Ross H. McKenzie (2025), arXiv preprint — ARXIV-2508.08548
Key takeaways
- Taking novelty (the whole has properties the parts lack) as the single defining mark of emergence, McKenzie argues reality is stratified into levels with their own ontology and epistemology, and that the key move in understanding emergence is finding a mesoscale at which new, weakly interacting entities appear, studied via effective theories and toy models.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-124. What follows is what the work says about itself.
McKenzie defines an emergent property by novelty: a many-part system has properties its parts lack. He reviews other putative marks — universality, order, complexity, unpredictability, irreducibility, diversity, self-organisation, discontinuities and singularities — noting it is not established whether any is necessary or sufficient for novelty. Through examples spanning physics, biology, the social sciences and computing, he frames emergence via scales and a stratified reality, stresses the mesoscale and modularity, and presents effective theories and toy models (the Ising model above all) as the core methods.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 145 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-124 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a hub reference and example catalogue on emergence from physics outward, with unusually concrete case studies and a sceptical physicist’s §15 on molecular structure. It is a survey and a position, not a proof. Its definitional framework is stipulated and its logical relations between characteristics are left open by its own account (§24).
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-124, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — the owner’s highest-engagement item in this batch (t = 145 s, 2 sessions), but it is a 187-page survey whose thesis the skim captures; deeper reading should be selective (§§2, 14, 21–22).
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-124 is that reading):
- A book-length reference survey of emergence by a condensed-matter physicist; useful as a hub citation for complex-systems material and for cross-domain examples.
- §21’s treatment of LLM emergent abilities should be checked against the metric-choice critique before it supports anything in the ML side of the record.
- Check whether the novelty criterion does real work, given that the author concedes no other mark is known to be necessary or sufficient.
Access when seeded: arXiv abs page (v1 12 Aug 2025; v4 2 Jul 2026) and the full v4 PDF (187 pp.) read directly — table of contents, §1.2 “Ten key ideas”, §21 (LLMs), §22 (Philosophical issues), §§23–24 read; the physics and biology case-study sections were not read.