Frederick Turner, Robert J. Stern, and Roger Malina
‘A Brief History of Emergence’ appeared in the Athenaeum Review – New publication by an ArtSciLab Member.
Spiral galaxies, hydrothermal systems, animals, ecosystems, oceanic currents and tides, hurricanes, civilizations, political systems, economies, and war are some of the many examples of emergent phenomena, in which low-level rules give rise to higher-level complexity.
The cascading crises of our times—climate change, pandemic, mass extinctions, a major war, political chaos, ideological conflict, a profound questioning of truth itself, the descent of the social media into rival righteous mobs, to name a few—require a better framework of understanding. Things have not just changed: change has accelerated on all fronts. Are all these crises just a coincidence, or are they actually symptoms, or byproducts, of some deeper process? In many academic disciplines, new models of how things happen are offered, that share a crucial insight into the nature of change. Disciplinary boundaries have often hindered researchers and analysts in different fields from seeing parallel developments in the new ideas cooked up next door. All of these changes and crises are best understood as due to a process often called “emergence,” though other terms have been proposed.
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