concept

Emergence

When a large-scale system gives rise to new properties that none of its individual parts possess - captured in physicist P.W. Anderson's line "More Is Different": the rules governing one water molecule never predict the wetness of an ocean. *Weak* emergence is when the whole's behaviour is unexpected but can still be derived and simulated from local rules - an ant colony, a weather pattern. *Strong* emergence is the contested claim that the whole gains genuinely new causal powers irreducible to its parts - and that is the bar anyone who wants to call a network a "mind" has to clear.