Eliezer: Here’s another example similar to ones other people have raised, a story I heard once, that might explain why I think it’s an important and useful concept.
Supposedly, in the early nineties when the Russians were trying to transition to a capitalist economy, a delegation from the economic ministry went to visit England, to see how a properly market-based economy would work. The British took them on a tour, among other things, of an open-air fresh foods market. The Russians were shown around the market, and were appropriately impressed. Afterwards, one of the senior delegation members approached one of his escorts: “So, who sets the price for rice in this market?” The escort was puzzled a bit, and responded, “No one sets the price. It’s set on the market.” And the Russian responded, “Yes, yes, I know, of course that’s the official line. But who really sets the price of rice?”
The Russian couldn’t conceive that an organization as complex as the open air market could have assembled itself; he was sure someone must have designed it in order for it to work. It had to have been set up. But markets and prices are an emergent phenomenon; the price isn’t set by one person and doesn’t have any one cause. And yet the markets function.
Similarly, a lot of people seem to have a mental model of democratic institutions that says it’s a non-emergent phenomenon: if you write a constitution and hold elections, you get a democracy with the rule of law. Others (including myself) claim that democracy and rule-of-law are emergent phenomena: if they don’t exist, there’s no specific set of actions a central actor can take that will cause them to exist. They exist because of millions of decentralized and uncoordinated actions of individuals without specific direction. If you hold the first view, projects like the establishment of the new Iraqi government make sense: we set up a government with a constitution and elections, so it should become a free democratic state. If you hold the second view, the project is insane: freedom and democracy require millions of individual and low-level cultural shifts that can’t be imposed from above, so there’s no way for us to turn the nation into a democracy. My point here isn’t that one view is right or wrong, although I have a firm belief. My point is that it’s highly relevant to our foreign policy to ask whether democracy is emergent or not.
Usually when you say, “You can’t just impose X from above,” you’re claiming X is an emergent phenomenon; the hallmark of a non-emergent phenomenon is that it’s possible for a single actor to take a series of actions that either cause or prevent it.
Eliezer: I generally like your posts, but I disagree with you here. I think that there’s at least one really useful definition of the word emergence (and possibly several useless ones).
It’s true, of course (at least to a materialist like me), that every phenomenon emerges from subatomic physics, and so can be called ‘emergent’ in that sense. But if I ask you why you made this post, your answer isn’t going to be, “That’s how the quarks interacted!” Our causal models of the world have many layers between subatomic particles and perceived phenomena. Emergence refers to the relationship between a phenomenon and its immediate cause.
So, for instance, suppose I’m on the interstate and I get caught in a traffic jam. I might wonder why there’s a huge jam on the road. It’s possible that there’s a simple, straightforward explanation: “There’s a ten-car pileup a mile further on, and five of the six lanes are shut down. That’s why there’s a traffic jam.” Obviously we could get far more reductionist— both in terms of “why is there a pileup” and “why does a pileup cause a traffic jam”—but for the conceptual level we’re operating on, the pileup is a full and complete answer. And thus the traffic jam isn’t an ‘emergent’ phenomenon; it has one major identifiable cause.
In contrast, a lot of traffic jams ‘just happen.’ The previous sentence is false, strictly speaking; the jams come from somewhere. But you can’t point to an individual cause of them; they arise from the local effects of millions of local actions taken by individual drivers. Removing any one of these actions wouldn’t eliminate the jam; it’s a cumulative product of all of them. So people searching for an explanation of why it takes two hours to dive ten miles in rush hour get really frustrated, because there’s no good explanation to give them. And people trying to fix rush hour get even more frustrated, because there’s no good angle to attack the problem from.
So emergence, in this sense, means that a phenomenon has many intertwined causes, rather than one or two identifiable and major causes. It turns out, of course, that most interesting phenomena are emergent (non-emergent phenomena are, by definition, boring, since their causes are straightforward). But “emergence” is useful as a shorthand for “the causes are complicated and interconnected, and I can’t pick one out and tell you, ‘here it is, this is why that happened.’” It’s important not to get confused, and not to think an explanation of why we don’t understand something is the same as an explanation of that thing. But as long as you remember that, it’s a useful thing to remember.