Emergent properties

This has been a long time coming! It has been discussed before but just want to provide a clear discussion...

It is obvious to anyone that miracles happen all the time. You mix flour, butter and sugar and put in the oven and somehow this inedible mix becomes delicious biscuits. Where does this "delicious" form come from? There is nothing in a biscuit except flour, butter and sugar yet with some heat these change.

I've argued before with chairs. There is nothing in a pile of chair parts that is not in a chair, yet the "orientation" makes one a useful chair and one a useless pile. What is "orientation"? Does it actually exist? Is it worth wanting?

We may pay a large some of money for what is essentially just wood and labour. Is labour anymore real than orientation? If so what is it made from?

We accept in normal every day thinking that most of the world exists but isn't made from anything. "Money" exists yet what is it made from? When someone is described as a billionaire, what is the stuff that makes him such?

We live therefore in an odd world. There are real things like food. And there are completely imaginary things like unicorns. And then there are the majority of things in between that are not real like unicorns, yet we use them every day. What are these things? In religions they are called "illusions". They look real, we use them all the time: yet when you investigate them you find there is nothing there.

The odd things is that absolutely evereything turns out to be an illusion! But this is a seriously profound point to take on board all at once if it is new - so don't try.

In science they are called as best as I can see: "emergent properties". Thus when you arrange a chair in a certain configuration the forces interact to create an upright structure you can sit on. Now when we claim this seat as ours and pay money for it: we are not actually owning the wood or the configuration but the emergent property of a seat. When it is stolen and we feel sad, we are feeling sad not for the loss of wood or even the configuration, but for the loss of the emergent property. Altho really we may feel sad for what the loss represents rather than the loss: like someone disrespecting us etc which are even more emergent things.

If we had a Ikea flat pack of a chair and someone stole that : again it is not the flat pack we will miss but the chair which is just the same thing in a different orientation - yet we do see a difference.

So our lives are governed not by real things, but the cinema projection of emergent "things" that we place on top of the world. Like in the previous post about animal "types" versus the individual animals: we see "types" everywhere even while in reality there is just an endless flow of reality.

So don't we starve if we don't eat. Food is not an illusion. Yes and no. Food as a nutrient is not an illusion. We can find food in extraordinary places like uncooked flour and even human bodies. But we overlay on top of food the emergent properties of cooked, uncooked and nice, nasty etc. Eating of human bodies is probably not a sign of enlightenment however unless it is done without preference, in which case there is plenty of other food about so it won't happen.

It will take me many years to let all this sink in, like it has taken the best part of 10 years to get this far! But certainly the issue of "things" being a part of mind and not being part of reality which is characterised by a steady timeless flow is becoming clearer... and hopefully as Buddha promised such understanding leads to liberation and an end to suffereing!