In philosophy, science, and art, emergence is when an entity has properties which only show up when its parts interact as a bigger whole. In other words, emergence is when a complex system behaves in a way that is more than the sum of its parts.
from https://bonnittaroy.substack.com/p/why-we-need-a-school-like-this-part
One of the most pernicious forms of malware is associated with one of “our” favorite words floating around the “liminal web.” Emergentism is closely connected to complefication-ism as when we construe more complex forms “emerge” from lower forms. Why assume that this his how emergence always works? Why do we not apply the term to situations such as, for example, the bio-legacies that emerged after Mount Saint Hellens erupted? Or when we sit in collective process, do we surreptitiously expect something higher, more complex, and inclusive-convergence to emerge? rather than see the fragmentation and bifurcation, and explosiveness of the process as emergent, too?
Emergentism is also part of the mind-body dualism malware, since we tend to construct a mental model of the mind as an emergent property of the body. This is the way we construct the modern version of the perennial philosophy— that chain of entities from void to energy to matter to elements, to biotic life to animals, and then humans. The problem with emergentism is that while it purports to defend the continuity of matter and life, of nature and people, of body and mind, it actually conveys a discrete separation. 1
The sense of separation comes not despite the term, “Emergence” but with it. This is because “emergence” means something like “a miracle happens here” — a placeholder where no other explantory theory is possible. It is this miracle— reminiscent of the hand of god— that separates us. A divine gap that cannot be mended.
Emergentism might not point to an ontological reality, but to the contraints of language and perception on the one hand, and the “uncanny” qualities of “numinous causality.” In the first case, for example, whenever we examine the continuity of things, it is easy to see what category of entities we are talking about. Something living or something dead. But at the interfaces, between the living and the dead — such as viruses— language proves to be too coarse-grained to categorize effectively. Which is to say that the categories, well, being “categories” are short cuts that do not precisely represent the infinite diversity in the reality. Similarly, at a certain scale we cannot perceive the real interactions that are happening, or given the temporal scale of evolution, we cannot perceive the exact place and time when one species is handed over as another.
The concept of numinous causalty pertains to the ontological necessity of gaps between effects and causes, and proposes that in reality, we are always only dealing with effects, the causes of which can not be known.