One of the more frustrating aspects of discussions about the mind, sadly including and indeed especially in the professional philosophy of mind literature, is confusion about the term “emergence.” Sometimes, it’s explicitly identified with David Chalmers-style dualism. Sometimes, it’s identified with sophisticated non-reductive physicalists and their multiple realizability thesis. Most often, though, it seems to indicate a vague idea along the lines of “explicable in terms of reductive materialism, but still really cool.

Last month, we got a good example of this in David Brooks’ column The Neural Buddhists. PZ called him an idiot, Jason Rosenhouse had more substantial criticism, Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat started taking it seriously as theology. For me, the key paragraph is this:

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Every damn thing he says in this column is consistent with hard-core materialism. He’s just using “emerge” to mean “are cool all the same.”

Note that I’m a little miffed to see Rosenhouse not reflecting on the use of the word “emerge,” but Rosenhouse seems not to be badly confused the way Brooks is.