Popper’s Emergentism

In this paper I present Popper’s three worlds, the theory of creative evolution and the emergence of new forms. I further analyse Popper’s concept of emergence and his claim about the strong relationship between novelty and unpredictability. I analyse two different senses in which Popper uses the concept of emergence: (1) emergence as the unpredictability/nonderivability/nondeducibility of properties, and (2) emergence as the absolute unpredictability of events (Stephan 1992). This distinction parallels the distinction between the epistemological and ontological concepts of emergence. I argue that Popper, despite some examples which point to an epistemological notion, suggests ontological emergentism with “downward causation”. In this way consciousness possesses its own independent causal power. This enables Popper to see humans as autonomous and free. However, it is also vulnerable to the problems of interactionist dualism, particularly the question of its compatibility with some basic principles of physical science. This paper concludes with a discussion of how Popper’s position differs from the weaker emergentism present in various theories in cognitive science, such as the theories of emergent properties in connectionism and neural networks.