Under Construction

Emergence - how all things come to be 'as if' they existed

Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is - Alan Moore

Index

Emergence

The Beginning

The Emergence of Numbers

Kinds of Numbers

Virtual Numbers

Dimensions and the Emergence of Space

Imaginary Mass is Energy

Demergence

A List of Strongly Emergent Things

A List of Weakly Emergent Things

Emergence

Emergence is a relatively new [by philosophical standards] concept, one that seeks to describe the novelty that appears when comparatively simple things combine to create more complex things. The classic example is that Chemistry emerges from Physics, and that Biology emerges from Chemistry, and beyond biology we get all that life can produce; evolutio, hunting, ecologies, economies, technologies, wars, holidays, and art. The list is literally endless, which is an important point; in contrast to the reductionism of science, emergence travels the opposite direction and can never be completed, it is boundless. The key feature that separates the subjects listed is generally reckoned to be that the more complex subject is not predictable from the simpler subject, or at least is not entirely so.

My addition to the discussion, a point that I believe no one else has made, is that emergence is the consequence of change, and that change may occur from one of two causes - possibility and paradox. The former leads to what I'd call soft or weak emergence, i.e. something happens because it can happen, and does so with a particular probability. In this case the kind of change remains within the realm of the cause(s), and so tends to be somewhat predictable. The latter, that I'd call strong or hard emergence, only happens in response to paradox, as a resolution of paradox, with the consequence that containing the immiscible ends of a paradoxical relationship produces some entirely unforeseeable property.

Paradox is the primary driver of emergence, i.e. the tension in the paradox forces some new thing to emerge. However, there are at least two ways in which this may happen: Firstly, two separate things may paradoxically stand apart through difference, but at the same time be held together by encapsulation, this is typically shown in the Liar Paradox where two contradictory ideas are held together on one item. Secondly, two otherwise identical things may paradoxically be separated by difference, such as is seen in Galileo's Paradox where two identical things [natural numbers] are separated by existence itself, forcing the larger, not-yet-existent number [the square of the smaller existent number] to take on a novel form as a potential square, one that cannot exist abstractly [even as an ideal] until the actual emergence of its corresponding natural [linear] number. Note: This description of numbers as emergent is itself novel, and not in keeping with conventional mathematics.

More about the nature of Paradox

Wholeness emerges from the paradox that nothing is a thing.

Number emerges from the paradox that a whole thing is a step from nothing to something [wholeness], and therefore paradoxically incorporates two nodes of a relationship, hence is both singular and plural, what we'd call one and two from our perspective of having numerals with which to name those numbers.

The paradox of number is perhaps unique in that it does not ever become resolved, it just keeps churning out more natural numbers. Just as one begat two, two begat three, and so on ad infinitum. Crucially, that process never can reach an actual infinity, there being no such thing. Set theorists will disagree, but just as word salad is a jumble of words lacking proper meaning, brain salad could be said to be a jumble of ideas lacking coherent meaning, and 'Infinity' - the axiom that such a thing could exist, is certainly brain salad. It is very easy to believe an idea, but ideas do not always have to be supported by facts and logical thought. But when they are not so supported, we have fantasy, and attempts to treat fantasy as truth generally result in brain salad.

NB. While on the subject of Brain Salad Surgery, explanations without examples are just so much word salad - That is, it is very easy to state something, but the abstract nature of the explanation does not necessarily have to make real sense, it just has to sound good. Translating an explanation to an example gives an extra layer of understanding that is equivalent to experimentation in the scientific process, i.e. it takes on the qualities of a thought experiment.

Now for some unconventional words on the nature of numbers: Just as the various bases; binary, hex, decimal, etc. overlay the raw numbers with a variety of collections of numerals, the natural numbers, which are all just simple divisions of the whole that is unity, afford the emergence of other kinds of objects. This leads to Galileo's paradox, once there are squares, for which the emergent solution is area. Area resolves Galileo's paradox by being unlike the linear progression of natural numbers. Hence we see that the square of a number is not the same thing as the linear number, neither is a cubic number like the square, nor the line.

Also we find that some numbers such as pi and root two change as more and more natural numbers come into existence. More numbers means the possibility for greater precision, and it is worth noting that the precision of pi, when it is always something less than accurate, does not affect the perfection of an ideal circle. The circle is just as virtual as any other thing, and is a whole that is virtually implied, even when its parts are not numerically strong enough to support its roundness - the roundness itself is virtual, and springs into existence paradoxically, just like any other novelty.

Transcendental numbers, such as root 2, and pi, are still whole numbers in their own right, they are truths, but they are also something else, something less that the solid certainty of integers, or the reasonable calculation of the rationals.

It is really only the number representation of pi that has difficulty in being precise, and that difficulty would be just as bad, though give different numerals, in any number base. Pi is a circumference divided by a diameter, so pi is rational, but pi cannot be calculated, and that is paradoxical. But the concept of a circle remains; the paradox does not kill it, rather it causes circularity to become true, and so helps force the existence of imaginary numbers, a necessary preparation for the creation of the physical reality of the Universe.

Other Emergence, I forgot to mention: area and volume, and hypervolume. It is not so much that these things cannot be predicted from knowledge of the lower level, rather that there is nothing in the lower level that contains anything at all like the emergent level.

An example of Strong Emergence?

The example of a computer running a program has been given by others as potentially giving rise to the emergence of consciousness. The argument maybe being that the computer could run any algorithm, so the electrical activity does not identify the presentation that emerges from running the code. I am not so sure that this does make a good example of strong emergence, as the output on the screen is no more conscious than a painting could be, and even actual consciousness does not seem so strong once you understand how the trick is done.

When a digital computer is running, nothing within the computer and its activity is actually like the things represented by its data. This is because the digital computer runs with encoded data, the nearest it gets to knowing an elephant in a room is when it finally shows a picture of said elephant, and that picture has only the most tenuous link to the meaning of 'elephant'. By contrast, when we are conscious of an elephant within a room, then we associate the image we contain, that originates from our perception, with a host of other facts [as icons], giving greater meaning to the simple image, and it is the multitude of meaningful relationships - the facts we know of the matter - that we as conscious beings are able to hold within our brain activity, that enables us to truly be conscious of our perception. This is an essential, for us, product of evolution that both enables us to find lunch, and to avoid being lunch.

The program emerges as a sequence of changes, each precisely predictable and rerunnable. Free will, the exercise of choice, which is what we as humans do everyday when we decide to get up, or to hit snooze, and so on, is based on a less predictable premise, one that involves not just probabilities, but fundamentally incompatible weighing of choices between incommensurate things. So, for instance, we may choose by balancing the need to earn a living, with the desire to rest and stay warm, and include a myriad human urges that could see us either getting out of bed, or staying right where we are. The impossibility of measuring, say sex against breakfast, means that we have to jump one way or the other, we being quantum like that, and in that jump, the emergent deciding factor, is our free will - everything else is simply some constraint on our decision, making it somewhat less free than it otherwise would be. The thing that frees our will, that prevents us from always choosing sex over breakfast, say, is memory. Memory enables a modicum of free will [within constraints], by giving us access to our prior experiences as recreateable abstracts, and by providing the building blocks of imagination. Schopenhauer may have claimed that 'A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.' and David Hume may have written of forces that 'mould the human mind from its infancy', but it is wrong to conclude determinism - as in a complete lack of free will; We can only do what we are capable of, and remember what we have experienced, but we can imagine emergent things way beyond experience, our will is only limited by our imagination. For example, every invention must have been imagined before it was created, and every science fiction story likewise. The imagination of a robot emerged from the minds of Josef Capek, Karel Capek, and later, Isaac Asimov and others; this was partly derived from the already present idea of a slave, but also was as impossible as Lewis Carroll's 'six impossible things before breakfast.' Thus, as an act of imagination, it counts as an expression of free will. Yes, it could be argued that some lack the imagination to be free, but in reality, the World is so varied, and the ever-presents in life - such as death - so prevalent, that just about all of us are offered reason to imagine. You might even say that imagination evolved to give us the ability to predict danger, before ever we have the experience of being eaten by a tiger, bitten by a snake, or stung by a spider. Fear motivates imagination.

We might ask: Are there any problems with the concept of emergence [as currently understood]? The concept originated in 1875, with G.H.Lewes, was further defined by Jeffrey Goldstein and described by Peter Corning as 'The common characteristics are: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems); (2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time); (3) A global or macro 'level' (i.e. there is some property of 'wholeness'); (4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); and (5) it is 'ostensive' (it can be perceived).'

People in general, by which I mean philosophers and scientists, tend to still talk about that which is fundamental, but emergence, or at least Virtualism, my take on emergence, which I'd call hard emergence, insists that every single thing in the whole of Existence is in fact emergent. So while the more conventional view is that the features of the Standard Model are fundamental, and some other kind of things may emerge from this - the physicalist view of the World - I would say that if one is to accept any kind of emergence, then it is somewhat incoherent to claim some things are not emergent, while some things are so. For instance, the conventional explanation of quarks is that they carry -1/3 or +2/3 electric charge, a claim that seems nonsensical in an emergent universe. Rather, I would say quarks carry no electric charge at all, only color charge, but that when quarksform greater particles, which thay must because single isolated quarks are not possible, then the paradox of their combined properties causes the emergence of electric charge. That is, the electric charge is an emergent property of the proton and the electron, but is nowhere to be seen in the components of those particles.

What does that mean? After all emergent is just a word. Why is it not just so much 'word-salad' like the word infinity?

Emergent means that a thing has come into being that did not exist beforehand. A good example of emergence, because it is undeniable physical materialism at work, is electro-magnetic force; the old lefthand and righthand rules that you may have studied in school. When an electric current moves perpendicularly through a magnetic field, or vice versa, a force emerges, at right angles to both. But any two out of three will do; any moving electric charge causes magnetic induction to emerge. Now, a physicist may describe it differently, but I'd say that the numbers that constitute the electric charges, during EMF emerging, create an untenable paradox, that can only find resolution in the positional changes that result from the emergent 'force', i.e. pressure for change.

One of the most well known, and relied upon, principles is that of Occam's Razor, originating from William of Occam, and that claims that given two explanations for something, the simplest explanation is the one we should accept. I would say that this principle has justification from emergence in that weak emergence is always easier than hard emergence, and will always lead to simpler explanations for any phenomemon - phenomena necessarily require change to occur, and the novelty of hard emergence must be driven by paradox, and paradox must entail some complexity that arises from the immiscible nature of disprate relationships.

In Virtualism, and probably all other forms of emergence as well, a thing that is emergent is:

A whole thing.

A thing with parts - more than just usually, always. Else there is no novel thing.

A thing that exists on an 'as if' basis.

A contingent answer to paradox.

No doubt I am repeating myself, but this is my process, my conversation with myself that maybe could shed extra light on the matter.

It is clear that life emerges from biology, biology from chemistry, and chemistry from physics - cells and molecules have behaviour and properties that atoms in isolation do not.

Within physics it is clear that atoms emerge from smaller particles, protons, neutrons, electrons and photons! Also that most of these might be said to emerge from quarks and gluons, although at this level we are very much into a chicken and egg scenario, because there are no free quarks, so it is arguably speculative at best to say for sure.

Are laws emergent? Clearly yes, for example [from Paul Davies] Ohm's law applies to electric circuits, so before there were electric circuits [or Ohm himself, maybe] there was no possibility of Ohm's law existing in a meaningful sense. However, the factors that led to Ohm's law were there in the parts from which circuits [and Ohm] emerged. So Ohm's law is an observation of how electricity behaves, itself emergent from parts consisting of atoms, electrons and photons, but also we could claim, of space and time, as these are also involved in the structure and behaviour of a circuit.

Similarly, the laws of physics cannot really be there when there is no 'there' for them to apply to. Without a universe there can be no spatial objects, or laws about spatial objects, but we could make a good case, in the light of emergence, or Virtualism anyway, that before there was space there had to be the parts of space, and that it was the combining of those parts that brought about the emergence of space.

So what are the parts of space? Here we have to at least start with Albert Einstein and General Relativity: John Archibald Wheeler is quoted as coining the phrase 'Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.', and from that we can see that matter, time and space are all closely entwined.

It is a moot point whether any of these could exist on their own. Certainly such a question cannot arise within physics. Physics cannot say what its fundamental parts are in terms of anything else, simply because they are taken to be fundamental.

If we were to hypothetically position ourselves outside of space and time [not that there is such a 'place'], we might observe a block universe, a many worlds universe, many universes [surely a misnomer?], or if Virtualism is correct, we'd see a real Now universe, with a hollow structure full of the ghostly happenings of everything that had occurred in its past.

But what would any of these universes be formed from? What would be their parts?

The answer in Virtualism, much like the answer from physics, is that they are constructed from numbers and some simple mathematics, i.e. the sort of mathematics that does not require any human involvement.

The Beginning

Emergence starts with a recognition of what we might be able to call Rene Descartes' midpoint, that which we believe we know to exist, but which could be the product of some demon [a Matrix].

We cannot know whether the midpoint is real, is trustworthy as an impression, unless we can find a compelling justification for its state. The kind of candidates I'd put forward as suitable midpoints are the things of science, especially the quantum basis of the Universe, and the emergent nature of chemistry and biology.

The far side of Descartes' position of thinking, I'd suggest, is not 'why is there anything?', but rather is 'What would Nothing be?' At least, it is that kind of a question about Nothingness, no space, no time, no rules, no fields, no numbers, no gods. Absolutely nothing. In Virtualism I claim that this is a paradoxical state that necessarily is a null relationship that defines a virtual whole, a whole that is its own centre, its own heart, that paradoxically is both nothing and something, is actually both null and whole, and that that makes it the basis of both zero and one, and every other whole thing that ever existed.

The Emergence of Numbers

The theory of Virtualism claims that Existence necessarily commenced, because an infinite sequence of change is not possible, as it would not allow the progress to our current position from some state infinitely many changes in the past.

Any arguments that suggest otherwise are mere word salad. There is no need for changes to occupy any amount of time, and this certainly is not even remotely comparable to Zeno and his arrow. Indeed, time is not even a feature of an Existence that has only one dimension, and so has no 'clocks' with which to compare changes.

The commencement of Existence stands outside of time, and stands apart from all other considerations [there being nothing else], as a whole state with null parts. This kind of relationship, of 'wholeness', is exactly the same as [identical to] every other instance of wholeness that is a virtual property of every single thing in Existence. Wholeness is an 'as if' property, emergent, the form of the thing, its ideal, its spirit, its essence. All these words describe the same thing, which is simply the virtual state of being, which means to be whole.

It really does not matter whether it is 'to be', or is 'not to be' - William Shakespeare, both are whole states, and in as far as they are, they are paradoxically identical.

The whole state is necessarily singular. In fact, there is nothing else to being singular than being whole, the two words are tokens for the same virtual state - every whole thing is one thing, and oneness is identical with wholeness.

Kinds of Numbers

Within mathematics the theory of numbers starts with the Natural Numbers. These are the whole numbers, the integers, and they are defined [within mathematics] by a variation on the theme of repeatedly adding one to what you have.

Then we have real numbers, these are all the integers and all the partial numbers.

Rational numbers are those that can be expressed as a ratio.

Then we get irrational numbers, transcendental numbers [pi and root 2], and imaginary numbers [such as i the square root of -1].

Virtual Numbers

With Virtualism we have a different idea of what a number is and how different numbers come into Existence, and therefore why numbers as a group , and as individual wholes, are still growing and so are in some sense alive.

The whole state, identical with oneness, is inherently paradoxical, because it is both something and nothing. That paradox turns one into two, through giving wholeness two ends, its whole self and the nothingness of not itself. That contradiction divides one to make two, and that is a very different conception of the creation of numbers, and has many ramifications for the necessary emergence of Existence from nothing.

The nature of virtual truths, as facts, is that as many as are applicable will overlay one another within the situation at hand. So, while dividing everything whole by two gives us two things, twoness, it also gives us one half, and halfness.

This story doesn't stop there. As soon as we have two there emerges another paradox, that two is three, it implies three as the three objects that we could label with numerals; 0, 1 and 2. And so it goes on, 3 makes 4, 4 makes 5 ad infinitum, which means for ever and ever, not implying that any end can ever be reached.

The implication of this story, which mathematicians will no doubt hate, as it flies in the face of Set Theory, is that real numbers are created alongside natural numbers, on an equal footing, and that, labels aside [i.e. ignoring the numerals], each new number overlays each existing number, for instance, when three comes into Existence, we already had 0, 1, 2, and 1/2, but now each of those can be overlaid with a division of 3, because each is a whole thing in its own right, even 1/2, so we now gain 3, and 1/3, and 2/3, and 1/2/3 ? And 1/3/3 ?

This is where Virtualism sharply deviates from Mathematics, and the deviation is entirely about the metaphysical nature of numbers. Mathematicians would generally claim that all the numbers are laid out, existingly ready for use. But Virtualism claims that when there were just three things, the division of any one thing by that threeness, was the same thing as the division of any other wholeness by three, it may appear that it gains you all the extra numbers, immediately, it maybe is 'as if' such numbers existed, but it is not quite the same as counting them out, one by one.

Multiplication may appear to generate more numbers, more quickly than addition, but the foundational number can only properly exist, as a strongly emergent object, by the process of addition as a resolution of paradox, rather than multiplication as a process of possibility. NB. properly speaking this process is one of division of all the numbers by one extra slice, so through division we actual gain an additional integer. The big difference is that the resolution of paradox produces strong emergence, while the fulfillment of possibility only produces a weaker form of emergence. One has to happen from strict necessity, the other only 'may happen' by chance. Ironically, while the emergence of square numbers is weaker emergence, the contention being that the resultant integer already exists, the square itself is an area, and that seems like a new kind of thing, except that it is really only a kind of wholeness that existed from the moment two existed and allowed one to be both straight and flat - a line and a square.

There is a famous paradox, usually called Galileo's paradox, and this paradox, as are all paradoxes, is explained, or resolved if you will, by Virtualism. In the case of Galileo's Paradox the resolution comes in the form of realizing that square numbers are not identical to linear numbers, so it is in practice necessary that an object may be empty as it starts to emerge weakly, but that when it emerges strongly there is no such weakness. The multiplied number, which is the same thing as the square number, is never fully populated until the equivalent linear number has emerged in its necessary strong manner.

This is perhaps easier to get an intuitive grasp of when we consider numbers to powers greater than 3. To start off with, the surface and n-volume of the unit hyperspheres increase, but after 5 and 7 dimensions each of these objects decreases, tending toward 0 quite rapidly. This property of numbers, to effectively become smaller as they become bigger, in higher dimensions at least, gains fundamental importance when we start to look at the manner in which numbers cause the necessary emergence of Space.

Dimensions and the Emergence of Space

Albert Einstein gave us Special Relativity, Hermann Minkowski then joined space and time, John Archibald Wheeler then told us that 'Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.' But, Virtualism shows us that each one of these advances in Science, while true up to a point, is just like Sir Isaac Newton's very correct laws of motion, not quite the whole story. Virtualism says that everything is emergent, so too is space, and that space emerges before time, and before mass, but that after a certain point, all three of these things then continue to emerge hand in hand. It is just like the square numbers and then the hyperspheres: In fact it is all just square numbers and hyperspheres, and the like, of one kind or another.

As numbers emerge they each both contain all the other numbers, and are contained within all the other numbers, all thanks to Gottfried Leibniz. It is exactly the same with square numbers as with linear numbers, and with cubic numbers and all the rest. What then happens - what necessarily must happen - is that along with the numbers [which are all examples of a virtual kind of sameness], there must also emerge all the virtual differences between those numbers, and crucially between the composite numbers that equate to non-primes. These differences are automatically and necessarily emergent, and although there is no apparent paradox that seems to make them strongly emergent, they are so; because if there were no difference, say between 11 and 15, or 3-squared and 4-squared, that really would be paradoxical !

Virtualism says that as the numbers emerge, necessarily there must emerge a virtual space that is composed of all the virtual differences between all those virtual numbers. What's more, the different kinds of numbers, having the capacity to accommodate one another, in some ways, can become overlaid. This scenario creates some very interesting structures. For instance:

Two-dimensional objects that can exist as parts of three or four-dimensional objects, etc.

Three-dimensional objects that can exist as parts of four-dimensional objects, etc.

etc.

I don't think I have to enumerate all the cases. The chase I will cut to is that Virtualism [that is; me] claims that this virtual space is the foundation of space as we know it; that space simply emerges from the way that numbers are, and the way that numbers can combine. The first interesting consequence of this view is that our three dimensional space has to be just one part of a four dimensional space that has too contain three other similarly three-dimensional spaces, each a real rotation away from the others. I would even suggest that this may be something of an explanation of the phenomenon of Dark Matter.

The next interesting consequence is that if a higher dimensional object contains a two-dimensional object, then theoretically that two-dimensional object [that has to be virtual, being just numbers] can be subtracted from its host, in which case it becomes a negative square, and mathematically that invokes the imaginary number i, the square root of -1. Causes it to emerge, you could say. i is an imaginary mathematical rotation, when applied to real numbers, and my claim, in Virtualism, is that light [photons] is no more, and no less, than the subtraction of square numbers, and the immediate addition of those same numbers to some other composite. Light takes no time to get where it is going because the very act of subtracting from one thing is adding it to another thing, hence the number is necessarily conserved, and behaves as an emergent, imaginary rotation; out and in, Just like that!

Imaginary Mass is Energy

We know from General Relativity that mass and energy are equivalent, and for me that is a clear pointer to them actually being the same thing. What is that thing? What is it that causes mass to do gravity? What is it that causes accelerated masses, which have more energy, to effectively have more mass?

The answer to these questions, for conventional science, is that mass bends spacetime, causing it to shrink. But, conventional science does not address why that happens. Virtualism though, says that the space is an emergent phenomena, one that only exists on an 'as if' basis, and that does so because of the differences between numbers that form objects. The manner in which these objects have position, and momentum, in relation to all the other objects, changes according to the Lorentz transformation, and that brings us back to i and the rotation of objects into the imaginary dimension, a phenomenon usually called boost. When an object has more boost, the differences between it and other objects are reduced, which is what happens when an object is accelerated, or when lots of masses are brought together to make a bigger mass. In either case, the centre of each whole object acts 'as if' it were all that were there, even though that centre is only virtual. The reduction in differences of the boosted object emerges as shorter distances and shorter times, the things we expect of General Relativity, and that is what we'd call greater mass, and when the increase is lopsided it means that the boost has a direction relative to the real differences between objects, and we see that as emergent velocity, and emergent acceleration when it changes.

The key point here is that the differences between numeric objects are what we'd call real, and are what give them position, i.e. cause space to exist, and any changes to the mass or energy of an object are really only changes in its level of boost into the i dimension. The i dimension is called imaginary, but that is a bit of a misnomer, all it really means is that it stretches from 0 to 1, and relates to normal dimensions as a negative square, i.e. a rotation. You could think of it as 0 to 100%, i.e. a distance that can't be exceeded, because once you are all the way, there is no further to go. This is the root cause behind the speed of light being the maximum velocity achievable.

More about the nature of Space

For an interactive graphic showing the nature of Gravity

As each new number emerges - as Existence ticks, you might say - some number compounds will become unstable and shed squares [photons], at the same instant a new layer of Now is added to all that has gone before, and as we'll see with the explanation of Time; forever changes.

Demergence

Demergence is a complementary concept to Emergence, one that is an entirely logical conclusion from Virtualism and the emergence of Reality from the truths of facts, i.e. in essence from numbers. Reality as a whole, as the one and only Universe, is by necessity whole and entire. Being so, it imposes a law of conservation, i.e. nothing real can pop into existence, or out of it, without some cause and result. That is, change that reduces something, somewhere, must increase something else, somewhere else. This is one of the basic laws - there is no free lunch.

The demergence of things occurs in exactly the same fashion as does the emergence of things, i.e. it is as a necessary avoidance of paradox, or put another way, it is the force of paradox that enforces the necessary accounting to take place in Reality, accounting that ensures that whenever a photon arrives at a destination, it also leaves a source, and vice versa. Anyone could probably write a book on Demergence, but I think you should have got the idea by now.

A List of Strongly Emergent Things

In an emergent Existence there is a definite distinction to be drawn between different kinds of things, although often it is difficult to observe or conclude where to draw the line, so the following lists should be seen as suggestions, perhaps, rather than hard and fast rulings on the matter. Also, while there may be obvious differences, it may not be entirely clear how the existence of one kind of object - level - leads to the emergence of a more complex level. Levels may be missing from the lists, and it is also not clear that where there are multiple layers of emergence, whether many layers down actually can be considered a contribution to many layers up. That is, while the much lower layer may interact by exchange of particles, a more societal layer may interact by exchange of favours, money, power, ideas, or whatever change may take place.

Existence - the very first state of being, i.e. wholeness and unity

Numbers - the most elementary objects after unity - a division of unity and overlaying of the results

Euclidean and Platonic objects - combinations of numbers as a line or more

Quarks and Color Charge - or watever the most elementary particles are - closely related to numeric objects, such that there are just a few kinds that are identical within their own group.

Space - a relationship of 3D difference between objects

Electromagnetic Charge - a property of groups of quarks

Mass - a rotation of an object producing a 4th dimension

Acceleration of gravity = mass gigantic george rolling into the imaginary deep

Chemistry - certain groups of physics that exhibit properties of molecules not found in particles alone

Biology - certain groups of chemistry that are complex enough to be life

Society - groups of biology, from family to nations

Meaning as facts - relationships between wholes that are of different kinds

Consciousness - wholes that are like other objects, but have differing parts

Language - wholes of meaning that are tokens, like but unlike their objects

Humour - the juxtaposition of facts in multiple manners

Love - the relationship of shared consciousness

Time - the facts of any emergent thing that remain after demergence

A List of Weakly Emergent Things

Weak emergence is the appearance of novelty, of change, but with a lower threshold than would create dimension. The list is not exhaustive, but includes:

Light as change to charged objects

Gluons as change to color objects - quarks

Entropy - a measure of change

Death - a demergence of life

Rotation? E.g. Sperry's Wheel, and planetary orbits

Laws of behaviour and any other things that are definitely there, but are not the agents of their own being, e.g. Ohm's Law

Weak emergence occurs as change, and change occurs as quantum steps, where some whole quantity of some kind is subtracted and added, or else is simply just added. The latter is not recognised as physical, but