The overall phenomenology of plasmas emerges from multiple couplings between processes on many different lengthscales and timescales, creating innumerable feedback loops. For example, overall energy confinement – the central emergent property for fusion – is governed by a selfconsistent loop involving: temperature, density, and current profiles extending from the extremely hot core to the cold edge; collective instabilities which are locally triggered when profile gradients exceed certain limits, and which draw their free energy from the profiles; the saturated turbulence which is driven by these instabilities; and the energy transport resulting from this turbulence, which in turn reacts back on the temperature and current profiles. This nonlinear feedback loop is built up from plasma processes which, individually, are nonlinear. Plasmas typically coexist with magnetic fields, whose energy density is often comparable to the thermal or bulk flow kinetic energies of the plasma. It follows that magnetic fields affect the system’s behaviour on all lengthscales and timescales from those of electron gyromotion to those characteristic of the entire system. Fusion plasma confinement properties thus emerge from self organisation within a complex system[1-3]; this fact was early recognised[4], but not always pursued energetically thereafter; for a recent review, see Ref.[5]. The need to quantify, interpret, predict, and control this emergent phenomenology is central to the mission of plasma physicists, whether for fusion or in the geospace environment.