Explaining The Brain: Strong Emergence

Certain phenomena cannot be explained by a single activity, where individual components work in tandem with each other and it is hard to pinpoint where the process starts or ends. The workings of such a phenomenon, known as Strong Emergence, cannot be categorized or bracketed in a single explanation.

Strong emergence is one of the few ways a brain can be explained. When we read a book, the page is made up of atoms, and so are we, but labelling it as simply an interaction of atoms cannot explain our ability to read, or the book’s ability to shape our mind into higher-level structures. This strong emergence does not take into account the complexities of understanding, language and how millions of neurons interact.