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.
It occurred to me at some point that Fun Theory isn’t just the correct reply to Theodicy; it’s also a critical component of any religious theodicy program. And one of the few ways I could conceive of someone providing major evidence of God’s existence.
That is, I’m fairly confident that there is no god. But if I worked out a fairly complete version of Fun Theory, and it turned out that this really was the best of all possible worlds, I might have to change my mind.