I've always thought of emergence as "a behavior at scale which is unintuitive or difficult to predict given understanding of a lesser scale". More specifically

I've always thought of emergence as "a behavior at scale which is unintuitive or difficult to predict given understanding of a lesser scale". More specifically, I think "emergence" is more about the blind spots we have as meat calculators than something magical, unless you ascribe to the notion of "magic" as "something sufficiently advanced or complex as to be difficult to understand", in which case I think actually yeah, emergence is magical behavior from that perspective.