So while emergence may be, as information scientist Francis Heylighen of the Vrije Universiteit in Brussel argued at the ELSI symposium, “simple, common and natural,” it also comes in innumerable forms that can seem mysterious or, as described in the quantum world, “spooky.”

David Pines, a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, which specializes in complexity studies, illustrated the dimensions of the emergence debate when he wrote about it several years ago for the online publishing site “Medium.”

“We live in an emergent universe,” he wrote, “in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify any existing interesting scientific problem or study any social or economic behavior that is not emergent.”

In the presence of claims like this, emergence has become a phenomenon where scientific consensus – or even agreement – can be difficult to achieve. Is it a trite “buzzword,” as some argue? Or is it a profound and important pathway to understand underlying phenomena of the world that cannot be adequately described by reductionist, deterministic science?

Some of the modern pioneers in thinking about emergence come from the world of Artificial Life, or ALife. Using computer simulations, ALife researchers study essential properties of living systems such as evolution and adaptive behavior. Since the evolutionary clock cannot go backwards to see the what attributes are inevitable and what is more random, ALife analyzes these kinds of processes by simulating lifelike behaviors and patterns within computers.

As described at the ELSI symposium by University of Tokyo ALife and complex systems specialist Takashi Ikegami, decades of work in the ALife field have led to the conclusion that the pathways to life and consciousness are created by a cascade of emergent phenomena possessing the capability for “open-ended evolution.”

And with computing power still increasing steadily, he said that the scale at which emergent properties can be identified and traced will similarly increase. As an example of how faster and larger computers can and will scale up ALife experiments and research, he told the story of the Rubik’s cube and what became known as “God’s algorithm.”

For 30 years, mathematicians and others working to solve the famous cube puzzle concluded that the minimum number of moves needed to complete the task was 22. This was not based on the experience of some Rubik’s cube fans, but rather of sustained mathmatical analysis.

But then in 2010 a teams of computer scientists and mathemeticians with access to Google’s supercomputers found that the minimum number of moves for any of the 43 quadrillion Rubik’s position was actually a very surprising 20. This result, Ikegami argues, is a reflection of the emergence of new technological capabilities in the last decade that are changing the world.

Some other classic artificial life simulations involve virtual birds or fish that are given some very simple rules to follow about how close individuals can approach each other and how they should steers in relation to other flock or schoolmates. Those simple instructions lead to the formation of virtual swarms and schools of enormous complexity that emerge from the individual-to-group transition.

An example of the unexpected behavior that can emerge: A flock splits to avoid an obstacle and then reunite once passed.

ALife is virtual, but emergence is everywhere in the natural world as well once you know what to look for. Bénard cells, for instance, are geometrically regular convection structures that spontaneously form in water or other thicker fluids when it is heated from below and/or cooled from above.

The cells are formed as the hotter fluid rises and the cooler sinks, a process that results in spontaneous self-organization into a regular pattern of cells. The cells would be considered to be emergent phenomena.

John Hernlund is a geophysicist and vice director ELSI, and was the lead science organizer for the conference.

“Bénard convection is a composite phenomenon that arises from the combination of simpler processes: thermal expansion, Archimedes principle, thermal conduction, and viscous resistance to shearing motion in a fluid,” he said. “Nothing about those basic constituent processes alone would enable you to predict that their combination would yield the beautiful regular geometric patterns seen in Bénard cells, and this is why these are often used as an example of emergent behavior.”

Astrophysicist Elizabeth Tasker, a professor and communicator for the Japanese Space Agency JAXA, chaired an early session on emergence which focused on how the universe and planets were formed. She said her field has generally not described that 13.7 billion year process that followed the Big Bang in terms of emergent phenomenon, but that over the week she gradually saw the usefulness and did so in particularly compelling terms.

“As an astrophysicist,” she said. “I began to see the history of the universe as a manga, with examples of emergence forming the individual frames: matter strewn around the cosmos was drawn by gravity into structures that became galaxies, gas collapsed until fusion birthed a star, rocky boulders accreted and then began to melt and circulate to produce plate tectonics.

“Each manga frame represented the introduction of a new property of the universe, one that could not be exhibited by the individual pieces that had created it. A lone gas molecule could not show the spinning spiral of a galactic disc, nor begin to fuse elements within a star. Likewise, the rocky pieces that formed a planet could not start the circulation of plate tectonics by themselves. Neighboring interactions created a system that could spawn an entirely new process.”