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Emergence explains nothing and is bad science (philosophy of science) - C C - Oct 14, 2025
https://iai.tv/articles/emergence-explains-nothing-and-is-bad-science-auid-3385?_auid=2020
INTRO: Scientists and philosophers have fallen for a seductive buzzword: “emergence.” It’s invoked to explain life, consciousness, and the flow of time: when simple parts combine, it is claimed, they sometimes produce new entities with powers their parts could never predict. But philosopher John Heil calls this out as an intellectual sleight of hand. “Emergence,” he argues, doesn’t reveal hidden truths—it masks our ignorance, mistaking gaps in explanation for gaps in reality. It’s time to drop the magic word and face the real challenge: uncovering, in concrete detail, how simple parts can give rise to complex wholes... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: It at least ought to be inconsistent with methodological naturalism (and physicalism, etc) to be content with "magical conjuring" or brute emergence at macroscopic levels, where some radical _X_ isn't even constituted of what existed beforehand. Whereas "new behaviors or dynamic activity" and "new principles" arising are just extra, specific additions to general categories that were already the case. Such isn't really a fundamental upheaval, even if there might currently be insufficient causal accountability.
RE: Emergence explains nothing and is bad science (philosophy of science) - Magical Realist - Oct 16, 2025
The ultimate point of a good scientific explanation is to enable us to manipulate and use and even to recreate a phenomenon in nature such that it improves our existence. Beyond that, there really isn't much more to expect from it. An intuitive sense or feel for the phenomenon is just a matter of working with it and knowing it inside and out, like with electricity or our own human bodies. If we can say no more about the phenomenon or property than that it just happens to occur in that precise manner, whether it be dictated by laws or traceable to underlying causes or is simply emergent, then what does it matter?
Nobody really knows why water crystalizes at precisely 32 degrees F, yet we use that knowledge to our own advantage and are content with it. At a certain level there is arbitrariness about everything. It's just what it is. Emergence is in a sense the modern counterpart to the occult art of alchemy, whereby the physical transubstantiation of matter itself supposedly produced certain psychic results. Is that not in fact the whole modern science of pharmacology?
We may never know how consciousness arises in the brain, but if we know enough that when you structure these particular atoms in a certain way consciousness suddenly emerges, then that may be all that we need. To create consciousness itself, is that not the secret ambition of all cognitive science?