  We argue that the mathematical structure, enabling certain cascading and
emergent phenomena to intuitively emerge, coincides with Galois connections. We
introduce the notion of generative effects to formally capture such phenomena.
We establish that these effects arise, via a notion of a veil, from either
concealing mechanisms in a system or forgetting characteristics from it. The
goal of the work is to initiate a mathematical base that enables us to further
study such phenomena. In particular, generative effects can be further linked
to a certain loss of exactness. Homological algebra, and related algebraic
methods, may then be used to characterize the effects.
