ABSTRACT
Among the various recipes recently proposed, emergentism has been the object of increasing interest. We shall describe it more accurately later, but for the moment we may say that emergentism rejects the idea of the division of our universe into two independent ontological regions, and in particular rejects the idea that mental phenomena should be considered as something external to the material world, something added to it “from outside”,1 so to speak. At the same time, emergentism assumes that our natural world contains irreducible mental properties, that is, even though everything that exists is physical, there are physical entities that have irreducible mental properties. In particular, when our physical reality arrives at a certain degree of complexity, it reveals new features whose nature and existence is not explicable by mere knowledge of the lower (physical) level, and whose action exhibits new genuine causal powers.
