# emergent causation **Opening (not a real abstract):** The notion of an emergent property has aroused much recent discussion among both scientists and philosophers. Many quite different kinds of properties have been described as ‘emergent’, the only clear common factor being the broad idea that when a physical system of sufficient complexity is in a suitable configuration new properties ‘emerge’ in a way that could not have been predicted from the physical laws governing less complex or differently configured systems. Examples of putative emergent properties in the actual world can be found in biology, chemistry, in branches of physics dealing with complex systems, in computer science, and in the philosophy of mind.1 Many of the examples given by scientists belong to an ‘epistemological’ variety of emergence, where the emphasis is on the impossibility of **Authors:** [[Prosser]]