Edit: read Mike’s Haiku in the comments first.  If you’re still not enlightened, then read the post :)

Due to the overwhelming response to my last few posts, I have decided to continue writing about emergence, which I think is very important. This post is dedicated to my parents, who think I’m thinkiess. I think I got it from them.

I’ll start with a (subtly altered) definition:

emergence is the behavior of a system that cannot be explained by examining the system’s components.

Since this post is mostly for my folks (who were, after all, my overwhelming response), I begin with an example about trees: “can’t see the forest for the trees.” A forest can be thought of as an emergent property of a system comprised of many trees. Some of the characteristics of a forest are distinct from the characteristics of a given tree. These characteristics are the emergent properties of a system of trees.

For example, deer do not usually live in trees. They do, however, make their homes in forests. Of course there are some necessary simplifications in this model- a forest is a whole ecology. But that, in turn, is another example of emergence: an ecology is an emergent property of a system of living things. It has properties distinct from the properties of those living things (the whole circle of life thing, for instance).

What I was trying to say in my previous post is that even very small things (like electrons or Higgs Bosons) need to be understood both as the thing that they are, and as emergence from a system. In the case of the very small things, that system may be the very fabric of existence itself, which I assure you is quite distinct from physics, which is the study of the emergent properties of the fabric of existence, not the fabric itself. The study of the fabric itself, we usually call metaphysics, but I personally prefer the term “cosmology.”

That concludes this Emergence E Meeting of the Outer Banks Cosmological Society, unless there is any other business to be presented by or to those in attendance.

Which sort of makes me think, huge crowds like this one are another fun example of emergence.