It is human beings who recognise the principle of emergence. Emergence is not a physical thing. It is just a human categorisation of complex patterns of physical reactions which give some recognised functionality, and this entirely driven by natural reactions of physical elements to previous events - no control involved, just inevitable reactions to previous events. How can any form of control or manipulation exist in such a scenario unless there is external interaction from something which is not the result of previous physically induced events?
Emergence is a phenomenon of nature and a property of complex systems. 'Physical', is irrelevant to the concept, as are human beings, complex systems exhibited emergent properties before humans came along to understand them. Water always flowed before we came to understand fluid dynamics.
Claiming 'control' to be something 'external' is just an abdication of our potential to understand complex phenomena. All this does is relocate the phenomenon to a black box in some other realm of reality, beyond our ken, thus trivially relieving ourselves of the effort involved to build understanding. If you are not prepared to conceptualise how things work inside that black box then it gets us no further forward at all. It is an exercise in evasion, a ploy.
When the dominant chimp exercises control over his family group, it does not help to imagine that adult chimps must therefore be supernatural or 'external'. Intentionality, will, desire, control, these are real phenomena of this world, not some external world somehow inexplicably intruding into our reality. When a chimp fashions a twig to make a tool to extract termites from a mound, its ingenuity, its intentionality, its hunger, these things have not derived from some other realm of reality, they are emergent properties of complex neural systems linking cause and effect, action and reaction, hunger to eating.
