Emergent materialism

Emergent materialism asserts that we will never understand the mechanism of emergence: it will always seem to us like emergence is magical. Colin McGinn argues that the problem is that we're too stupid to understand how strong emergence happens. To explain it to humans would be like explaining quantum theory to chimps.

Weak emergence states that once we can fully describe the relations between lower and higher levels of neural activity we can then understand how the higher level phenomena emerge from the lower level ones.

See also Mind-body problem, monism, materialism, physicalism, Reductive materialism, Eliminative materialism