In contemporary philosophy, there recently has been introduced an opposite to emergence, where a property is lost in a complex instead of a property being gained(emergence). A classical example is the property of spatiality, being demergent in the emerging of a people. Though each individual belonging to a people is spatial, the same cannot be predicated of a people as a whole. The thought has also been raised that spatiality is demergent in the mind, because the mind arises from matter (the brain) while thoughts cannot be said to posess matter.
Most of these contributions are due to a Dutch philosopher named Tim Kuipers, who claims demergence to be the only explanation for the non-spatiality of consciousness when holding on to the mind/brain identity.
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