Emergent Dualism

Emergent dualism holds that neither mind nor consciousness is fundamental in reality but arises “naturally” when sufficiently organized physical systems—a certain kind of complex arrangement of physical atoms, say, in biological neurons and brains—generate a genuinely new, nonphysical substance by as-yet-unknown meta-psychophysical processes or laws, and this nonphysical substance would be the first-person subject of the mind or consciousness. Thus, unlike traditional Cartesian dualism, the soul is not an independently existing substance created by God and inserted into the organism from outside; unlike property dualism or non-reductive physicalism, what emerges is not merely a new set of phenomenal properties but an individual mind that becomes the first-person bearer of those properties, a unified individual that bears experience and may exercise downward causal influence.

Hasker’s Emergent Self

The principal contemporary architect of this position is William Hasker, who originated the theory, developed it systematically in The Emergent Self, and proposed the name “emergent dualism”; Dean Zimmerman subsequently became another major defender (Hasker, 1999; Zimmerman, 2010). Hasker's route to the position is an argument from the unity of consciousness: a complex conscious state cannot exist distributed among the parts of a composite object, so the subject of experience cannot be the brain, which is such an object. What is required, he argues, is not merely an emergent property but an emergent individual—a new substance, generated by the brain much as a magnetic field is generated by a magnet, occupying space, and exerting causal influence back on the system that produces it.

Once generated, such a soul might persist beyond the brain, and the same laws could in principle operate in nonbiological systems. Thus, the theory accommodates strong brain dependence, evolution, animal consciousness, and potentially artificial consciousness, while allowing possible postmortem survival. Hasker's own entry treats his arguments in full; this entry maps the position they support.

From Emergent Properties to an Emergent Subject

Emergent dualism begins with strong emergence. When matter enters certain highly organized configurations—paradigmatically biological brains and nervous systems—novel mental properties and causal powers appear that are neither present in simpler matter nor derivable from laws governing matter in simpler arrangements. Hasker argues that phenomenal consciousness requires something stronger still. Because a conscious experience is presented as a unified whole, there must be a single bearer of that experience. Thus, the relevant emergence is substance emergence: physical organization generates a new conscious individual (Hasker, 1999, 2010).

As noted, Hasker compares the relation to a magnet generating a magnetic field, while insisting that the analogy is limited. The intended point is that an entity can be generated by an underlying physical organization yet acquire causal properties not reducible to those of its generator. In Hasker’s version, the resulting “field of consciousness” acts back upon the brain, supporting intentional action, rational agency, and libertarian freedom.

This establishes the defining contrast with merely emergent property dualism. Phenomenal properties do not simply characterize a physical organism; they belong to an emergent subject that becomes an additional causal participant in the world.

Brain Dependence and the Pairing Problem

Because each emergent mind is generated by a particular organism, emergent dualism offers a distinctive response to the traditional dualist “pairing problem”: why does this nonphysical mind interact reliably with this particular body rather than another? The generating relation itself supplies the connection. Hasker and Zimmerman consequently allow the emergent mind to be spatially associated with, or located in, the brain regions with which it interacts rather than being an entirely nonspatial Cartesian substance (Hasker, 1999; Zimmerman, 2010).

Thus, the pairing-problem advantage is a central part of Hasker's case, and he claims two further gains over Cartesian dualism. Special divine creation of each soul becomes unnecessary, since the generative work is done by the physical system. And the intimate dependence of mind on brain that neuroscience documents is predicted by the theory rather than merely accommodated by it. This natural dependence makes brain effects on consciousness unsurprising: damage to the generator degrades the field. Changes to neural organization can alter, impair, or perhaps even divide consciousness. Hasker interprets evidence from commissurotomy as compatible with division of an emergent conscious field, while animal minds can emerge from less complex nervous systems without requiring separately created souls (Hasker, 1999). Hasker also argues that emergent dualism requires accepting, with the materialists, that the potentiality for conscious life resides in the nature of matter itself, which distinguishes the position from dualisms that treat matter as mentally inert.

Emergent Laws, Causation, and Explanatory Costs

The central unexplained component is the emergence relation itself. Some versions invoke fundamental psychophysical or meta-psychophysical laws specifying when organized physical systems generate conscious subjects. Others, including Hasker’s causal-powers formulation, regard the propensity to generate consciousness as somehow grounded in the nature of matter itself. Either way, the theory presently offers no established mechanism or quantitative threshold specifying when a sufficiently complex system becomes a conscious individual.

This is the theory’s principal strength and vulnerability. It takes phenomenal consciousness, unified subjectivity, and mental causation seriously while respecting extensive neurobiological dependence. But critics argue that the emergence of a unified immaterial substance from distributed nonconscious matter is an exceptionally strong and exceptionally surprising—and completely unexplained—metaphysical transition. Problems include how the threshold of emergence is determined, how many emergent subjects a borderline physical configuration generates, whether downward mental causation conflicts with physical causal closure, and whether the theory genuinely explains consciousness rather than relocating the mystery into an emergence law (Rickabaugh, 2018).

Survival, NDEs, and Possible Independence

Once a nonphysical conscious individual has emerged, versions of the theory can differ over how strongly its continued existence depends on its physical source. At one extreme, the mind may cease when the generating brain ceases functioning; at the other, it may acquire sufficient ontological independence to persist after bodily death.

This possibility has made emergent dualism relevant to discussions of near-death experiences (NDEs) and alleged out-of-body experiences (OBEs). NDEs and OBEs are said to support emergent dualism, in that if one starts by assuming OBEs and NDEs to be actual disembodied conscious experiences, then emergent dualism is said to be a candidate to explain them. In other words, if such reports were independently established as genuine, emergent dualism would provide one possible metaphysical framework: a consciousness originally generated by a brain might subsequently persist independently of it, because once this nonphysical substance (“soul”) comes into existence, it is then logically possible for this “soul” to become ontologically self-subsisting, no longer dependent on its progenerating physical substance (brain), and therefore capable of maintaining its existence beyond the dissolution of the physical brain (Kopel, 2023). This possibility is not evidence supplied by emergent dualism itself, and the empirical status of such phenomena remains much disputed.

Theological Speculations

Hasker's own theological treatment of survival is more restrictive than the general position allows. The brain normally generates and sustains the emergent self. On his field analogy, a field would be expected to dissipate when its generator ceases, so the emergent self does not naturally survive the destruction of its brain. Thus, after death, survival would require that God sustain the field (i.e., that same individual) directly until its embodiment in a resurrected body. Theological postmortem survival is therefore possible without requiring the soul to have existed independently of matter from the beginning (Hasker, 1999, 2017). Moreover, in Hasker’s theory, emergent dualism purchases compatibility with neuroscience at the cost of natural immortality—a concession Hasker makes explicitly, and one that bears on how far the position can underwrite interpretations of near-death and out-of-body phenomena.

The position has attracted sustained criticism from within dualism as well as from materialists. Rickabaugh argues that it inherits a combination problem as severe as panpsychism's: if the brain's atomistic composition disqualifies it from grounding unified consciousness, it is unclear how such a brain could generate a mereologically simple substance (Rickabaugh, 2018). Kim's general critique of emergence applies as well—downward causal powers appear to violate the causal closure of the physical, while their absence undercuts the appeal to agency (Kim, 1993).

Philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne has likewise suggested that if direct divine creation of individual souls—his personal view—were mistaken, a theist could understand the natural world as endowed by God with a propensity to generate souls when suitable physical organization develops (Swinburne, personal communication, 2016). This distinguishes the traditional theological position of special creation from emergent dualism’s natural soul-generation.

Evolution, Animals, and Artificial Consciousness

Emergent dualism fits biological evolution more naturally than traditional substance dualism, which requires a separately created soul for every conscious organism. If increasingly complex nervous systems acquire the natural capacity to generate conscious individuals, phenomenal consciousness can evolve along with neural organization, and nonhuman animals can possess emergent minds appropriate to their biological complexity (Hasker, 2018).

Nor is biological carbon necessarily essential to the generic theory. There would be no necessity that the kind of meta-psychophysical laws that generate emergent dualism should be restricted to complex arrangements of atoms in biological entities or contexts. If the relevant emergence laws depend on physical or functional organization rather than specifically biological material, sufficiently advanced artificial systems could in principle generate nonphysical conscious subjects. Emergent dualism therefore does not entail that AI consciousness is impossible, as it would under traditional forms of dualism. Whether artificial organization actually satisfies the relevant conditions would depend on the still-unknown laws or causal powers governing emergence. Hasker's own formulation leaves this open in principle while emphasizing biological development, and he has not argued that engineered systems would generate emergent selves.

Assessment

Emergent dualism occupies a distinctive middle ground. Consciousness is not accidental and reducible to physical structure, on the one hand, or fundamental and ubiquitous, on the other; nor is the conscious soul an independently created nonphysical entry into nature. Instead, nature itself possesses the remarkable capacity to generate new first-person subjects when physical organization reaches the appropriate form. That claim—developed most systematically by Hasker and subsequently defended in variants by Zimmerman and others—is the defining commitment of emergent dualism. Its central difficulty, of course, is explaining how matter generates a unified nonphysical subject and how such a subject causally interacts with the brain.

Emergent dualism is sometimes regarded as a softer or more naturalized form of substance dualism, “dualism-light,” as it were: nonphysical minds remain real, but their appearance and ordinary functioning are continuous with biological development and evolution rather than exceptions to nature, in other words, a normal part of the physical world, however extended, where these as-yet-unknown “natural” meta-psychophysical laws would determine their automatic manifestation from complex structures, especially from brains (perhaps only from brains). Moreover, as noted, dualism's “pairing problem”—how can nonphysical substances (“souls”) have causal relations with physical substances (brains)—with zero tolerance for failure—would be reduced under emergent dualisms because (i) souls would seem in a way “tethered” in space (Zimmerman, 2005), and (ii) souls would have been generated by physical substances (brains) in the first place.

As for this freshly emergent nonphysical substance and subject, to explore its extremes, it could be either entirely dependent on the brain for continued existence or take on independent ontological existence in some strong sense. While either would be an extraordinary feature of reality, the latter, to me[RLK], would seem a rather odd way for reality to be.

References

Hasker, W. (1999). The Emergent Self. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hasker, W. (2010). Persons and the unity of consciousness. In R. C. Koons and G. Bealer (Eds.), The Waning of Materialism (pp. 175–190). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hasker, W. (2017). Emergent dualism. In Y. Nagasawa and B. Matheson (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife (pp. 297–314). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hasker, W. (2018). The case for emergent dualism. In J. J. Loose, A. J. L. Menuge, and J. P. Moreland (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism (pp. 61–72). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

Kim, J. (1993). The myth of nonreductive materialism. In Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press.

Kopel, J. (2023). Near-death experiences and emergent dualism. Theology and Science, 21.

Rickabaugh, B. L. (2018). Against emergent dualism. In J. J. Loose, A. J. L. Menuge, and J. P. Moreland (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism (pp. 73–86). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

Swinburne, R. (2016). Personal communication, as reported in the Landscape of Consciousness entry “Emergent Dualism.”

Zimmerman, D. W. (2010). From property dualism to substance dualism. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 84(1), 119–150.