The Futility of Emergence

36 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 August 2007 10:10PM

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.

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