The complex nature of emergence

Serious approaches to emergence fall into two main categories. One of these is reasonably easy to defend: it posits that when systems get very complex, it’s impossible to reliably predict their future states. As a result, some phenomena require new, non-reducible concepts and theories to capture and account for them. Because this has to do with how we know the world, let’s call it epistemological emergence (‘epistemology’ is the study of knowledge).

A much more controversial kind of emergence can be called ontological (a philosophical term of art related to the nature of being). Ontological emergence suggests that certain features and objects are actually part of the world, not just a result of our limited theories and predictive abilities. This tends to upset atomists, because it undermines the view that the world is wholly compositional.

Someone please check if I understand this correctly : ontological emergence says that new properties arise in a complex system that cannot reduced to the actions or properties of individual parts. They "emerge" in that the complexity is required, but aren't directly caused by smaller parts.

Suppose you hold, as most synchronic emergentists do, that when an event occurs at a level above the most fundamental, there is always a set of events lower down that fixes the simultaneous higher-order event. Recall our laughing baby, an event that lies above the level of fundamental physics. Although the chortling can’t be reduced to physical processes, there are fundamental physical states and structures that fix the biological and psychological states; so whenever exactly similar physical processes and structures are present, a baby laughs. If you also believe that everything that happens in the world goes on at the level of fundamental physics, then it follows that any causation that seems to occur at the higher level is redundant. The baby’s laugh does not cause the mother to smile, because her smile is wholly dependent for its existence upon a very complicated set of fundamental objects, processes and structures.

I dunno... if the mother's smile depends on the the complex atomic-level processes that make the baby laugh, what's the difference ? The baby will always laugh in those situations, and so the mother will always smile. The mother has to perceive the laugh - she has to receive photons conveying the image of the smile and sound waves in the air to hear it. Her smile is caused by the baby's atomic structure and motions corresponding to that of a laugh. I'm not seeing a conflict here.

Thinking about emergence opens up a set of questions that are quintessentially philosophical, even though the answers might require substantial scientific input. For example: were all the laws of nature in place at the origin of the Universe, or did they emerge through some kind of transformation? If so, does this imply a set of ‘superlaws’ to explain how and why such transformations occurred? Such questions do not arise naturally within an atomistic ontology – but guided by a careful approach to emergence, we might make headway and free the concept from the clutch of mystics.

I will naively hazard that the most fundamental laws cannot be caused by epistemological (one of the worst words in the English language) emergence by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be fundamental. I can see how higher level laws might be emergent in this way though. Ontological emergence doesn't seem of any help here either, because you'd still need something for them to emerge from.

Of course I may simply be gibbering incoherently, but hey, look, something that's not about consciousness for a change... :P

https://aeon.co/essays/atomism-is-basic-emergence-explains-complexity-in-the-universe