This couldn’t be farther from the truth though. As in, I don’t think any place I’ve even been to would count as a megacity. Let alone where I live. The way I s

This couldn’t be farther from the truth though. As in, I don’t think any place I’ve even been to would count as a megacity. Let alone where I live. The way I see it is that emergence is not an agent. More like some basic law of nature. Think about planned gardens and suburbs versus natural forests and medieval city centers. You can mow your lawn every week, expend obscene amounts of water during the summer, pour everything with herbicides in a misguided effort to have the perfect lawn, but the moment you stop doing it, nature takes over and introduces a fractal amount of complexity in just a few seasons. In my opinion an old forest where nature has been let alone for some time is much more beautiful and interesting than any planned garden, and a medieval city centre much more beautiful and interesting than any planned neighborhood. And then, emergence explaining our civilization doesn’t necessarily imply that you don’t have agency as an individual. It just says that the total of whatever we collectively do, irrespective of if we’re compelled to do it, or have free will, results in more than just the sum of individual parts.