I am glad that there are people other than myself who find the notion of "emergent phenomena" to be code word for "magic" or "ignorance." Quite frankly I am mystified by how learned people, presumably taught the scientific method, could be so enamored with so called "emergent phenomena" but then I recall that practically the whole discipline of modern cosmology is little more than dressed up religion (anyone here know what possible cosmological consequences "Dark Energy" or "Dark Matter" have). But in that vein it bares mentioning that if it is impossible to discriminate between two things, then they are logically identical. Magic = achieving work through methods that do not involve "work effecting activity." Emergent phenomena = quality achieving methods that do not involve "quality achieving activity."

In order to deal with the topic of Emergent Phenomena one is required to comprehend what is called "Supervenience." I will leave it to the readers to explore Supervenience at their own discretion. (Standford encyclopedia of philosophy has a good article on it). Suffice it to say that some people have managed to convince themselves that a form of Supervenience can exist whereby "Top down causation" can occur.

Strong claims to emergent phenomena (which are essentially arguments regarding causation) require that the Supervenient qualities occur out of nowhere. This would be like in real life saying that Kinetic Energy occurs without there being any potential energy. Potential energy is not itself energy; hence the POTENTIAL part of its name. So can anyone point out why we "assume" the existence of potential energy in matter but that "potential intelligence" is not present in neurons?

Weak claims to emergent phenomena (which are essentially classification arguments) reference sets which include all objects in the universe (as Eliezer has pointed out), and as such are completely devoid of explanatory powers. Technically all things in the universe are "emergent properties" of physics. But we could potentially explain everything in the universe "if we had perfect knowledge of physics." We would need something like Laplace's daemon, but with perfect predictability we could derive neurochemistry. Once you have perfect neurochemistry knowledge, you can derive economics or any other set of behaviors you wish.

Example: When two triangles are brought together a square is the result (technically a quadrilateral, but I am keeping it simple). There is no property of triangles that is equivalent with "squareness." So "squareness" can be said to be an emergent property of triangles. Right now every person reading this should realize that something fishy is going on. Each triangle has "potential squareness" as part of its "list of qualities that it possesses." So when two triangles are brought together you get a square. You do not get something for nothing. The only difference between the triangles in this example and everything described as "emergent" is the degree of complexity.

The "proper way" Emergent Property is supposed to be used is when you have a universe of discourse that is random and note that "small sections of apparent order" occur. These properties are then "emergent" as they are not connected with any law that the universe itself possesses. The problem is that any application of this to a level of reality short of applying it to reality itself is entirely inconsistent with all non-paraconsistent logics.

A truly random "thing" does not exist. Such a "thing" could not interact with any thing we are aware of, since any interaction involves a two-way quality exchange/copy/removal,etc. Does anyone here have any idea what "mono-interactive interaction" looks like? The only way to achieve that is to have a "nothing" do something.

The very definition of "Nothing" is that it lacks any and all qualities. No qualities means no abilities. No abilities means "doing" is impossible. Nothing does not result in a change in anything.

Just because you are not aware of all the causal factors DOES NOT mean that there do not exist any causal factors. You can use this for any possible "emergent phenomena." Just because you are not aware of selection mechanisms for quantum physics does not mean that there are no selection mechanisms. Repeat ad nauseum.

MTF

English evolved in a time period, predominatly ruled over by men. Hence, the default term is: "Mankind", "Man", and the default, when gender is uncertain, is to use "Man", "Him", or derivatives of such.

In Old English, the word "man" was gender-neutral, while the words for male and female were something like wer and wif. The compound word wifman, meaning "female human" is what evolved into the modern word "woman" (interestingly, the word wer survives most commonly in "werewolf", which as you can see literally means man-wolf, and distinctly male). Cognates of "man", such as the German Mensch in fact remain gender neutral.

The gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun is "they", with documented use at least as far back as Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Which of these is in your opinion not true?

• The more similar people are to you, the easier they tend to be to understand.

• People of the same sex are on average significantly more similar to each other than people of different sex.

• There is no magical force compensating for differences caused or implied by sex involved in understanding each other.

What's the difference between a "programming error" and an "emergent consequence of the program as written", other than whether the programmers decide they like the result? Is it just a question of whether the rules involved can be described intuitively at the level of user-interface objects rather than lines of code?

Most of this is specific to videogames and probably will not be applicable anywhere else:

An emergent property in the context of videogames is one the designers of the game did not intend, [more strictly: yet is not a programming error].

Excluding the possibly, since this example is ambiguous using it:

In the game Super Smash Bros, jumping is not emergent, since the designers programmed it into the game specifically.

Wavedashing [dodging into the ground so that you will be able to move while attacking] (and in fact, every single bit of strategy for every character) is emergent; it's not programmed into the game, it's just that if you put together all the intended rules of the game, wavedashing appears also.

What does "this is emergent" tell you, in this context?

It tells you first of all it's unintentional, which then tells you it has a vastly greater chance of being unbalanced or broken.

Using the stricter definition, it also tells you whatever it is profits the player in some way, because if it did not profit the player in some way it would not have emerged; someone would have found it, not used it or told anyone, and it would just fade away. (But this is only valid for emergent things when they're structured in a certain way. This part can be generalized to, say, the economy, but not, say, to traffic jams, because traffic jams are more tragedy of the commons types of things.)

It also tells you, most importantly, that it is probably not possible to know all the specific causes of this thing and instead to try wide and general causes. (i.e: "World War I happened because of a general attitude among nations that military force was a good way to solve problems." It's possible to say it happened "because Alice thought... and Bob thought... but Carol thought... and Dave thought....", but this is going to be either much less accurate or not worth the effort to make it accurate.)

What does "this is non-emergent" tell you?

There are one or more obvious specific causes that it would not be worth breaking down. (In the case of videogames, the developers, but it also works for cases like "there is a big dent in the front of my car because I crashed it into a tree" [but wait, you say, isn't that also phrasable as "because the force from the tree caused this molecule and this molecule and this molecule to move backwards"? Yes, but it doesn't matter; the only cause is still the force from the tree.])

(Finally, random other example I thought of after reading the Go example:

In chess, the position of the pieces at the beginning of the game is not emergent: there is one cause for that: because it's part of the rules of the game.

The fact that the best first move for white in most cases is pawn to e4 is emergent. Nobody wrote that into the rules of chess; it's just a consequence of the positions of the pieces.)