The concept of emergence is one of the most powerful — and most misunderstood — in science and philosophy. Traditionally, emergence is framed as the appearance of higher-order structures “on top of” lower-level substrates: minds from brains, life from matter, complexity from simplicity.
But this layering metaphor is inherently spatial and hierarchical. It presupposes a base reality and then a stacking of effects.
From a relational ontology, we must rethink emergence not as vertical accretion but as recursive construal — the looping reconfiguration of perspectives within a system of meaning.
From Layering to Recursion
Emergence is not the upward accumulation of stuff. It is the recurrence of the cut — a re-entry of construal into the system it construes.
A construal, once enacted, becomes part of the meaning potential of the system. This allows for new construals that take prior construals as part of their field. What emerges is not a higher level, but a richer system of constraints.
Emergence is the system’s capacity to construe itself from within — again and again, recursively.
No Levels, Only Loops
The illusion of levels arises when we reify outcomes as objects. We then imagine a lower “level” producing a higher one. But in a relational field, there are no levels — only coordinated perspectives that recursively constrain each other.
For example, “mind” is not an emergent property on top of brain processes. It is a recursive construal of construal — a pattern of activity that makes sense of itself as experience.
Emergence is not a bridge between layers. It is a fold in the field — the system tracing its own possibility.
Emergence Is Semantic, Not Structural
In physics and complexity theory, emergence is often treated as a structural property: patterns, attractors, orders. But this assumes a prior system of observables.
From the relational view, emergence is always semantic: it involves the construal of pattern as pattern. It is meaning constituted in recursion — the actualisation of coherence within coherence.
Emergence is not what happens when components combine. It is what happens when the field construes its own construals as meaningful — when possibility reflexively configures itself.
Self-Reference Without Self-Containment
One of the oldest paradoxes of emergence is how a system can contain its own description. Gödel, Turing, and others exposed the limits of this idea.
But from a relational stance, no system contains its description. It enacts it — from within.
Emergence, then, is not a system representing itself in full, but a system cutting itself anew, generating a perspective that configures previous perspectives as meaningful. This recursion doesn’t close on itself — it opens possibility further.
The Myth of the Whole
Emergence is often invoked to support holistic metaphysics — the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But in relational ontology, there is no whole. There is only the cut of coherence that enacts a local horizon of intelligibility.
What we call a “whole” is itself a construal — a pattern of coordination, a semantic configuration. It is not above or beyond its parts. It is immanent in their organisation.
Implication for Science and Philosophy
This reconstrual of emergence has wide-reaching implications:
In systems biology, it means life is not layered over chemistry, but recursively constituted through semantic closure.
In cognitive science, it means mind is not a product of computation, but a perspectival rhythm of construal.
In physics, it means so-called macroscopic phenomena are not emergent in scale but in semantic coordination — the articulation of stable construals.
The challenge is not to explain how complexity arises from simplicity. The challenge is to trace how construals become recursively intelligible within a field of possibility.
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