To explain living organisms’ being able to escape entropy, Autpoiesis (initiated by Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela) allows biological entities to run up the ladder of complexity and not down and degraded as non-living things like rocks do. This suggests things can develop to display uniqueness in being more than their parts—as Barb says, “new affiliations” that in turn could continue on. The emergence in this system is in the whole not being represented in any characteristic of its parts, as neither hydrogen nor oxygen speaking to us about water. Nor will they admit to knowing anything about it.
But is it hopeless to design for this? I wonder. A whole bicycle is proof of itself. In school we can’t prove a bicycle but we can propose, through certain patterns of thought, the possibility of a bicycle almost to the point of the universe manifesting a bike out of the shear likelihood of its being in existence by our thinking of it. Humans can’t make things appear from nothing but we can imagine things, build them, operate them and then think about thinking about them so we come pretty close to the emergence of things already. Why not then design a process for emergence?