Science-plaining reality to the humanities: the case against emergence

Yesterday, in an after-class discussion with a student, I found myself questioning the value of the concept of emergence, and the way it is embraced not just by complexity theorists but by the sciences at large. Today I found some time to think through the argument a bit more and then boom, this blog post EMERGED.

In short, I feel that the idea of emergence, and much of complexity theory in general, is just a form of “science-plaining”, where science invents its own jargon to “explain” to the humanities (and people at large) what they have known for centuries, while maintaining the untenable position that it “objectively describes the world”.

If you ask people to explain emergence, they often mention things like the game of life or dynamics of murmuration. The point is that these are systems that behave in a way that would have been very hard to predict on the basis of its separate constitutive parts.

What interests me here is not so much the claim that things behave in surprising ways (we don’t need science to tell us this), but the scientific suggestion that this is somehow a feature of the system, rather than (also) the result of scientists’ positionality (e.g. their situated cognitive (in)abilities).

Other people would explain emergence by pointing out how, when you put these things together in a particular way, at some point, a qualitatively different thing appears.

Here again, what interests me is not so much the idea that “stuff put together differently behaves differently” - we don’t need science to tell us this - but the insistence that this “qualitative shift” is somehow a inherent feature of the system, rather than (also) the result of the way scientists decide what is a qualitative change and what is not.

Finally, people often defend the idea of emergence by arguing that in cases of emergence “the whole is more than the sum of parts”.

Again, I feel that we don’t need scientists to tell us that putting things together in a particular way can make a big difference. I think most people would recognize that before you put the parts together, they were already part of other “wholes”. And that when you take them out of those wholes, and put them together as one new whole, you create a different “whole”, which will differ from the other “wholes”. If this is emergence, then emergence is everywhere, which would make it a rather useless concept.

My hypothesis¹ is that scientists are in a way explaining basic reality to themselves, because they have lost touch with the fact that the world is fundamentally relational. As the idea of a pure experiment requires them to isolate their research objects from the context, they have made themselves believe that it is actually possible to do so. While in reality, nothing ever exists outside of its context. The best you can do - e.g. in a lab - is to try to keep the context more or less similar in space and time. This ontological confusion makes them think that emergence is something special. After all, it’s only when you think of the world as made up of isolated things, that you can conceptually distinguish the whole from the sum of parts.

To be clear, I am not saying that the flocking behaviour of starlings is not amazing, or that the game of life is not mesmerizing. I just think that the cases scientists (rather arbitrarily) single out as “emergence” are less rare than they think, and that what excites them about emergence has been recognized and studied by - with other words - for centuries: by philosopohers, writers, poets, humanities scholars, you name it.

Having said all of that, maybe I shouldn’t get so worked up about this. If it takes some fancy jargon for scientists to admit that some things are unpredictable, so be it. And if it - on top of that - helps them to recognize that stuff put together differently behaves differently, great.

Just don’t come and talk to me about how the sciences are this purely objective counterpart to the fundamentally subjective humanities and social sciences. And share some of your research funding please.