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Many problems that have been discussed in the philosophy of mind have been discussed from an emergentist's perspective. But there is little consideration, if any, of the problem of free will. This chapter aims to shed some new light on this old problem by approaching it from the perspective of emergentism, where both diachronic and synchronic aspects will play a role. Leading questions are, for example, whether or not the capacity of having a free will can be reductively explained, or whether the ‘emergence’ of this capacity could have been predicted, in principle. To reflect on these questions one has to distinguish various explications of what the capacity of having a free will really is.

A sixfold taxonomy for emergence is presented into which a variety of contemporary accounts of emergence fit. The first dimension of the taxonomy consists of inferential, conceptual, and ontological emergence; the second dimension consists of diachronic and synchronic versions of each of these types of emergence. The adequacy of weak emergence, a specifically computational form of inferential emergence, is then examined, and its relationship to conceptual emergence and ontological emergence is detailed. Arguments are given assessing whether the end state of a weakly emergent process has to satisfy a novelty condition and new argumet is provided for the conclusion that diachronic emergence involves tokens of states.

Retrospective reflections are provided on the papers “How Properties Emerge,” “Emergence, Not Supervenience,” “Synchronic and Diachronic Emergence,” and “Computational and Conceptual Emergence” by Paul Humphreys. Remarks are made on the respective merits of diachronic and synchronic approaches to emergence and it is noted that fusion emergence is a special case of the author’s more recent transformational emergence. An argument is given that holism should be imposed as a requirement for emergence only on synchronic accounts, and a reevaluation of the six conditions for emergence given in the author’s “Emergence, Not Supervenience” paper is provided. Elaborations of why features are conceptually emergent or inferentially emergent are given and brief remarks on theoretical approaches to emergence are provided. A clarification of the author’s position that introducing levels of properties is in many cases a methodological convenience rather than a recognition of ontological reality is given.

Among the very architects of the recent reemergence of emergentism in the physical sciences, Robert B. Laughlin certainly occupies a prominent place. Through a series of works beginning as early as his Nobel lecture in 1998, he relentlessly advocated a strongly anti-reductionist view of physics. In spite of this, rare are the philosophers who have paid serious attention to Laughlin’s insights, even among those sympathetic to the idea of emergence. The starting point of this chapter is a willingness to remedy this situation by taking seriously Laughlin’s emergentism. More specifically, reflecting on Laughlin’s idea, according to which “one of the things an emergent phenomenon can do is create new particles,” the authors propose an exploration of the way in which emergence can shed light on the ontological status of some quantum entities—more particularly, so-called quasiparticles—that would come into being on the occasion of certain physical transformations.