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reasons to study emergence

Would an emergentist (uh, awkward word of my own creation that'll have to do for now) say that there is no human being until distinctively human activities occur? The reason why I suspect that the answer might be yes is because, it seems likely to me that for emergentism (why not make up new words?), ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (old fallacy by Haeckel). Why do I think that is likely? Because otherwise one would have to give an Aristotelian priority of being over action (as in the Medieval adage "action follows being"). But emergentism, as I see it now (i.e., as of December 19th 2009) seems to see higher-level properties as arising from complexa of lower-level properties. If so then emergentism lacks a sense of being as a kind of springboard for operation.

Resolved: to learn more about how emergence is understood before I criticize/praise it any more.

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