Faced with conundrums posed by the origin of the universe, life, and consciousness, many thinkers have proposed a concept known as emergence. The idea is that some properties of systems emerge only after a certain level of complexity is reached. Emergence offers a materialist account of “something from nothing” an escape hatch.
But at IAI.TV, Washington University philosopher John Heil wants us to know that, as a concept, emergence doesn’t really work. Here’s the Introduction:
Scientists and philosophers have fallen for a seductive buzzword: “emergence.” It’s invoked to explain life, consciousness, and the flow of time: when simple parts combine, it is claimed, they sometimes produce new entities with powers their parts could never predict. But philosopher John Heil calls this out as an intellectual sleight of hand. “Emergence,” he argues, doesn’t reveal hidden truths — it masks our ignorance, mistaking gaps in explanation for gaps in reality. It’s time to drop the magic word and face the real challenge: uncovering, in concrete detail, how simple parts can give rise to complex wholes.
“Emergence explains nothing and is bad science,” October 13, 2025
Heil offers,
Although the literature on emergence is vast, there is scant agreement on what it means to describe the As as emerging from the Bs. Philosophers disagree on many things — on the nature of causation, for instance — but disagreements over emergence are more unsettling. Few scientists or philosophers doubt that causation occurs. Apparently uncontroversial examples of causal processes are ready to hand, anchoring competing accounts of causation. In the case of emergence, however, competing accounts appear to be accounts of entirely different phenomena…
Critics of emergence argue that every feature of a complex whole, such as a tomato or a living creature, is resultant. Complex systems comprise many, many parts dynamically and interactively organized. In interacting, the parts can change one another, often in dramatic ways. When you have all this, say the sceptics, you thereby have something — a complex system — that does indeed exhibit new kinds of characteristics that endow the system with powers not possessed by its individual parts. But these characteristics are nothing “over and above” these parts with these properties interactively organized as they are.
“Bad science,”
Although Heil doesn’t come right out and say it, he seems to favor a traditional materialist approach. The trouble is, when addressing the “something from nothing” problem, that approach typically degenerates into promissory materialism: One of these days we will find a materialist answer to all this! The days, years, decades drag on and the obstacles mount.
Growing awareness of this problem is probably one of the factors driving the current interest among scientists in having conversations about ultimate matters like God and the cosmos.