It's very silly. What he's saying is that there are properties at high levels of organizations that don't exist at low levels of organizations.
As Eliezer says, emergence is trivial. Everything that isn't quarks is emergent.
His "universality" argument seems to be that different parts can make the same whole. Well of course they can.
He certainly doesn't make any coherent arguments. Maybe he does in his book?
Yet another example of a Nobel prize winner in disagreement with Eliezer within his own discipline.
What is wrong with these guys?
Why if they would just read the sequences, they would learn the correct way for words like "reduction" and "emergence" to be used in physics.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.