What Future Am I Supposed To Buy?

Canadian Budget Day. Lots of talking heads on the television today.

Frankly, I'm bewildered by the budget. Tax cuts and home renovation credits? What am I supposed to do with that? An economist shows up on the CBC to sum it up, "Consumers need to get out there and start spending." Give me a break!

To be honest, I was expecting something completely different. We had quite a scary ride last year, with gas prices spiking up to $1.50 per litre, food riots breaking out all over the world, melting polar ice caps. But I must have missed the memo, since all those concerns seem to have disappeared recently, only to be replaced by the fear that I'm dragging the global economy down the drain through my avoidance of the big aisles at Home Depot.

I guess I have a somewhat different idea of how I should spend my money, and I was fervently hoping that the government would be able to help. My money-plan technique goes something like this:

1. Imagine the sort of world you would like to leave to your children. Make it pedestrian-friendly with a strong sense of both local and global community. Make it run on something other than oil, natural gas, or coal. Make it durable, and something you can be proud of.

2. Now, determine the types of things you will need to buy, build, or invent to make this happen.

That's more-or-less how I see the budget process. I was thinking about home solar power buy-back programs, support for community gardens, green urban alleyways, energy efficiency initiatives, community geothermal subsidies, LEED building standards, etc, etc.

And don't think I'm just spouting hippy nonsense here. I'm very much the capitalist. Feed-in tariffs in Germany have created a renewable energy sector with 170,000 jobs. We could have the same in Canada.

Instead, what did I get? "Here's $350 -- go buy yourself a new kitchen sink."

Sheesh...

I'll leave you with a good little video, which does a great job of presenting how I feel about buying more stuff. Hey, Mr. Harper -- I don't want more stuff, I want a FUTURE!

Toss Me in the Stew and Give it a Stir

My last post was intended to be a brief primer on emergence, but I haven't yet said what causes emergent behavior. One defining characteristic of emergence is that the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. But what causes this to happen?

It boils down to two things: diversity and interconnectedness. If all of the bits of me were the same, I would not be human. I would be more like a sponge. Or some giant patch of mold. And if all the bits of me were not interconnected, I would not be able to accomplish the dance of coordination which results in my fingers typing this sentence.

The same holds true for any type of emergent phenomenon. The structure of cities, the behavior of corporations, the explosion of life on this planet -- all of it depends on a diverse pot of ingredients mixed together in a complex interconnected stew. Too much uniformity or not enough mixing, and the resultant dish is a dull unimaginative gruel. However, if you can manage the right balance of individuality and community, entirely unpredictable yet wonderful things can happen. This isn't just nice, poetic thinking; there's good solid math hiding behind these ideas.

So anyway, in the spirit of mixing it up a bit, I've finally joined Facebook. My music, movies, and books have all made the transition from the physical to the non-physical. Perhaps it was indeed time to join an online community as well. And perhaps it will give me some interesting, and shall we say emergent, ideas.

A Brief Primer on Emergence

I’m looking at my fingers as I type this, watching them go. Clickity-clack-clack. My fingers themselves don’t really know what’s going on. They’re just composed of a bunch of skin cells, tissues, nerves and bones. The individual cells that make up this system have no knowledge that my brain even exists. They are just responding to their immediate surroundings. My eyes are equally clueless, looking at my fingers. My neck muscles merely pointed them in the direction of my hands, after which they dutifully responded to the different wavelengths of light hitting them.

At this point, most people say that, well, my brain knows what's going on. My brain is purposefully orchestrating all of the activity which is going into typing this blog. But even the neurons that are directing the show can’t really be said to “know” what’s going on. Each one is just responding to its environment, much like the nerves in my fingers did when telling my muscles to contract to type this sentence. Chemicals build up on the surface of the neuron’s synapses, triggering an electrical pulse that travels down the length of the neuron, releasing more chemicals on the other end. Pulse, pulse, clickity-clack, lungs breathe and heart beats, and off I blog!

And that, my friends, is emergence.

Each of the trillions of cells in my body, by themselves, has no consciousness whatsoever. And yet I am much more than just a collection of cells; I am a human being. The whole is much, much more than the sum of its parts. It is something completely different. This "new thing" emerges from the complexity of the interaction of the elements in the system, and not from the elements themselves. What's more, the emergent behavior is nearly impossible to predict. It's miraculous.

I'll be coming back to this theme often over the next few months, because it is my goal to at least describe some of the forces which create new emergent behaviors, both positive and negative. For, just as I've emerged from a mess of cells (I was, after all, the size of the dot on top of an 'i' when I first started out...), what we call civilization has similarly emerged from an unorganized mess of people. Time to open up our eyes to the bigger picture.