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I'm going to try to keep this short, because I always hate when people write long posts in these forums.

Like other people have mentioned, I think this paper does a great job of essentially describing the progression of the Emergence course. The argument is logical, well-reasoned, and relatively straightforward.

I do, however, have the same nagging doubts and feelings of skepticism about it that I think we've had about emergence all along: everything seems too easy. (This is not a criticism of the paper, but rather a criticism of popular conceptions of western science that have existed since the scientific revolution.) Reading the paper, I often thought, "Okay, this all seems good. But what about... everything else? What about the non-emergent science we've been doing for centuries?"

Clearly, we are so used to deterministic, foundationalist science that it is hard to imagine anything else. As Wolfram wrote in "A New Kind of Science," we are trained to think that things must be hopelessly complicated, and to suggest that they are simpler is tantamount to treason. Hopefully, more papers like this will help to give emergence the foothold it deserves in the cutthroat world of scientific research.

My favorite part of the paper dealt with emergence as it relates to education. I fully agree that it makes sense to connect emergent ideas to theories of education. I think such an idea is far less controversial than other aspects of emergence; there have always been critics of "skill"-based education, from John Dewey to Paolo Freire. Perhaps, as standardized testing become more and more pervasive, people will rise up against the pedagogy of mandatory "schooling," and if they do, perhaps they will realize that such ideas are equally applicable to other scientific disciplines.

Guess this ended up being kind of long after all.