potato comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong
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Well, I agree that that fake explanation is used too often, and that it only gets any cred because it's from the right literature genre. But I don't think the whole of work in emergence can really be reduced to a mystery to worship. Certainly "emergence" is a stupid noun, just like "Red-hood" is a stupid noun. And that's a wonderful exercise to shut up the anti-reductionist movement based around emergence.
But "emergently arising" and "arising" can be given useful different meanings without stretching things too far, specially if "emergent" is contrasted with "resultant".
-- Manuel Delanda
Delanda is one of those anti-reductionists that I was talking about, but nonetheless I still think he gives useful and viable meanings to "emergent" and "resultant" here , though I think his arguments against reductionism are just plain silly. They leave room for reducing any "emergent property" of a whole to the interactions of its parts, so as far as I can tell his arguments leave plenty of room for reductionism.