Whenever someone exhorts you to "think outside the box", they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where "outside the box" is located.  Isn't it funny how nonconformists all dress the same...

In Artificial Intelligence, everyone outside the field has a cached result for brilliant new revolutionary AI idea—neural networks, which work just like the human brain!  New AI Idea: complete the pattern:  "Logical AIs, despite all the big promises, have failed to provide real intelligence for decades—what we need are neural networks!"

This cached thought has been around for three decades.  Still no general intelligence.  But, somehow, everyone outside the field knows that neural networks are the Dominant-Paradigm-Overthrowing New Idea, ever since backpropagation was invented in the 1970s.  Talk about your aging hippies.

Nonconformist images, by their nature, permit no departure from the norm.  If you don't wear black, how will people know you're a tortured artist?  How will people recognize uniqueness if you don't fit the standard pattern for what uniqueness is supposed to look like?  How will anyone recognize you've got a revolutionary AI concept, if it's not about neural networks?

Once upon a time...

This is a story from when I first met Marcello, with whom I would later work for a year on AI theory; but at this point I had not yet accepted him as my apprentice.  I knew that he competed at the national level in mathematical and computing olympiads, which sufficed to attract my attention for a closer look; but I didn't know yet if he could learn to think about AI.

I had asked Marcello to say how he thought an AI might discover how to solve a Rubik's Cube.  Not in a preprogrammed way, which is trivial, but rather how the AI itself might figure out the laws of the Rubik universe and reason out how to exploit them.  How would an AI invent for itself the concept of an "operator", or "macro", which is the key to solving the Rubik's Cube?

At some point in this discussion, Marcello said:  "Well, I think the AI needs complexity to do X, and complexity to do Y—"

And I said, "Don't say 'complexity'."

Marcello said, "Why not?"

Prerequisites:  Belief in Belief, Fake Explanations, Fake Causality, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

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 is explained by "arisence" or that chemistry is an "arising phenomenon", and claim that as my explanation.