Work and Emergent Properties, Growth and Nature & Harry Potter.

The Modern World is very much based on some fundamental features of the world.

Isn't it interesting that the key idea that came about through the Farming Revolution was the idea of "growth on investments." You plough a field, plant and seed and sit back and watch the profit come in.

Nothing has changed in 4000 years. Except now those with assets plant them in the stock market, buy the political class to ensure they always promote economic growth (even at the expense of the working population and the planet), and then sit back and reap the harvest. Except where once it was plants growing the fields, since the dawn of Capitalism it is people working who generate the growth. And thereby started the exploitation of people which is the essence of the modern world.

Another fundamental thing is Emergent Properties. Mankind really is fascinated by this illusion and spend all their time making and buying things to enjoy the illusion. Much as modern humans love watching media be that books or films or youtube. They know it isn't real but they love the illusion.

But working is at least as old and is the illusion at the heart of materialism. We go to the cake shop, see previous post, and get all excited about what the baker has been working on. Somehow the baker takes that flour, eggs, butter and sugar and puts them in an oven to create this wonderful new things.

It's the same down the electronics shop. People take metals and silicon and conjure up these amazing electronics like phones and computers which are unlike anything the world has ever seen. And yet the raw materials like the cake are all that are really there. But the illusion is so captivating that humans are prepared to spend their whole waking lives working to make new illusory things and their free time consuming these illusions.

After all these millennia we are as hooked as ever. We even named one of our ancestors Homo habilis because the most notable thing about this hominid is that it made tools and could make things. The beginnings of the world of illusions had started, and we jump at the chance to recognise that.

Now there is nothing "wrong" with illusions. They happen. But we should never take them to be "real." they are the emerging properties of certain arrangements, of causes and conditions so Buddhism describes it, and what come from nothing will return to nothing because it is nothing.

But its interesting in our thinking that what comes from a certain seed remains that seed even when it is no longer a seed and is a tree. We think dismissively oh that grew from an acorn, it is an oak. And somehow those 3 letters are supposed to replace this extraordinary organism that may live for 1000 years. Likewise we actually miss the deep illusion of cake in many ways. We know there is no magic. We know there are recipe books, and we know bakers can do this trick. Its like seeing the Magician at a fair. We know there is no real magic, they just hide how they do it. Likewise at a restaurant of amazing foods we know there is no magic, we believe we could watch the chef and learn how to do the trick to create this wonderful food. But actually we are happy to pay our money and be a bit dazzled by the illusion so created. But never so dazzled as to see how completely extraordinary making something is. In fact even the chef does not really know how they do it. They have just studied certain combinations and with experience and practice they can do it again and again. But ask them how and its like riding a bike. I have no idea, it just happens. Perhaps a Chemist may study the chemical and explain why certain things create certain flavours. Like heating ginger to 120oC creates a lot of tasty zingerone a taste we really like. But however we rationalise it we cannot explain away the fact that a qualitative change occurs and the new quality comes from no where. Zingerone is qualitatively different from Gingerol and heat. A cake is qualitatively different from its ingredients and heat. If they were the same we would ignore the baker and just eat the raw ingredients. But you could never guess what a cake was like if you saw the raw materials. It must actually be made for us to know what cake is, no recipe is enough by itself. This fundamental magic of emergent property is a magic that mankind is still, perhaps more than ever, enthralled by. No need for Harry Potter the true magic of the world is as vivid and enthralling as ever before.

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Altho I add one thing. Bhutan launched its first TV station BBS in 1999. The first broadcast was an address by the King reminding the people of Bhutan that the images this machine made were just impermanent illusion and that they must be careful not to confuse them with reality and worse to become attached to them. I understand that within a year the crops were failing cos the farmers were too busy catching up with a Russian soap opera that had taken the country by storm.

This ability to capture reality in shadowy images says a huge amount about how the brain works and how reality is constructed. But the fact that we get trapped by the illusions also says a lot about how little we understand about the nature of reality.