conchis comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong
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In line with previous comments, I'd always understood the idea of emergence to have real content: "systems whose high-level behaviors arise or 'emerge' from the interaction of many low-level elements" as opposed to being centrally determined or consciously designed (basically "bottom-up" rather than "top-down"). It's not a specific explanation in and of itself, but it does characterise a class of explanations, and, more importantly, excludes certain other types of explanation.
I would think that something like "life/intelligence is an emergent phenomenon" means "you don't need intelligent design to explain life/intelligence".