Emergence

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Emergence
/ɪˈməːdʒ(ə)ns/ (n.)

A property of a system or aggregated whole which is not shared by components of the system or the constituents of that body. For example, “wetness” is a property of water, but not of any individual molecule of H₂0. “Consciousness” is an emergent property of neural activity, but the neurons firing across your cortex are not themselves conscious. “Bureaucracy” is an emergent property of a financial services organisation, though it may not be present, or ant any rate, obvious, in any of the individual communications within that organisation. Well, not many, anyway. Nonetheless in each case the emergent property is a function not of the system as a whole but of its individual components.

To alter an emergent property you need to change the nature of those individual interactions so that a different property emerges. However tempting it may seem to an administrator, you cannot change the wider system, except by changing each of the individual interactions from which the property emerges. You can’t stop water being wet, unless you change the conditions in which water molecules interact (by making it colder, or hotter, or mixing other molecules with H₂0. Likewise, you can’t remove bureaucracy from an organisation while keeping the organisational hierarchy which incentivises people to be bureaucratic. Each individual actions may be explicable — if a bit conservative — viewed in isolation. You can’t see the bureaucracy in it, and the individual may feel she has no alternative, given the hierarchical structures, than to act that way.

Emergence is important component in complex systems, which, as you may know, the JC has a bit of a thing about. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and psychological phenomena emerge from the neurobiological phenomena of living things.

Joe Norman with a great example of emergence and irreducibility at Risky Conversations:

If you take a Möbius loop — a one-sided geometric shape created by taking a strip of paper, twisting it one half turn and looping it — and try to reduce it by breaking it into smaller parts, you lose the one-sidedness. Each of its segments has two sides. You can join any of its segments together, and they still have two sides. It is only when you twist the emerging structure and join it back on itself that the second side vanishes.

Nascent theory: reducibility is to irreducibility as complicatedness is to complexity — only looked at from opposite ends of the telescope. Complication can be predicted, and solved, from first principles or the initial state; complexity cannot.

Likewise, a reducible phenomenon can be atomised into its fundamental components with no loss of essential qualities or properties; an irreducible one cannot — some of those properties emerge at a level of abstraction higher than the smallest components.

See also

• Reductionism
• Möbius loop — one of the JC’s hermeneutically sealed private jokes for one. Oh! There’s another one!