The Arc of ‘Emergence’ : Where the Whole Is Qualitatively Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

By Keith Tidman

To begin, let’s visit the fact that we live in an emergent universe. Current cosmological evidence suggests that the universe started in a small, dense state, in which was compressed the origins of the entire observable universe that our species happens to inhabit. As convenient shorthand, that dense state is often referred to as a singularity. What then transpired, some 13.8 billion years ago, was a quintessential instance of emergence that formed for us the ultimate origin story. Where the whole—the novel, coherent, self-organising elaborateness of the emergent universe—was qualitatively greater than the mere summing of the initial components whose interactivity led to a universe.

That initial budding universe brought on rapid, faster-than-light expansion in a tiny (less than a trillionth) fraction of a second—an emergent phase called cosmic inflation. Fast-forwarding, over the course of billions of years, matter accretes and the universe self-organises into large structures, such as stars. We arrive at the present, where our species stares amazed at the universe’s continuing emergent condition through space-based telescopes, seeing cosmic clouds of dust and gas many lightyears across, in a mind-boggling, emergent show prodigiously birthing new stars that will populate new galaxies.

The result is an innately evolutionary cosmos: its properties ‘emergently’ transitioning from potential to increasingly actual complexity. That is, from an initial exponential expansion of spacetime, to a cooling off resulting in the formation of atoms and finally to the things that those atoms eventually compose: the assemblage of stars, planets, and galaxies—and most remarkably, to life (including intelligent life) dotted amidst all that churning.

The term emergence was coined in the late nineteenth century by the English philosopher G. H. Lewes in his book Problems of Life and Mind. It occurs when simple parts of a system interact synergistically with one another. The outcome is often a novel, far more complex and sophisticated whole that cannot be reduced to or predicted from the mere sum of the system’s discrete components. That is, ‘strong emergence’ entails a scaling process that produces vast qualitative differences in configuration and performance emerging from simple building blocks, where the whole displays characteristics altogether absent from its parts.

The effects of strong emergence are thus qualitatively different from ‘resultant effects,’ where resultant effects simply entail adding or subtracting causes, such as calculating the weight of an object by adding the weights of its parts. Other classic instances of what’s also dubbed ‘weak emergence,’ involving simpler, rules-based local interactions among individual constituents, include the following: the rhythmically eddying patterns of leaderless flocks of starlings (murmuration), the building and foraging behaviour of ant colonies and bee hives, traffic patterns stemming from driver decisions, the behaviour of economic markets, the crystalline formation of snowflakes, and weather patterns arising from initial conditions and physical interactions.

To illustrate the process of emergence concretely, and its omnipresence in our everyday world, let’s begin by touching on two examples that, while fairly straightforward, are nevertheless highly consequential in all of our lives. Those will help set the stage as to what emergence is all about. Afterwards, we’ll trace a much longer arc that showcases emergence across interrelated topical fronts.

The first introductory illustration points out that although hydrogen and oxygen molecules have their own individual properties, those properties don’t include what happens when the molecules combine. Such as the wetness, surface tension, and phase-like ability to freeze, steam, and boil at different temperatures associated with the emergence of water. Whose presence allows our world to be abuzz with life, and whose absence makes many other worlds barren. These properties of water could not have been anticipated from the individual molecules alone. Here, the whole is much more than the sum of the parts, which in its wholeness is therefore more an example of strong emergence, despite some philosophers and scientists differing among themselves on this front. 

The second illustration involves what is called superconductivity, with many critical applications today: particle accelerators, quantum computers, high-resolution diagnostic imaging, electric-grid optimisation, magnetic levitation trains, and fusion energy, among others. Under a critical temperature, certain materials exhibit zero electrical resistance, yet without the loss of energy. The resulting superconductivity emerges from interaction between paired electrons. An outcome that cannot be predicted from the properties of individual electrons. A signature sign of strong emergence being the uniqueness and complexity arising from something simpler.

These two illustrations reflect the thinking of the early twentieth-century philosopher Samuel Alexander, who spoke of different levels of explanation. That is, as physical processes become more complex, they bring about emergent effects that are unique to, or novelly characteristic of, the higher-order arrangement and behaviour that we experience. As an example, Alexander, in speaking about the mind, asserted the monist position that the mind and neural processes correspond with one another; they don’t just parallel one another. As he put it, in an implied rejection of dualism, “they are not two but one,” where the mind is “something new, a fresh creation,” that emerges from matter, presaging how science approaches the subject of the mind and consciousness today.

Now, let’s return to unspooling the thread—or more particularly, to tracing the arc—of emergence, stretching across four key connected subject areas: the cosmology of our ticking universe, through its beginning, evolution, and ultimate fate; the rise of life, from the origin story of abiogenesis to the dominion of modern-day self-management of our own species’ evolution; the mind and consciousness, from their remarkable human manifestations to their potential future analogues in the field of artificial general intelligence, or AGI; and the ascent of complexly developed civilisations, whose multivariate social order and intellectualism serve as incubators of ideas to shape what we know and understand and how we live.

This universe—the entirety of spacetime—became an increasingly interconnected, complex, dynamically changing phenomenological panorama exhibiting properties not explainable or predictable from the early individual particles and conditions. We live, of course, amongst the resulting roiling universe, our reality comprising trillions of galaxies, stars, and planets. One can’t help but wonder if all that cosmic expanse and goings-on is all just for us, amounting to an odd aloneness, or whether we share it with other highly intelligent species, amounting to an equally odd togetherness. The processes of strong emergence interestingly, and unsurprisingly, can and do lead to philosophical contemplation of the nature of being.

Consider three cosmological models, each fitting into the broad notion of what’s classified ‘strong emergence.’ One model points to a universe that will continue its accelerating expansion, brought on by the repulsive gravity of dark energy. An expansion of space that, along with entropy’s drive toward increased net disorder, causes the universe eventually to undergo what’s called a thermodynamic death, becoming cold and dark as the superstructures of the cosmos separate more and more from each other.

A second model suggests the universe cycles back and forth between Big Bangs and what are known as Big Crunches, where the universe is thought first to slow its now-accelerating expansion, then ultimately reversing into another dense singularity. That is, the possibility of recurring cosmic births and deaths emerging from the cycling, anchored to each other like entangled bookends. As the Roman statesman Seneca apocryphally said about the etiology, the manner of causation, of such sequences of happenings—their origins, and reasons: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

And then there is the third possibility, which is where our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes percolating into and out of existence – emerging – like fluctuations within an eternal multiverse. In this multiverse scenario, each universe is putatively governed by unalike laws of physics, while remaining subject to the influences of entropy that drive it toward maximum disorder. Yet, although our universe and all the other universes have finite lives, experiencing one beginning and one end, the multiverse itself is not similarly constrained. Rather, the model envisions the multiverse as forever: noncontingent, uncaused, necessary, and sufficient—that is, it always has been and always will be.

Given that the general concept of eternality is, in one manner or another, a strong marker of each of these emergent cosmic models, we might reasonably conclude on that basis that there has only ever been ‘something’ and never ‘nothingness,’ in the process obviating a link between strong emergence and the holistic coherence of the multiverse. By extension, the fact these cosmological models present perpetuity as their foundational ontological default, the state of ‘something’ necessarily prevails over the state of ‘nothingness,’ offering one rational answer to the question, Why is there something rather than nothing? An inquiry pondered by many philosophers across the millennia of history, and also contemporaneously by some within the ranks of the natural sciences, like some cosmologists.

Of note, these emergent cosmological models currently constrain our experience of the universe to a surprisingly tiny five percent that’s visible to us, where that thin slice of so-called ‘ordinary’ matter is detectable because its permutations either emit, reflect, or absorb light. The rest of the universe—the other ninety-five percent—is currently hidden to us, presumed to lurk as dark matter and dark energy about which we currently know little. Is it reasonable to expect, however, that at some later astrophysical stage, the furtherance of cosmic emergence will render the universe entirely visible, beyond that humble five percent?

Speaking of reasons to be humble, it’s worth pointing out that our emergent cosmological models seem to lead inevitably to mass extinction events, in their turn cleaning the cosmic slate of every species and civilisation. With no exceptions. For example, in the case of our universe undergoing ceaselessly accelerating, faster-than-light expansion, it’s determined to arrive ultimately at its thermodynamic demise. That is, going cold and dark as the ‘lumpy bits’ of the universe, like galaxy superclusters, separate farther and farther as space between them expands—clocking in at mass extinction. And, in the case of the fluctuating, finite universes composing an infinite multiverse, the lifetimes of those member universes expire, too, as extinction events. It appears that the bookend of cosmic emergence is extinction. Grist for philosophers and other thinkers to ponder the why of such puzzling matters, to satiate our species’ natural curiosity regarding life-defining context for the world in which we live.

It now makes sense to turn our attention toward the remarkable appearance of life within our universe. Where life, including humans, was rooted in the intense heat and pressure of exploding stars ejecting the heavier elements needed to seed the conditions for life to emerge on Earth, making these ancient supernovas foundational to our appearance. Let’s start by exploring how biological life naturally emerged non-biologically through increasing chemical complexity, known as abiogenesis—as opposed to an in-the-moment creationist event that putatively created all life spontaneously.

Abiogenesis, the original evolution of life or living organisms from inorganic or inanimate substances,  entails a step-wise process involving strong emergence from simple molecules billions of years ago to self-assembling, self-sustaining, and self-replicating chainlike macromolecules able to exist in the prebiotic world. A bridge to underlying ontological rules: what happens, how, and to what ends. These essential large biomolecules include nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids, synthesized – emerging – from smaller organic and inorganic compounds, to perform functions essential to life, such as storing genetic information and catalysing chemical reactions.

Studies, starting with the pioneering Miller-Urey experiment decades ago, have demonstrated that the emergent building blocks of organic compounds, such as amino acids, can be generated through prebiotic chemistry. In turn, simulating the early-Earth environment. The experiments provide evidence to support the emergent properties of abiogenesis: at the very least, the reasonableness of life arising in this manner. The science will continue, as researchers further extract the details and bit by bit fill the remaining explanatory gaps. As a forerunner of this discussion, the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, who we might call an early ‘emergentist’, wrote in A System of Logic that “To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself.”

With all that in mind, the overarching account of phase-by-phase differentiation leading to life itself spanned billions of years, emerging from abiogenesis to single-celled organisms to complex organisms—including our own anatomically modern human species. The general thinking is that all life on Earth emerged from a single Last Universal Cellular Ancestor, or LUCA. It took that large expanse of time to make Homo sapiens’ emergent arrival upon the stage possible, estimated to have occurred as recently as three hundred thousand years ago.

Since then, we have wandered and settled Earth on a global scale. During which time our species’ procreation and generation—from an egg and sperm to the imaged elaborateness of an embryo to birth of a baby to a child’s natural curiosity to the embellishment of an adult—is a superlative instance of strong mergence. Where development segues from the interactions of rudimentary building blocks and initial conditions to increasing complexity and qualitative enhancements through continual self-organisation, increased coherence among elementary components, and the evolution of new properties and behaviours. Where the resulting macro-level whole is qualitatively far greater than, and not reducible to, the sum of its micro-level components.

Now, let’s sprint forward millennia from the preceding origin story to today. Society has long been actively engaged in using the science of genetics to cure illnesses by repairing genetic mutations. (The 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to the two pioneering scientists who developed the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas 9.) The results have led to considerable success, with more triumphs on the horizon. Society’s ethical norms and the science of genetics aren’t yet poised to safely intervene in our species’ self-directed ‘evolution’ in an informed manner. However, the academic and pragmatic interest won’t fade, and at some point this scientific revolution will prove safe enough for humankind to pursue human germline editing. For a species to be able to take charge of its own evolution is paradigm shifting. Meanwhile, stringent international guidelines have put such practices on indefinite hold. The aim, ultimately, is to rewrite our DNA, resulting in emergent, intergenerational changes. This requires large networks of genes interacting. The process would be a classic example of strong emergence, where the qualitative complexity and novelty of the whole exceed merely summing the individual parts. The result is differences in germline design that emerge from the genetic building blocks with which geneticists start.

Vigilance will be necessary to get the science and technology right and to weigh sociological considerations, like those raised by thought leaders, to weigh objectives, develop guidelines for clinical implementation, and anticipate emergent consequences—matters to prove fluid and shifting with time. Ideally multidisciplinary teams would be assembled, to ensure ourselves of getting the myriad decisions right: geneticists, ethicists, biologists, medical doctors, bioengineers, regulatory experts, efficacy experts, sociologists, psychologists, counsellors, legal scholars, supranational organisations, and policymakers.

The point is that the key to our account of strong emergence—getting from component simplicity to unpredictable, order-of-magnitude greater novelty and sophistication—leads us to the next leg in our arc of emergence. That is, how emergence allows for the human mind and consciousness to ignite from the neurobiology of material brains: the synergistic interactivity of the brain’s eighty-six billion neurons and one hundred trillion synapses in a magnificent force-multiplying way. The individual neurons and individual synapses, however, serving only mechanically as “non-comprehending” parts, according to the contemporary philosopher and cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennett.

At its core, the generative source of consciousness will ultimately be measured and understood, and the innumerable physical causes and effects leading to consciousness’s emergence mapped. The challenge, though tough, is not intractable. This materialist formulation will oppose the wraithlike nature of the mind and consciousness often inferred by the abstract nature conveyed by mind-body dualism.

As standard emergence goes, no single neuron or synaptic network, or small neuronal cluster, or, even, electromagnetic field can presage consciousness’s presence and role in defining us. An emergent functionality that allows our species to do innumerable clever things: think, understand, ponder, experience, possess identity, imagine, ideate, anticipate, remember, exercise agency, be sentient, engage in thought experiments, model reality, communicate, emote … and much more. Where emergent consciousness—filling in the gaps of what it is to be us—serves as the nucleus of human nature’s richness and diversity. A discovery of the self, both as a species and, subjectively, as some eight billion instances of individually localised consciousness.

The early-twentieth-century philosopher, C. D. Broad, provided a descriptive metaphor for this process, especially the claim of irreducibility, based on considerations of epistemology. He noted that the initial physical qualities and how they lead to the complexities of consciousness and the mind could not have been forecast by a “mathematical archangel.” Even an archangel who happened, let’s say, to know everything about the material world and was capable of executing any mathematical calculation. Accordingly, the novel qualities of consciousness and the mind are both unpredictable and irreducible.

Human consciousness also has its inchoate artificial correlates, where the substrate for the mind and consciousness might be other than carbon-based. These correlates appear as an emergent product, at least initially of human algorithmic exploration and exploitation. Eventually and more importantly, self-adaptation and self-maximisation by superintelligent systems will emerge—in effect, in control of the systems’ own emergent evolution—stemming from machine learning, thought experimentation, and the modelling of new paradigms. Manifesting as more than just intelligence, but also as experience, self-awareness, sentience, curiosity, reflection, thinking and understanding, values, and more—brought to bear during the watershed transition to self-optimisation.

The focus will turn to the emergent human-level and beyond-human-level capabilities of the system as a whole, to range across spheres now unanticipated by us. This process will prove more momentous upon the eventual commercial viability of exponentially more powerful quantum computers and the what-if problem-solving genius they’ll bring to the table. The scaling of the whole will become more urgent, multifarious, and qualitatively sophisticated than could have been foretold from the simpler parts initially programmed into future artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Certainly, as the process of strong emergence continues unabated along the lines of AGI’s maturation, society will ultimately ponder what conditions are necessary and sufficient, beyond emergence alone. That is, a brightly illuminated tipping point or threshold (both a measurement and definitional problem) to begin thinking in terms of some definable variant of actual personhood. Such as awareness, autonomy, directed behaviour, a moral banner, accountability, intentionality, and the community’s common good, stepping beyond the express ‘rules of robotics’ presciently laid out decades ago. Hard-nosed, practical science and thought experimentation working at their best, not science fiction.

Given advances in understanding human and machine consciousness, it’s logical to turn our attention to how the growing collective—spurred by our species’ cognitive capabilities, rich curiosity, organisational penchant, analytical problem-solving, imagination and innovation, and design proclivities—led to the strong emergence of self-organising civilisations. That process entailed people settling on and revisiting the group’s vision, priorities, and norms presumed to give rise to the emergent, complex features and performances that they favoured. Leading to the societal framework that community thought leaders erected. Darwin, too, pondered whether and how adaptive behaviours might be inheritable.

In conformance to classic emergence, civilisational outcomes cannot be predicated on simple presumptions about initial conditions. There is no single directive to catalyse the pieces of the social puzzle. What emerges from those initial conditions, through the phase transitions associated with civilisational emergence, is the increasing formality, detail, and sophistication of major social and organisational properties: government, institutions, social stratification, culture, language, technologies, agriculture, mythologies, science, morality, law, labour, markets and economies, art, religions, schools, transportation, archives, information networks, and so forth.

These and other properties of a civilisation exist in a harmonising search for stability and symmetry. They entail a transitioning from the deceptively simple to the multiplicative effects associated with major qualitative shifts in civilisational layering and sophistication. These shifts mirror innumerable decisions and actions—things that happen as much by fateful serendipity as by rational intent, gaming the best for the most in venturing beyond the mere scaffolding of civilisation. And in that process of emergence, forging a transformative future, along with an evolving national history and heritage.

A key takeaway from our arc of strong emergence, where the emerged macrolevel whole is qualitatively more than the additive sum of its microlevel parts, is that to understand complex systems requires examining the interaction among the parts. The resulting whole possesses properties that aren’t manifested by those parts: novel behaviour, coherence, elaborateness, dynamic change, holistic inclusivity, evolution of new properties, interconnectivity, and continual self-organisation. As Aristotle succinctly said millennia ago in his Metaphysics: “The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts.”