 Many sciences treating complex systems of one or other variety have undergone extensive and impressive development in the last fifty years. Theorists in these disciplines freely use terms such as “emergence” and “top-down causation” to describe the phenomena they study. It is often unclear, however, whether they are best interpreted as describing weakly or strongly emergent states and associated behavior. Among those who have reflected recently on the state of their discipline, solid state physicist Laughlin (2005), systems biologists Noble (2006) and Boogerd (Boogerd et al. 2005, 2007), and neuroscientist Walter Freeman (1999, 2000) and cosmologist Ellis (2016) appear to advocate strongly emergentist accounts of aspects of solid state physics, biological life, and the human mind, respectively. They argue that the pertinent sciences encompassing these domains give equal, complementary places to “bottom up” and “top down” determinants and principles, and argue that we cannot understand the latter as themselves ultimately fixed by instances of the former. The general thrust of their detailed arguments is that there is no fully “bottom up” way to describe, let alone explain, certain organized phenomena. See also Ellis, Noble, and O’Connor (2012) for a collection of state-of-the-art overviews of the interaction of top-down and bottom-up principles in numerous scientific domains, from fundamental physics to sociology.