Thanks for the thought out response.

I'm not advocating for reductionism, I'm unsure where you picked that up from. Let me know so I can correct it. You would be surprised how far from atomism and determinism my philosophical worldview is. I think many readers have placed me in some philosophical camp or another, most of whom are wrong.

Don’t let my blanket rejection of emergence fool you; I’m fully aware of the logical positivist project and its counter reactions. I recognize that many people find value in “emergence” as a counterargument to reductionism. Those same people (including yourself) assume that if someone is against emergence they must be a reductionist. Untrue. Reductionism is flawed, but I’d argue that emergence replaces a flawed idea with another flawed idea.

My issue is quite simply this: on reading in-depth papers describing emergence, I come away no more knowledgable about the topic than before. It doesn’t just fail to give useful scientific information, it fails to give useful information at all. I feel like I was given big promises and left with empty pockets. What exactly is it giving me? What exactly is it giving us? To call it an explanatory model in any sense - transcendental, metaphysical, apodictic, religious even - is unwarranted. I compared it to “miracle” in the sense that they are both devoid of useful content, not that they both presuppose magic.

Emergence *as a category* doesn’t give new information. Any new information given is given by the specific theory that applies in that instance. Emergence is therefore similar to the word “theory”. To say that “theory” helps explain something is incorrect, it is a particular theory that does so.

This is especially problematic if you propose that emergence is a fundamental construct of nature: that I think goes way too far. This post critiques emergence as epistemology, as a useful mental tool. It would be a leap to posit it as part of reality. To suggest that “simplicity” and “complexity”, which are a human interpretations, are somehow part of nature strikes me as a category error. They are at best aspects of our theories.

Thanks for the response. You gave me a few things to chew over at least.