Strong Ontological Emergence: An Argument for the New Interactionism

This paper proves that the logic of living systems emerging from non-living physical systems also applies to emergence of the mind from a biophysical body. The key notion here is the system’s higher complexity, which leads to the occurrence of not just emergent properties but a new entity as well. I argue for a different version of nonreductive physicalism and prove it by applying the first two laws of thermodynamics. This application of a scientific framework allows for radical reconsideration of mental downward causation. In the first part, I discuss the incompleteness of the two most widespread versions of physicalism: reductive and non-reductive. In the second part, I present strong ontological emergence as an evolutionary product of the mind emerging from the brain as a physically higher complexity. In the last part, I return to the most challenging and unsolved problems in Cartesian interactionism and answer them with the new ontology of strong ontological emergence. This ontological framework also allows to indicate how downward mental causation not only becomes possible in explaining in physicalist terms but also becomes a logical necessity streaming from deterministic laws of thermodynamics. I conclude that some of the basic notions of the physicalist understanding of the mind were first proposed already by some pre-Socratic philosophers