Cognition: Great kudos to Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording! Emergence is all in situations like this. But if we had good models of complexity, the systems we could study with them would not be very complex, would they? Somewhere or other Seth Lloyd has… a paper?… a talk?… about how a system possessing “free will” is precisely one that you cannot understand but only observe—that the most energy- and information-efficient way for us to understand what it will do is to watch it and see:

Eric Hoel: Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is why: ‘The authors apply a suite of popular techniques from neuroscience to… the MOS 6502 microchip… [with] only 3,510 transistors… Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Pitfall…. Looking at the connectomics… performing “lesions”… analyzing… individual transistor behavior… [via] firing rates or tuning curves… averaging the chip’s activity into fMRI-like voxels… dimension reduction and Granger causality. Many pretty graphs…. The conclusions were utterly obscure…. The 98 “lesions” that led to the unique failure of Donkey Kong!… An equivalent result in the brain would net a Nature paper for some hungry young graduate student…. You’d never be able to derive a single thing about barrel-throwing or bananas from the knowledge… <