| Sumario: | Emergence is often defined in terms of dependence, autonomy, and/or novelty. However, the debate surrounding the emergence of spacetime in quantum gravity has typically proceeded without much clarity regarding the definition of emergence and how dependence, novelty, and autonomy are to be understood in this context. To shed light on this, I introduce some desiderata for emergence criteria in quantum gravity, namely (i) avoiding spatiotemporal presuppositions, (ii) accommodating both flat and hierarchical emergence cases, (iii) clarity and precision and (iv) metaphysical neutrality. Then I compare three main approaches to defining dependence, novelty, and/or autonomy, two of which are present in the existing spacetime emergence literature. These are, firstly, various approaches that define emergence in terms of the elimination of degrees of freedom (Bain 2013a, 2013b, Wilson 2020, Crowther 2018), and secondly, Crowther’s, (2021, 2022) view. Then, a third approach, which defines emergence primarily in terms of conditional probability (Franklin 2024, Franklin and Robertson 2024), that has yet to be applied to the spacetime emergence problem, is introduced and applied to key quantum gravity cases. I argue that, unlike the other views, this third option fulfils all the desiderata and is the most generally applicable of the options discussed here.
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