ABSTRACT
Contemporary scientific emergentism, defended by physicists like Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin, neuroscientists like Walter Freeman, and many others, takes as its starting point our present scientific evidence that includes “horizontal” causal explanations/models but also ubiquitous “vertical” compositional explanations/models. 1 Crucially, the latter explanations show how almost all higher-level scientific entities, whether individuals, or their activities and properties, are composed by lower level entities.
