Emergence – How Stupid Things Become Smart Together

How can many stupid things combine to form smart things? How can proteins become living cells? How become lots of ants a colony? What is emergence?

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit.

Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and psychological phenomena emerge from the neurobiological phenomena of living things.

In philosophy, emergence is often understood to be a claim about the etiology of a system’s properties. An emergent property of a system, in this context, is one that is not a property of any component of that system, but is still a feature of the system as a whole