Emergent Property Quotes

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It's an emergent property.

Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.

That's not something that we've gone in thinking 'Right! How are we going to examine that now?' It's just when you take a step back you see that they're actually all sort of in that mode.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

When carbon (C), Oxygen (o) and hydrogen (H) atoms bond in a certain way to form sugar, the resulting compound has a sweet taste. The sweetness resides neither in the C, nor in the O, nor in the H; it resides in the pattern that emerges from their interaction. It is an emergent property. Moreover, strictly speaking, is not a property of the chemical bonds. It is a sensory experience that arises when the sugar molecules interact with the chemistry of our taste buds, which in turns causes a set of neurons to fire in a certain way. The experience of sweetness emerges from that neural activity.

Cryptocurrencies are an emergent property of the Internet - almost a fifth protocol in the Internet suite. If Satoshi Nakomoto did not exist, it would still be necessary to invent them.

The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself.

The manner in which life constructs itself must be dealing with some other principle which we've failed to identify.

I think that every collective that you witness occurring on a stage, it's not about any one of the individuals. There's something that's happened that's kind of put all that stuff together into a much bigger result ... some alchemy.