Emergentism

Emergentism follows John Stuart Mill's systems that are not subject to the natural law of causes but "amount to more than the sums of the properties of their parts" and British philosopher C. D. Broad, whose definition of emergence amounted to the claim that mental properties would count as emergent if and only if philosophical zombies were metaphysically possible. Samuel Alexander believed that emergence was fundamentally inexplicable, and that emergentism was simply a "brute empirical fact." Ludwig von Bertalanffy founded General System Theory (GST), which is a more contemporary approach to emergentism popularized by Fritjof Capra.

Supervenience is a well-defined relation between "higher-level" (e.g. mental) and "lower-level" (e.g. physical) properties. Informally, a group of properties X supervenes on a group of properties Y exactly when the X-group properties are determined by the Y-group properties, where "determined by" is taken somewhat non-specifically.

Consciousness is notoriously difficult to define or locate, but Alan Turing proposed what is now known as the Turing test to determine if a computer could simulate human conversation undetectably. This test is commonly cited in discussion of artificial intelligence. The application to consciousness is highly suggestive, but not clear. One is reminded of Edsger Dijkstra's comment "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim".

Turing's Test evolved from a party game in which object is for an interrogator to determine which of the other two players is a man and which is a woman. If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle. ~Rita Mae Brown

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond. - Hypatia Theon