Notes On Properties and Emergence (October 2019)

There's no thing called "emergence" that just happens like some spooky ooga booga. Entities are defined by relationships, so of course we see different "properties" depending on the scale or environment we're looking at.


"Properties" do not emerge ex-nihilo from "complexity".

The structure of an entity is the shadow of its relationships to other things. It is not emergence, but deconstruction, that endows things with qualities.

Plato was right about the cave, but wrong about the source of the shadows.