I am going to use this word a lot throughout this work. It isn’t terribly complicated, but I have often found it to be challenging to understand from definition rather than from example.

Emergence is the phenomenon in which an interacting arrangement of things results in a whole, which displays properties not seen in any of its individual parts.

The easiest example to use is life itself. Atoms do not reproduce. Neither do simple molecules, not on their own. But if you take enough atoms, form simple molecules out of them, and then form a specific set of complex molecules out of those, you get a configuration of atoms that is able to copy itself. To draw in atoms and simple molecules from around it and build its copy.

But all those atoms are still there, they’re still following all the same rules and behaviors that atoms have always and will always follow. The atoms have not themselves changed, or gained the ability to reproduce. There’s not some… life-magic now imbued in them that allows a cell to multiply. Life is just a thing you get, when you arrange atoms a particular way. An emergent phenomenon.

Another example: in the video game Minecraft, players are able to build a number of different blocks and objects and items that are able to perform information-processing tasks inside the game, using the game’s ‘redstone’ technology system. But they’re very simple objects, there’s no ‘timer’ object on its own. Instead, players build timers out of a bunch of blocks and items working together in well-understood ways. When you put two pistons, a redstone block, and two hoppers facing each other together, you’ve made a timer out of things that are not timers. This is emergence.

If this explanation does not suffice, I recommend you seek out the many other attempts out there at explaining this before continuing.