What is emergence and how do we use it?

Then you misunderstand YEC. I am a full determinist as it regards physical matter. I believe matter behaves regularly in accordance with ‘laws’ that describe the way God’s creation is set up to work. Miracles are instances where God chooses to suspend those normal ways of working for specific and exceptional circumstances.

I think it’s more a case of suggesting there is an unknown auxiliary factor at work there.

Fair enough, thanks for the discussion! I think this helped me a lot to think about the broader scope of “emergence”.

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Organic chemistry might be more helpful. If I gave you the formula C8H10N4O2 you couldn’t tell me what it is. It happens to be the stoichiometric ratios of atoms in caffeine, but to a chemist those numbers don’t mean a whole lot. It is the arrangement of those atoms that makes the difference. By extension, it is also the history of those atoms that means something (i.e. the conditions that led to that molecule forming).

This is how I tend to think of emergence. It isn’t enough to know the ingredients. You also need to know their history, how they are arranged, and their environment.

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Fractals and chaos theory are pretty tied together. I think you could regard fractal phenomena as emergent because fractal theory is superfluous to the underlying chemistry, and conversely the underlying chemistry is inadequate to describe the emergent fractal phenomena. The same as heredity. DNA can be completely described by chemistry, but the outworkings of its function cannot.

Says who? This statement is not self evidently true.

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