Abbas K. Rizi (2025), PNAS Nexus 5(2):pgag010 (2026; online 2026-01-19); arXiv preprint first — ARXIV-2507.04951
Key takeaways
- Emergence can be made precise and non-mystical as many-to-one coarse-graining that preserves predictive information, with its onset located operationally by symmetry breaking, criticality and RG universality — weak emergence suffices, and strong emergence would require new causal principles unsupported by evidence.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-153. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The paper observes that “emergence” is increasingly used, often imprecisely and sometimes mystically, for collective behaviours such as flocking, synchronisation and collective intelligence. As a perspective piece, it recasts emergence as a measurable phenomenon grounded in physics. Using temperature, magnetism and herd immunity on social networks as examples, it shows how collective behaviour arises from local interactions under global constraints, and argues that a properly framed notion yields insight rather than mysticism.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 50 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-153 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a compact, well-referenced statement of the physicist’s weak-emergence view and a reading list into it (Carroll & Parola, Hoel, Rosas, Witten, De Haro & Butterfield, Dennett). Its framework is stated, not developed: no distortion measure is given for F, and “predictive” is never quantified.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-153, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — moderate engagement (t = 50 s, 2 sessions); short and the skim covers its argument, but it is a clean statement of the weak-emergence view the record will want to cite.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-153 is that reading):
- A compact, citable physicist’s position on weak emergence; contrasts with McKenzie’s broader survey (LIT-141) and with philosophical strong-emergence views.
- The LLM “emergent abilities” analogy is asserted, not examined; check it against the metric-artifact critique of emergent abilities (Schaeffer et al. 2023) before relying on it.
- Check whether “information relevant for prediction and control” is given a formal measure or only gestured at via causal-emergence work.
Access when seeded: arXiv abs page (v1 7 Jul 2025; the PDF read is v4, 9 Jan 2026) and full PDF (10 pp.) read directly; DOI and journal online date from Crossref. Sections are unnumbered, so locations are headings and pages.