Emergence is an annoyingly vague concept, but that doesn’t mean it’s an empty one.
One meaning of emergence is “decentralized control”. In a free market economy, prices and other properties are emergent from a large set of transactions among distributed agents, in contrast to a centrally planned and controlled economy. So there’s something that is not emergent, or less emergent. Similarly, it used to be thought that a bee colony was controlled by the queen, but now we know that its activity is also the result of the work of distributed agents. It didn’t have to be that way, so we have found an instance of emergence where we might have found something else. In AI, there are emergentist approaches like neural nets or genetic algorithms, or the old-school symbolic approach which is top-down and designed.
So it’s clear that emergence is not meaningless. But you are right, it is not an explanation for anything. If you’ve found that a bee colony is decentralized, you still have to tease out the rules and interactions of the various agents involved.
Emergence is an annoyingly vague concept, but that doesn’t mean it’s an empty one.
One meaning of emergence is “decentralized control”. In a free market economy, prices and other properties are emergent from a large set of transactions among distributed agents, in contrast to a centrally planned and controlled economy. So there’s something that is not emergent, or less emergent. Similarly, it used to be thought that a bee colony was controlled by the queen, but now we know that its activity is also the result of the work of distributed agents. It didn’t have to be that way, so we have found an instance of emergence where we might have found something else. In AI, there are emergentist approaches like neural nets or genetic algorithms, or the old-school symbolic approach which is top-down and designed.
So it’s clear that emergence is not meaningless. But you are right, it is not an explanation for anything. If you’ve found that a bee colony is decentralized, you still have to tease out the rules and interactions of the various agents involved.