Causal emergence is either a brilliant new marriage of science and philosophy, or a bunch of useless nonsense. You can be the judge but I am leaning slightly toward the latter.

Some physical entities, which we often refer to as agents, can be described as having intentions and engaging in goal-oriented behavior. Yet agents can also be described in terms of low-level dynamics that are mindless, intention-less, and without goals or purpose. How we can reconcile these seemingly disparate levels of description? This is especially problematic because the lower scales at first appear more fundament in three ways: in terms of their causal work, in terms of the amount of information they contain, and their theoretical superiority in terms of model choice. However, recent research bringing information theory to bear on modeling systems at different scales significantly reframes the issue. I argue that agents, with their associated intentions and goal-oriented behavior, can actually causally emerge from their underlying microscopic physics. This is particularly true of agents because they are autopoietic and possess (apparent) teleological causal relationships.

In other words, how can your atoms and cells, which have no intentions or will, sum up to create you, a person who I presume has intentions and will. Then all of us persons with intentions and will add up to a civilization, which has intentions and will, which is part of a planet, a solar system, a galaxy, and universe, which arguably do not. If I were smoking something, I might find this profound, but I don’t see an application for it. But it does remind me of Howard T. Odum’s concept of a “mesoscope” as opposed to the microscope and macroscope, which refers to understanding systems at a middle scale where these complex, messy interactions between the physical and human worlds take place. Most of our scientists and engineers are studying the world through a microscope, and that is what we as a society and economy are rewarding, while the most important problems that could be solved at the middle scale are not being tackled by many people, and the people who are tackling them are not being sufficiently rewarded.