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”.