>not some magical word if you don't know how something works.

I'd disagree, emergence is typically what we don't understand. When we understand it, it's rarely considered an emergent concept, just something that is.

>They don't offer a scientific explanation.

Correct, because we don't have the tooling necessary to explain it yet. Emergence as you stated came from simpler concepts at first, for example burning hydrogen and oxygen and water emerges from that.

Ecosystems are an emergent property of living systems, ones that we can explain rather well these days after we realized there were gaps in our knowledge. It's taken millions and millions of hours of research to piece all these bits together.

Now we are at the same place in large neural nets. What you say is pointless is not pointless at all. It's pointing at the exact things we need to work on if we want to have understanding of it. But at the same time understanding isn't necessary. We have made advancements in scientific topics that we don't understand.

> There's two kinds of emergence, one scientific

I am not aware of any scientific kind of emergence. There's philosophical emergence, and its counterpoint - ontological reductionism.

Most people have an intuitive sense that philosophical emergence is true, and that bubbles up in their writing, taken as an axiom that we're all supposed to go along with.

On closer inspection, it is not clear to me that this isn't simply a confusion or illusion caused by the tendency of the human mind to apply abstractions and socially constructed categories on top of complicated phenomena, and those abstractions are confused for actual effects that are different from the underlying base-level phenomena being described.

Nobody claims mistical gaps. There is no deus ex machina claim in emergence. However e.g. stable phenomena at a higher model level might be fully dynamic at a lower level model.