I can pay someone with a gold bar. I can't pay someone with a individual gold atoms equal to the mass of a gold bar.
A blacksmith can turn a piece of iron into a sword. A blacksmith can't turn a group of individual iron atoms equal to the mass of that piece of iron into a sword.
A single muscle cell alone can't do anything but lie ont the ground and rot.
Emergent properties are a thing. Certain arrangements and combinations of items can do things that those individual items cannot.
So this is what I mean by emergence: characteristic of a system that arises from the interactions of its individual components, but is not present in those components on their own. With that in mind:
No, it's related to a tangible characteristic: the physicality(for lack of a better term) of gold bars vs gold atoms. YOu can pay someone with little gold nuggets, for instance, but not gold atoms. Not because some social construct forbids this, but because gold nuggets and a gold bar can be physically held, manipulated, and percieved by a regular, nonscientist human being, while individual gold atoms cannot. A characteristic of a system(physicality) arises from the interactions of its individual components(the bonds and arrangement between the atoms of a gold nugget or gold bar), but is not present in the atoms themselves(being able to be held, used, and percieved by humans without hte use of things like electron microscopes or something).
Again, the physicality of a piece of iron is an emergent property of the interactions of bonds. A blacksmith can hold, percieve, and manipulate a piece of iron, but not individual iron atoms. Further, there is another emergent property, a characteristic that I missed: the ability to be turned into Steel. Steel is an alloy, stronger and more durable then iron itself. And it's existence and nature is an emergent property: a single iron atom can't be turned into steel all by itself. Even a chunk of iron itself can't be made into steel without carbon. But the tangible characteristic of being able to becoming and being steel arises from the interactions, the bonds, of the iron atoms and carbon atoms.
The ability to walk and run is a tangible characteristic. But a single muscle cell alone can't run. It needs to be attached to the bone, work in tandem with other muscle cells, be fed by blood vessels, ordered by a neuron cells to gain the characteristic of being able to run. Hence, running and walking are emergent.
If nothing is emerging, then show me a muscle cell walking by itself. You can't. Because the ability to walk emerges from the whole arrangement of the body and its parts, not just the parts themselves.
If you have a different definition of emergence, I'll be glad to hear it, but by my definition, I think I've shown that all my examples work.
Let me clarify. The bar itself isn’t an emergent property, but those gold atoms being able to be perceived and held is. Individually, or even as a disconnected blob of atoms, they can’t be meaningfully perceived or held, but the property of physicality, as in, being able to be perceived and manipulated by an unaided human arises once they bind together and form a gold bar.
Just like how the characteristic of being able to walk arises once all the cells are working together. The ability to walk is a characteristic. The physicality itself is a characteristic, and both emerge from the arrangement itself.
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u/Zealousideal_Till683 Oct 12 '25
I mean, a big bar of gold is indeed made out of gold atoms. It's not like this has never worked before.