I don't consider causal intention to be part of the definition of emergence. Whether through spontaneous evolution or engineering, I think any complex system likely has emergent properties or phenomena. To me, emergence is broad and includes everything from the cascading order of an avalanche to flocking behavior of birds or the standing waves in the morning rush hour; the chill under a clear night sky to cooling effects of perspiration or the heat pump in my refrigerator.
My take on emergence is that it is deeply mired in observation. A complex system does complex behavior. An observer recognizes patterns of behavior and forms an abstraction of identity to distinguish a certain pattern as a characteristic of the system. In some observer-less sense, the complex behaviors are certainly there. But, the semantic boundaries of what is a behavior, what identifies it as a persistent thing that can have emerged or not depending on the current state of the system... those are illusory concepts declared by the observer.
I don't consider causal intention to be part of the definition of emergence. Whether through spontaneous evolution or engineering, I think any complex system likely has emergent properties or phenomena. To me, emergence is broad and includes everything from the cascading order of an avalanche to flocking behavior of birds or the standing waves in the morning rush hour; the chill under a clear night sky to cooling effects of perspiration or the heat pump in my refrigerator.
My take on emergence is that it is deeply mired in observation. A complex system does complex behavior. An observer recognizes patterns of behavior and forms an abstraction of identity to distinguish a certain pattern as a characteristic of the system. In some observer-less sense, the complex behaviors are certainly there. But, the semantic boundaries of what is a behavior, what identifies it as a persistent thing that can have emerged or not depending on the current state of the system... those are illusory concepts declared by the observer.