This is an unformed thought, but to me the philosophy of emergence, intelligence and deep learning have something to do with each other. In emergent systems, you have a stack of levels of phenomena, and you can describe the phenomena at one level without reference to the details of the lower levels. It&#x27;s like those details have been blurred out and you&#x27;re left with a compressed representation with just enough information to be useful at the new level (e.g. pixels-&gt;edges, renormalization in physics). The success of architectures with multiple layers, including bottlenecks in layer size, seems very similar, and show that this is a good way to look at the world.<p>This seems to be quite a natural way that humans see the world, and in fact we might not think of something that doesn&#x27;t behave this way as being intelligent -- we want there to be some sort of compressed &#x27;trick&#x27; that doesn&#x27;t just brute force the data.