ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a credible account of what strong emergence could be. A mere addition of powers does not adequately satisfy the pre-theoretical requirement of emergence that it involves novelty in the higher-level phenomena. Every complex whole—that is, every whole that is made out of parts-would have emergent powers, which were just the addition of the powers of the parts. Nonlinearity was for a time seen as a key idea in emergence. Emergent powers of wholes cannot then be mere aggregates because those parts themselves change, losing at least their qualitative identity, in order to enter into that whole. The causal transformative account gives a strong ontological emergence in a perfectly naturalistic way, without resorting to any deus ex machina 'magical' or 'spooky' device. Emergence versus reduction is usually seen as a matter of constitution, and this is a synchronous relation that explains 'verticality': how the lower-level phenomena constitute higher-level phenomena.
