Did Democritus believe in emergent properties?
Some might interpret the complexity arising from simple atoms as a form of emergence. While I did not use such a term, my system certainly accounts for the qualitative differences we perceive in the world arising from the quantitative differences in the arrangement and motion of atoms. A single atom is simple, but a multitude of them, interacting in specific ways, can produce what we experience as hardness, sweetness, or heat. The apparent qualitative changes are thus a consequence of underlying quantitative, atomic rearrangements.
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