💭 It is hard to see how emergence/self-organisation/spontaneous-order means anything substantial. The main problem is this: simply ask 'Is the phenomenon predictable?'. →
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← If it is, there must be something graspable in the parts or preconditions – so it is not 'emergent' after all. If it is not predictable, then 'emergent' cannot reliably describe anything in the world – it is meaningless. →
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← So, either emergence is predictive knowledge, like any other, or merely a fancy placeholder for knowledge we lack. →
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← The second problem is this: 'emergence' says assembling some things yields more than the pieces, but what could assembly mean if it did *not* do that? An 'assembly' *is* something different from the pieces. So *all* assembly is emergent. →
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← It seems 'emergence' is vacuous in two ways: first it was contradictory and demarcated no cases, then it was tautological and covered all.
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It summarizes three related properties - indirection, statefulness and expense
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Emergent properties are indirect as they are not explicitly specified in the initial state or the rules of the system.
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imo it's one of those terms that are primarily concerned with human understanding of things and less with the things themselves
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Emergence: When illegible causes have legible results.
though NB that the quoted definition doesn't capture systems that we understand but that still show emergence (democracy, heat transfer)
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I was trying to think about subjectivity here too. If it is subjective, I tend to think it is human brain platform caused rather than individual point of view