▨ recognition and emergence

"There are two ways of talking about 'emergent results' ... One way is to think of it as an outcome. ... The other way of thinking of emergent is to see it as a pattern. Mess around with some ingredients and eventually they take the form of something you recognize as a chocolate cake. Or evolve from one form of biological life to another to another and eventually you end up with something you recognize as a rabbit. That's what I think Dennett means. It's important to understand this distinction, I think, because it helps us understand the 'suddenness' of the emergence of language (or consciousness, or any of the other phenomena we are discussing). When you are manipulating a pattern of entities, order may 'suddenly' appear out of chaos, but what changed suddenly (suddenness) was not the pattern of entities but rather our perception of them." (source section 12)