Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is complex''. Thus, understanding emergence and complexity should benefit the study of living systems. It can be said that life emerges from the interactions of complex molecules. But how useful is this to understand living systems? Artificial life (ALife) has been developed in recent decades to study life using a synthetic approach: build it to understand it. ALife systems are not so complex, be them soft (simulations), hard (robots), or wet (protocells). Then, we can aim at first understanding emergence in ALife, for then using this knowledge in biology. I argue that to understand emergence and life, it becomes useful to use information as a framework. In a general sense, I define emergence as information that is not present at one scale but is present at another scale. This perspective avoids problems of studying emergence from a materialist framework, and can be also useful in the study of self-organization and complexity.
翻译：即便在古代时代就使用了类似出现的概念,我们也缺乏一个一致的定义。然而,出现被确定为复杂系统的主要特征之一。多数人会同意“生活是复杂的”这一说法。因此,理解出现和复杂性应该有利于生命系统的研究。可以说,生命产生于复杂的分子的相互作用。但是,这对理解生活系统有多么有用?近几十年来,人造生命(ALife)已经发展成一个合成方法来研究生命:构建它来理解它。生命系统并不那么复杂,是软的(模拟)、硬的(机器人)或湿的(protocles)。然后,我们可以着眼于首先了解“生活”中的出现,然后在生物学中使用这种知识。我说,了解生命和生命,将信息作为一个框架是有用的。从广义上讲,我把出现定义为不是在一个尺度上存在,而是在另一个尺度上存在的信息。这种观点避免了从物质学框架中研究出现的问题,也可以用于自我组织和复杂性的研究。
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