What is Emergence?

Abstract

A general theory of emergence should first start taking into account that this concept cannot be defined in an objective way. The word “emergence” refers to a relationship between an observer, the models which he is equipped with, and certain results of observations, or of measure operations, in turn dependent on his mental schemata and on his technological apparatuses. Therefore the emergence can be defined only relatively to a given observer, whose features should be specified in a suitable way. For the purposes of the present discussion we will assume that the observer is a theoretical physicist, endowed with all actual tools of this discipline and with the best computing facilities so far existing. This means that the emergence which we will speak of will be associated to some discrepancy between the forecastings, whose attainment was the goal of the models introduced by the observer, and actual behaviors evidenced within models themselves.