MEDIUM EMERGENCE – Part Two – A Short Reductionist Argument against Materialism

Paksi, Dániel (2017) MEDIUM EMERGENCE – Part Two – A Short Reductionist Argument against Materialism. Appraisal, 11 (3). (In Press)

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Abstract

Medium emergence, which unites the concepts of strong and weak emergences, is the proper personalist ontological position between dualism and materialist monism. Michael Polanyi’s ontological conviction of personal reality and his understanding of “existential” and “conceptual” emergence comport with this theory, according to which persons emerged from inanimate fundamental matter through evolutionary achievements. This is the reason that they have tacit and personal knowledge which cannot be represented in the neutral terms of physics and chemistry and thus cannot be reduced synchronically to matter. Theorists of materialism claim that every higher level phenomenon can be reduced synchronically and thus cannot exist ontologically; however, reduction, as a form of human knowledge, is itself a higher level phenomenon thus is the necessary precondition of any kind of reduction. Therefore, the (synchronic) reduction of reduction and human knowledge is self-eliminating and logically impossible—that is, materialism cannot stand.

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