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I was thinking about our discussion from last class and how I said I believed that specialness was a property of an emergent system.   I guess specialness implies a human observer which raises the question of whether something can be an emergent system without a human observer to describe it as special. Paul says that the problem with something emergent necessitating a human observer is that it implies that there were no emergent phenomena prior to the appearance of humans in the universe.  Well I believe that there were indeed no emergent phenomena before humans were present.  To consider something as an emergent system requires a human to describe it as such. Yes, we can say that there were emergent systems before we existed like weather phenomena for instance.  But a meteorological phenomenon is only that because we say it is....kind of like the tree falling in the woods with no one there to see or hear it.  In other words, emergence is a product of the human mind much like any other idea or abstract.  We can still talk about and learn about it because doing so can still be useful.  But without us here to describe ideas and phenomena, then they wouldn't exist.