> This dual condition of "useful-to-people" is the thing introducing the illusion, since it changes depending on what we're modelling. The system isnt acquring

> This dual condition of "useful-to-people" is the thing introducing the illusion, since it changes depending on what we're modelling. The system isnt acquring any new property. I have a couple of possible responses to this, but maybe the most obvious is that I'm not sure why "useful to people" can't qualify as a new property. For instance, a system that suddenly becomes useful to people can be transformative to society, which can lead to new emergent social or economic properties at the societal scale. To conclude that "useful to people" is not a meaningful property, aren't you basically implying that something that suddenly becomes useful cannot even in principle lead to new societal scale emergent properties? That seems dubious. Edit: or you're implying that emergent properties are not reducible to interactions between constituent properties, which also seems dubious. For a concrete example, the internet probably falls into this category. It has transformed society and led to new emergent properties at societal scales, but computers didn't suddenly acquire any new computational properties, or new properties to manipulate bits. Only the scale of their deployment changed, and that scaling was itself useful to people, and this led to new societal properties. That arguably can't happen unless "useful to people" is itself a meaningful property, no?