Emergent Entities
Composition creates new real entities — grounded in physics, not identical to their parts
Emergent entities are new things that come into being when parts combine, relate, or are shaped and recorded — not merely new descriptions of old parts.
When two people fall in love and commit, a couple exists: a unique entity with its own history. It can be promoted (marriage), demoted, or cease — yet live on in memory and records, still argued about and learned from long after it is gone. That is not the same as listing two individuals and a force vector between them.
The same holds for informational creation: a drawing, a painting, a sculpture. The stone minus what was removed is not the artwork. The work holds information, history, meaning — and may be admired or loved beyond the raw material. It can exist in a brain, on canvas, in any medium that holds information.
Conceptual entities — including deities once conceptualized — follow the same logic at the author’s stance: the entity exists when the concept coheres and propagates (heads, texts, imagery, ritual). It is information that affects worshippers and, indirectly, non-worshippers. The author does not worship; he holds that such gods are real emergent entities, not supernatural substance and not mere fiction. The information that led to a given concept emerged from prior chains of physical and informational causation — long before any single articulator. → Philosophical stance (section Conceptual entities — including deities).
What this claims (ontological)
- New entities are created — couples, organisations, artworks, commitments, institutions, conceptualized deities.
- They have identity over time, history, and status that can change (promote, demote, dissolve).
- They can persist beyond immediate physical presence — in memory, capture, tier-one records.
- Creation can be entirely informational — constituted by what is stored, maintained, and propagated, not only by bulk matter.
- Propagation is causal — through people and captures, the entity affects the world as if fully present because it is present at the entity level.
What still holds (grounding)
- Why combination is possible, why a particular event happened, and how it unfolds are chains of reaction governed by elementary physics and information (information realism).
- Emergent entities are not supernatural and not independent of physical law.
- They are often unexplainable at lower levels for practical purposes — not because physics is false, but because the entity is the wrong object of study at the particle level.
What this is not
The precision move: new entities, physically grounded — not “merely a convenient fiction,” and not “a separate substance.”
In the epistemic ladder
Tier 0 (Real) includes acts and states of affairs — including emergent entities and their transitions (commitment, marriage, dissolution). Tier-one captures can record that a couple committed, that a work was completed — without collapsing the entity into its parts.
→ Philosophical stance · Emergent physicalism
Origin: distilled from author stance; public article at /about/philosophical-stance/.