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Showing posts from May, 2022

The riddle of emergence – where do novel things come from?

It’s not true, that there’s nothing new under the sun. The universe is producing novelty all the time. Galaxies, stars, and planets, where none existed before. New elements, new molecules – life itself, with the explosion of new species, and eventually new minds, capable of new thoughts. New types of things at new levels of existence – discrete entities composed of smaller entities, arranged in specific ways. New systems with new properties and new causal powers, governed by new principles. So where does all this novelty come from?   The term emergence is often used to refer to the appearance of qualitatively novel states or processes or properties that arise when things are combined in certain ways. But as with many metaphysical terms, it means different things to different people and in different contexts, and it’s not always clear what, if anything, follows from its use. In particular, it is often not stated whether “emergence” simply refers to an observed phenomenon in need o