I have been fascinated with this hobby since I played around with my Uncle's Pioneer Quadraphonic receiver in the early 70's. Music is my thing because I played instruments growing up. I am also an engineer and so I like the technical side of it and the satisfaction of successfully improving the sound.
I'm not totally buying into this emergence concept. I work with and design systems. So I will say this: Components working together make up a system, but the system characteristics can be described mathematically and predicted beforehand based on the behavior of the components and how they interact. When the results do not match prediction, then some complexity or variable has been overlooked, that's all. We can experiment with parts and guess at the empirical results and suggest some incalculable response has been achieved, but that is like assuming that someone who solves a Rubicks Cube has just performed some type of magic.
I'm not totally buying into this emergence concept. I work with and design systems. So I will say this: Components working together make up a system, but the system characteristics can be described mathematically and predicted beforehand based on the behavior of the components and how they interact. When the results do not match prediction, then some complexity or variable has been overlooked, that's all. We can experiment with parts and guess at the empirical results and suggest some incalculable response has been achieved, but that is like assuming that someone who solves a Rubicks Cube has just performed some type of magic.