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Emergence has been a course unlike any other I've taken. I think the opportunity it gave for us to explore our own ideas and questions about 42 has been invaluable. The emergence approach of creating simple models to generate complex results is extremely powerful, but it is enough of a departure from scientific methods we know (and has powerful enough implications) that it leads us to problematize both conventional scientific perspectives and the emergent perspective. While there was never really a question as to whether emergent phenomena existed, we certainly struggled with the implications; that all we need to study are 1d CAs, that we exist in a purely physical universe, that consciousness may not be as ridiculously complicated as some believe.

I do think it's interesting that emergence is not a particularly new idea (at least from what I know). More like an old idea that only came back into fashion recently. Still, it's a novel way of approaching all sorts of topics and I intend to do some modeling in my thesis work next year. Partly this is because emergence simplifies the process of combining separate disciplines into a theory by allowing us to simply construct a model rather than worrying about the theoretical implications of what we want to study.