I was asked to comment:
The article is standing its argument on the assumption that science must explain the internal, deterministic causes of what we observe, and that to do otherwise is “unscientific.” Aside from being a faulty premise, it’s an outdated notion of science. The article uses a straw man rather than properly presenting the position that so-called "emergentism" represents. The piece displays little more than the common misunderstanding of how and why emergence is fundamentally different from the antiquated reductionist (and extremely convenient) methods of far simpler sciences.
The author appeals to reductionism, which of course has never been the answer. All sciences outside physics (so almost all of science) has made progress by the necessary abstraction and extreme approximation required to deal with phenomena whose look and behavior are fundamentally distinct from the pieces that makeup a system. Reverse engineering one's way towards an understanding of the causal connections that drive an output works only for the simplest of systems, having little relevance to the overwhelming number of real-world phenomena. To say that emergence "has no real meaning or explanatory force" is to suggest emergence belongs in the same category as particle physics. It is to operate under the pretence that complex phenomena are just waiting to be explained in the same fashion planetary systems and stellar phenomena are. As though the workings of chemical, biological and social phenomena can one day be subsumed into the low-dimensional worldview of basic physics. To say that "emergence has no information that fundamentally differentiates it from a 'miracle'” is to ask that modern science force nature into its dead view that observations can be explained by a chain of cause-and-effect that leads from inner pieces to outward behavior.
The author is looking to fill a gap, not realizing the gap is a fundamental and necessary construct of nature. The author sees emergence as a gap-filling mechanism, only because he erroneously believes a deterministic gap exists in the first place. It's like suggesting quantization in atoms must be wrong, because there must be something in between the energy levels. No. That's not how complexity works. Complexity takes jumps by way of abrupt transitions. Phase changes, avalanches and collapsing markets don't evolve like some Newton's cradle towards a well-defend output. The dramatic appearance of entirely new properties are not "shortcomings in a theoretical model" they are the properties of complex matter, period. There are no gaps to be filled. The gaps are the whole point.
The author understands that "emergence can only be ascribed to a phenomenon in retrospect." But this is its power, not its failing. The direction forced on us by genuine complexity is what brings our focus towards properties, not fairy tale "reasons" for why things come about. Complexity is not about “I’m sure the system will work itself out” rather it's about "I know how systems like this behave, and we can thus expect..." Emergence is not a crutch for phenomena that are "difficult to predict." Framing complexity as a more difficult version of what Galileo struggled with shows a severe lack in understanding of what complexity is. As I have discussed elsewhere, complexity is "simpler than simplicity" because only the retrospective properties can be used to make decisions. The author argues that emergence gives "no new insights about the processes...", but again, this rests on the faulty assumption that processes are to be defined solely by deterministic means. Deterministic machines grace the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, but they most certaintly do not comprise nature's solutions. Further, it is factually incorrect to suggest that emergence gives no new information. New information is what emergence is; generated out of the synergistic combination of more basic parts.
Painting emergence as an appeal to ignorance, with no predictive power is, again, forcing complexity to adhere to an entirely wrong paradigm. The idea that prediction requires causal knowledge is false. One can predict what will happen to markets, viruses, electrical grids, neural networks and brains by virtue of known properties. You don't need to know anything causal to appreciate that extreme social engineering will collapse a society. This isn't naive prediction (how many people will the virus kill, when will the market collapse), rather it's the prediction that dynamic systems evolve and collapse in known ways (viruses have multiplicative growth, markets collapse, etc.) Artificial intelligence isn't about "emergentism" ... it is not some mere "perspective", rather it is a technology that is undeniably knocking on the door of genuine complexity. The proclamation that "...emergence is void of any explanatory power" is ONLY true when defining "explanation" in an antiquated, reductionist sense.
Nothing new in this article. Just yet another example of physics envy, misplaced rigor and outdated science.
