Emergence

Emergence occupies a pivotal and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a biological concept, a philosophical category, and a psychological metaphor for transformation. The literature ranges from technical treatments of dynamic systems theory — where Thompson’s enactive framework elaborates ‘dynamic co-emergence’ as the mutual determination of organism and milieu, resisting both reductionism and strong ontological dualism — to depth-psychological deployments in which Murray Stein reads individuation itself as the emergence of a new selfhood from the dissolution of prior psychic structures. Bosnak and the complexity-theory tradition invoke emergence to describe properties of collective self-organization that are irreducible to their components, a theme that recurs in Fogel’s neuroscientific account of awareness as a ‘whole systems phenomenon.’ Jaynes historicizes the concept through Lloyd Morgan’s emergent evolution, questioning whether consciousness itself can be treated as a novel property arising from simpler constituents. Sri Aurobindo gives the term a cosmological valence, positioning emergence as the law of evolutionary Nature’s ascent through successive orders of being. What unites these otherwise divergent perspectives is a shared insistence that certain psychic, biological, and cultural realities cannot be derived from, predicted by, or reduced to their substrates — a conviction that carries profound implications for any science of mind that would locate the self exclusively at the level of neural mechanics.

In the library 15 passages

Emergence through collective self-organization thus has two aspects. One is local-to-global determination, as a result of which novel macrolevel structures and processes emerge. The other is global-to-local determination whereby global structures and

Thompson defines dynamic emergence as a bidirectional causality between micro-level interactions and macro-level order parameters, rejecting both homuncular and purely bottom-up accounts of self-organization.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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What I am calling dynamic co-emergence is the sort of emergence that best describes what Merleau-Ponty means by form, namely, a whole that cannot be dislocated from its components but cannot be reduced to them either.

Thompson links his concept of dynamic co-emergence directly to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of form, establishing that mind and life constitute hierarchically integrated wholes irreducible to their material substrates.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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‘Emergence . . . occurs only when the activities of the parts do not simply sum to give the activity of the whole.’ An excellent example of such emergent behavior is portrayed by Mitchell Waldrop in his brief history of complexity theory

Bosnak draws on complexity theory to define emergence as a property of collective behavior that is irreducible to the sum of individual components, illustrating this with Reynolds’s ‘boids’ simulation of flocking behavior.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis

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A first involutionary foundation in which originates all that has to evolve, an emergence and action of the involved powers in or upon that foundation in an ascending series, and a culminating emergence of the highest power of all

Aurobindo frames emergence as the cosmological law of evolutionary Nature, whereby successively higher powers of consciousness unfold from an original involutionary foundation through an ascending series of manifestations.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939thesis

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Compared to the lengthy period of pupation, which may have extended over weeks or months, or in some cases even years, the final emergence of the adult is lightning fast. It may take only fifteen minutes.

Stein uses the metamorphic emergence of the butterfly from its pupa as the governing metaphor for the sudden appearance of a transformed self after a prolonged liminal period of psychic restructuring.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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Just as the property of wetness cannot be derived from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen alone, so consciousness emerged at some point in evolution in a way underivable from its constituent parts.

Jaynes surveys the emergentist tradition from Lloyd Morgan forward, acknowledging the intuitive power of the thesis that consciousness is an evolutionarily novel property irreducible to its material preconditions.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis

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His deontologized conception of emergence is close to my conception of dynamic co-emergence. 7 Therefore it would seem that Kim is mistaken when he writes… if W is a complex system with structural stability, then it could well have had its emergent property M at t, without its constituent a having had P at t.

Thompson contests Kim’s micro-determinism of emergent properties, arguing that structurally stable complex systems exhibit emergent properties that are not exhaustively explained by the states of any single constituent.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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Whereas living structures are ontologically emergent with respect to physical ones, the human structure ‘perceived situation-work’ is emergent with respect to living structures.

Thompson, following Merleau-Ponty, argues for a hierarchical ontology in which each successive order — physical, vital, human — constitutes a genuinely new kind of emergent dialectical relation between organism and milieu.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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Based upon deep structures of archetypally anchored image and form, they eventually will gather energies and direct them into artistic, cultural, social, and religious structures we cannot yet foresee… we cannot yet identify with certainty the emergent structures of new patterns of wholeness.

Stein applies the concept of emergence to collective cultural transformation, suggesting that new patterns of archetypal wholeness are forming out of the dissolution of premodern structures, though their final shape remains unforeseeable.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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Morphodynamics is a branch of dynamic systems theory concerned with the emergence of form or structure… ‘structure is not a property of the elements but of the field of their interactions’

Thompson connects Merleau-Ponty’s concept of morphodynamic behavior to contemporary dynamic systems theory, showing that emergent form is a field property of interactions rather than an attribute of isolated components.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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this paper may be read as an introduction to a Baldwinian understanding of Jung that seeks to make use of his familiarity with Baldwin and Lloyd Morgan as a point of departure for further developments in theory and practice.

Hogenson situates Jung’s evolutionary thinking within the emergentist tradition of Lloyd Morgan and Baldwin, suggesting that archetypes can be re-read through the lens of emergent evolutionary properties.

Hogenson, George, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001supporting

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here’s the first part of the legend, the legend of emergence. Now I said that in Iceland we have this concept of land-nam, land-claiming. A specific place is identified on the reservation as the place of emergence.

Campbell treats emergence as a mythological category, identifying it with ritual origin narratives in which a sacred place is consecrated as the symbolic site from which a people and their world first arose.

Campbell, Joseph, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990supporting

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other process that moves the now emergent imaginal disks into place and substitutes them for former structures.

Stein describes the biological emergence of adult structures in metamorphosis as a literal ground for the psychological metaphor of new psychic configurations displacing obsolete ones during individuation.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998aside

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