Again, please help me and let me know if I am wrong, badly wrong, or very badly wrong but a little right, but Eliezer's argument seems to suffer from a couple basic flaws, the use of replacing emergence with magic being the first. It certainly serves its point to draw the parallel's between the current use of emergence and magic, but i could just as easily say, A: The car moves because of (combustion being directed into useful kinetic energy that causes parts to move and the car to run) B: the car moves because of magic as you noted, magic fails to explain everything because it is so general, and so can be compared to anything, in which lies the fallacy. You could make your point about magic and anything just as easily because magic isn't a real explanation, nor is it a good comparative point for anything. and the other point i guess is one that every college freshman knows, "wikipedia is not a liget source of anything. dont use it" though i will say that the comparisons to an engine and go earlier do not serve the purpose of those who support the hypothesis that emergence is a legitimate concept because as I noted above, the individual pieces of an engine do posses the property of motion, the oil and the fire, should you heap all the pieces of a car in a pile atop a bucket of oil and apply fire you will find that each individual piece will gain the property of motion quite rapidly and in your general direction.
The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?
I name emergence or emergent phenomena—usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise or “emerge” from the interaction of many low-level elements. (Wikipedia: “The way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”)
Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem. Imagine pointing to a market crash and saying “It’s not a quark!” Does that feel like an explanation? No? Then neither should saying “It’s an emergent phenomenon!”
It’s the noun “emergence” that I protest, rather than the verb “emerges from.” There’s nothing wrong with saying “X emerges from Y,” where Y is some specific, detailed model with internal moving parts. “Arises from” is another legitimate phrase that means exactly the same thing. Gravity arises from the curvature of spacetime, according to the specific mathematical model of General Relativity. Chemistry arises from interactions between atoms, according to the specific model of quantum electrodynamics.
Now suppose I should say that gravity depends on “arisence” or that chemistry is an “arising phenomenon,” and claim that as my explanation.
The phrase “emerges from” is acceptable, just like “arises from” or “is caused by” are acceptable, if the phrase precedes some specific model to be judged on its own merits.
However, this is not the way “emergence” is commonly used. “Emergence” is commonly used as an explanation in its own right.
I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, “Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!” as if that explained intelligence. This usage fits all the checklist items for a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. What do you know, after you have said that intelligence is “emergent”? You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before. It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don’t anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed. The hypothesis has no moving parts—there’s no detailed internal model to manipulate. Those who proffer the hypothesis of “emergence” confess their ignorance of the internals, and take pride in it; they contrast the science of “emergence” to other sciences merely mundane.
And even after the answer of “Why? Emergence!” is given, the phenomenon is still a mystery and possesses the same sacred impenetrability it had at the start.
A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective “emergent” from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different:
Another fun exercise is to replace the word “emergent” with the old word, the explanation that people had to use before emergence was invented:
Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon’s behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?
“Emergence” has become very popular, just as saying “magic” used to be very popular. “Emergence” has the same deep appeal to human psychology, for the same reason. “Emergence” is such a wonderfully easy explanation, and it feels good to say it; it gives you a sacred mystery to worship. Emergence is popular because it is the junk food of curiosity. You can explain anything using emergence, and so people do just that; for it feels so wonderful to explain things.
Humans are still humans, even if they’ve taken a few science classes in college. Once they find a way to escape the shackles of settled science, they get up to the same shenanigans as their ancestors—dressed up in the literary genre of “science,” but humans are still humans, and human psychology is still human psychology.