Emergence

The word emergence describes when something comes to light that wasn’t known before, like the Mind Flayer in Stranger Things:

Something emerges from mist or fog, or some other substrate, and then it’s suddenly there. Maybe it was there all along.

This word—emergence—makes a great metaphor to describe any time when some unexpected complexity crops up. The key thing that defines emergence is that the component parts don’t seem to add up to all this complexity.

You can see this in the world of biology, where many of the 10³⁰ individual life forms have organized into larger structures that seem to think for themselves.

Bee hives and ant colonies are more akin to individual creatures with objectives and minds than a collection of thousands of individuals. Each individual drone follows a really simple plan based on nature’s algorithm: if you see some food, let the others know; follow the drone in front of you; and so on. And yet, the hive itself has objectives like building a collective defe…