may ultimately be the same thing. Perhaps they can both be true at the same time. In other words, perhaps the universe is fundamentally paradoxical. And we could even say that the emergent quality of the whole cosmos is ‘god’ in the panthiest sense, if you’re willing to think of it this way. The pantheist postion of course just makes God as inscrutable as the view of the universe from eternity. Hidden in plain sight in Christian theology are the remnants of Platonic and neo-Platonic thinking that tried to address this — to square the circle — but, we might say, this is no longer mainstream in religion today, in fact it’s decidedly niche!

Shallow emergence is not considered magical, even although it really has no proper explanation. This is because it is entirely consistent in the way it occurs and therefore just accepted as a ‘brute fact’. Deep emergence may likewise be consistent in its operations, but as yet we don’t know enough to say if it is or not. So it can seem like we are suggesting magic when deep emergence is proposed. But it is no more (or less) magical than its ‘shallower’ cousins!

Emergence suggests an inherent unpredictability to the universe (with consciousness and agency just higher-level emergence). It is difficult to figure out what kind of explanation could ever correspond to the territory of the real world — that is, the world that includes for choice, quality and agency. Or indeed any kind of coherent theory, given the way we currently understand coherence.

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