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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   3369 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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Emergent theories are easier to believe

The Futility of Emergence:

The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?

I name emergence or emergent phenomena—usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise or “emerge” from the interaction of many low-level elements. (Wikipedia: “The way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”) Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem. Imagine pointing to a market crash and saying “It’s not a quark!” Does that feel like an explanation? No? Then neither should saying “It’s an emergent phenomenon!”

I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, “Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!” as if that explained intelligence. This usage fits all the checklist items for a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. What do you know, after you have said that intelligence is “emergent”? You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before. It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don’t anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed. The hypothesis has no moving parts—there’s no detailed internal model to manipulate. Those who proffer the hypothesis of “emergence” confess their ignorance of the internals, and take pride in it; they contrast the science of “emergence” to other sciences merely mundane.

A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective “emergent” from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different:

Before: Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing.

After: Human intelligence is a product of neurons firing.

Another fun exercise is to replace the word “emergent” with the old word, the explanation that people had to use before emergence was invented:

Before: Life is an emergent phenomenon.

After: Life is a magical phenomenon.

Now as for what you wrote specifically, I would call this individualistic theory, and not emergent. That's clearer. But you said:

members all have similar motivation, and rather than planning ahead, their actions just happen to lead to or benefit from the outcome.

Let's use red tribe as an example. Clearly, some of their members plan ahead. Are you modeling mice here, or men?

  • In fact, there may be lots of coordination and omission, because people can identify their "ingroup" and "outgroup" mostly reliably and even subconsciously; but no center or plan, just natural human behavior, and it's not actually secret, the signs are obvious just not to you.

Partially true. Conspiracy = coordination + secret. Sometimes, there's not-secret coordination. However, there is no requirement that there be no center or plan at all. Very often in human groups there is, in fact, a center and a plan. Like Donald Trump and Project 2025. What is more interesting is thinking about the ultimate power of this center. Usually it is there, but it only partially explains phenomena.

The other thing about emergent theories is the leaders actually aren't human (there are none),

No, usually human groups have leaders.

the plan actually isn't human-made

Typically there are some plans and the plans are in fact made with the big brain in the skull which evolved for a reason to be able to make plans.

Members do plan ahead and sometimes coordinate, they may have leadership, may even believe they are forming a conspiracy. The difference from a real conspiracy theory is that the actual plans and coordination are a small part of the overall process, and the leaders have little control over it; more like, the process started and they happened to notice and ride it, but they didn't cause it to happen and it would've happened without them (maybe with others instead).

The difference from a real conspiracy theory is that the actual plans and coordination are a small part of the overall process, and the leaders have little control over it;

Or it could be a big but not complete part of the process, and the leaders have a lot but not complete control over it. Or big could be moderate. How do you know whether it's big, moderate, or little/small? What are you basing this off of?

more like, the process started and they happened to notice and ride it, rather than they caused it to happen.

It depends what you mean. In general leaders ride their followers, because they do not have the power of mind control. But their plans are the product of agency.

What are you basing this off of?

The typical conspiracy theory heavily implies if not outright states near-complete centralization: a group (spontaneously or after an event) meets, plans something, and carefully orchestrates it. The reality, that what they were planning started without them and would continue without them (via some other group), or that their plan was a small part of what the conspiracy theory accuses them of, makes the theory misleading: it gives the impression these people have more competence and foresight than reality.

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