emergence

The word emergence has become more and more relevant, of late. People talk about the modern world again and again; the changes it has wrought continue to permeate the everyday. Starbucks coffee cups littering the streets and desktops. Asphalt blanketing the surface of the urban landscape. More cars, more public transportation, more plane routes, more, more, more production in general, expansion is the key to survival, those things which fail are simply absorbed into a constantly growing and shifting organism. Like life, always evolving, though unlike life, it is composed of many parts which are inorganic. And yet, they were produced by an organic substance. In a sense, the organic and inorganic parts form a whole when they interact, and thus to the eye which transcends viewing man from the perspective of himself in order to see the whole, this distinction becomes... unhelpful. Meaningless. Same thing.

An addendum to this, as it bothers me slightly. We talk about natural and artificial, but it is only a egotistical distinction. We are the products of our environment as much as anything else. The changed man has wrought on the world are fast, yes, but in the end everything must be reduced to what is natural.
In any case, perhaps it may prove a useful distinction in a less encompassing sense. So let us continue to use this pair of words, artificial-natural.

Returning to emergence. So we see a society which moves forwards, towards something, growing constantly, often violently, but such is all evolution. There are changes which are positive for the organism, which it embraces, and there are changes which are negative, which it strives to correct, and there are changes which seem to serve no purpose at all, or perhaps once served a purpose and no longer do, as does the appendix of man.

To use a biological metaphor, these are the precise interactions that one can label, mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism. The first is a cobeneficial interaction between two organisms, the second is an interaction where one species benefits from the relationship, and the third is one in which one species benefits and the other is harmed.

And yet these organisms themselves are a chaos of conflicting forces. Surely thousands of little processes occur every second inside a sparrow, some beneficial to its general well-being, many not, and yet as a whole the sparrow functions. And then, when we back off a few steps, we can see how the sparrow's interfacing with other organisms creates larger relationships.

We should not strive to understand the higher level in terms of the lower. It simply does not help much; for we have already come to understand the higher resolution intuitively. So what if a person lies 1% of the time, though the system is fallible, it still works, and so... we can generally speaking come to trust this person. So what if we don't understand every little process which brings to pass the birth of a ladybug, we still know that releasing a swarm of them over a crop will cause an aphid invasion some trouble.

Well there are problems with the above idea of course.

Self-sustainability is a word which comes to mind. The idea that there are systems which can preserve their processes longer than others. And yet what we forget when we talk about this is that there is a constant war going on for some limited resource. In order to realize self-sustainability, there must be a "giving-up" of autonomy. That is why the human organism, homo sapiens, is both a perfect example of self-sustainability and not. If you look at the organism itself in contrast to its environment, we can see that with its ability to project far into the future, and map the world and cosmos surrounding it, that it can plan for all sorts of contingencies. Indeed, this organism is perhaps the most self-sustainable organism as compared to any other in the world, from this perspective.

And yet from another perspective not at all. For we forget that by creating all of this "knowledge" the world has changed irreversibly. Indeed, the world and all of its biological components form a superorganism which has ran rampant. The production of knowledge has deeply affected it, for knowledge has far reaching implications. It has drained lakes, killed species, spawned wars, allowed for the unleashing of nuclear fission on the planet's surface...

Yes indeed, the very act of thought, has become more powerful than any mere physical process...

But to return to emergence. We are still in a process of evolution of course. We are in the process, to be more precise, of continually giving up our autonomy. Now there may be something intrinsic to the property of thought which may prevent a giving up of autonony to the extent that we find in the cells which make up a larger organism. But... on a whole, we are losing autonomy.

You could say something like, but wait! Today man has the ability to visit just about any country or island in the world to visit, and explore! Is that not more autonomous than what we had in say, the medieval ages?

Haha. That's funny. Think about the last place you visited. Think about the tourist industry, and all the lines forming like little self-governing processes as you wait to get onto the plane, or purchase a meal at a local restaurant, or waiting to get into a museum. Think of the beaches and all the hundreds of other people there.

You are not autonomous. You are taking part in a process which is much larger than you. Your choice of visiting this particular tourist destination was only made possible due to the channels of knowledge which have been constructed in society. Yes, the map of the world is a fairly objective instrument. It looks pretty much the same whether you look at it in the US or in China, except the spellings of each country seem slightly different. And yet, let me remind you, that this is not the world we are looking at. It is a representation of the world. And what you have in your mind is a representation of the world, too, after having learned how to navigate it. Because quite clearly you don't know your way around the world. Try navigating a foreign downtown city you've never been in before. I'm not saying find your way home, which is a simpler matter when one takes into account certain built-in systems of communication and self-localisation, but rather, try to find your way to the nearest supermarket, to the nearest government building, to the nearest...
Don't you see how lost we all are? We can see a map of the world, but all our representations depend on the workings of the system. We need to stop and ask for directions, consult a map.

It was similar before, I suppose, we used more primitive signs. Look for water by following the dry ravines downstream. Find a spring by following a river upstream. Etcetera. But the difference here is that all of these understandings of the world, these conceptualizations, are all bouncing off each other, feeding off each other, and producing in the end, a system which is incredibly dependent on its own mechanisms, streamlined and all.

The tourist depends on the tourist industry for finding his way around, for having a bed to sleep at night, for finding exotic food which he enjoys, and the tourist industry depends on the tourist for money so that it can also thrive.

But wait, you may say. That doesn't mean I'm giving up all my autonomy. We each are unique human beings. We can each choose an occupation and objective in life, we can pursue the arts, we can philosophize about things which don't even seem to matter!

Haha. Well there are some commensalistic and parasitic aspects to the system. The professional philosopher of say aesthetics may have a very mild impact upon the societal organism. But he is taking advantage of the system. He is what some may consider a parasite, feeding off its products, and enjoying a fulfilled existence himself without contributing in turn. These are not my perspectives, but they are perspectives held by certain parts of the system. Certain individuals think these things. And so you see what we have here is a conflict within the system.

But the philosophers are a part of their own system now. There are many of them, and they feed each other with their ideas, written and orally expressed, and they produce, produce, produce so much information, which richochets off other disciplines sometimes, and so we get a kind of interaction, which is insufficient to kill the entire organism clearly, and thus is not persuasively negative, at least not enough to justify exterminating the entire system such as it exists today. Indeed, perhaps it may eventually bring to pass a very positive effect. Who can tell?

The same goes for all processes, for all systems. Who can tell what time will bring? Who can look at the beginnings of history and expect all the stories which have come to pass since?

And yet, there are many things we can tell. We can look at the system as a whole. We can see the patterns falling into place, the people giving up their autonomies, so influenced by their cultures and environments. I can tell, when looking at a line in front of a museum, that the second person in line will follow the first person in line.

We are giving up our autonomy because we are creating a system which caters to more and more of us. We have to integrate ourselves into the system in order to succeed; we have to be mutualistic to demonstrate our usefulness.

And yet, funnily enough, there are also just some of us who only want to sit in the corner and philosophize.