2025 Complexity Science Symposium

Overview

The concept of emergence, and several auxiliary ideas, including coarse-graining, effective theory, and compression, play a huge role in complexity science. Formalizing emergence is becoming more important across numerous disciplines, including study of the "emergence of" time, life, mind, consciousness, intelligence, and society. Following a flurry of profound papers spanning the 70s-90s, many of which grapple with rigorous alternatives to inefficient reductionist models and theories, there has been relatively limited progress and consensus about how emergence might be put to use, and what it implies for the structure of scientific research.

In this Complexity Symposium we debated emergence across the natural and the social sciences. This includes wrestling with questions such as: (1) is emergence simply a way to make scientific computations more parsimonious and tractable—e.g., using the single effective variable temperature to describe an ensemble of microscopic particles? Or does emergence describe something truly new? (2) is emergence a causally important principle in controlling complex systems? (3) is emergence vital to understanding ideas like intelligence, consciousness and unconsciousness? (4) when does emergence fail and thereby necessitate a more reductionist approach to phenomena? and (5) what is the relationship of emergence to the deep philosophical questions of realism and anti-realism -- whether there is a truly knowable world, or a near infinite sequence of effective theories.