Jacob's Escalator
In the Genesis there is this story of a dream known as Jacob's ladder. Many interpretation of this dream have been proposed. I remark that in the dream are depicted angels in a constant motion: they are ascending and descending the ladder between the heaven and earth.
Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
Genesis 28:11-12
I interpret it as an allegory of the dialectic between the objective reality and the realm of ideas. My metaphysical understanding being that both worlds have to interact (through will and observation) permamently. One cannot rely on an ossified mental world (aka the Science is settled) and have to constantly act on the world and to think about it, back and forth. Again and again, in a never ending loop. Will can, and does, modify the world but within limits (typically the so called "laws of nature"). Where is this limit exactly is not clear. And it is our duty to figure out where it is. This is why there is this constant exploration on the Jacob's Ladder.
IT has changed the relationships between objects and ideas. The change is deep. It is not only our everyday lives that have changed. Our conceptual apparatus of how we understand our place in the universe also has been impacted. This is a shock whom significance is in the ballpark of the one that the scientific method produced.
The Emergence of Emergence, Reductionism, Evolution and all that
One of the hardest challenge in science is to be able to shift scales meaningfully. It is well known that the physics of the very small (quantum mechanics) and of the very large (say generalized relativity) do not really go well together: consider for instance the problem of time. The search of a convincing unified theory is still an open question. On the biological front we can witness the same issues: moving from basic biochemistry stuff (like Kreb’s cycle) to life is not an easy task. Understanding comprehensively how the chemistry of a single cell works is already a daunting problem, but understanding how it has implication for the whole organism is just another level.
This kind of challenge can be seen all across the board. In medecine for instance: the effect of an antibiotics is very well understood at the level of the Petri dish. It becomes more complex when it is used to cure a sickness into an actual person: you have to consider side effects, and what does it do exactly in the body is not clear: because it is incorporated in the body, how the interactions with the targeted bacteria happen is hard to understand etc. Now if you zoom out again: what is the effect of the use of antibiotics at the level of a population, it is a whole new question. The fact that bugs develop resistance set up a whole new level of questioning and of policies: are the sicks of today more/less important than the sicks of tomorrow ?
Similar problems occur in economy: from local optimization (which are basically pure maths: there is a function cost to optimize under given constraints) to a "good" global economy (good with relation to what ? Environment, inequalities, durability etc.)...
One way to circumvent the attached conceptual problems is to use the blanket idea of emergence. Let us consider the case of physics for illustrative purpose. As a physicist you think that everything that happens in the universe is measurable and as such has a material expression somehow. When you have to justify how it explains life you start to wave hands in the air saying something like : "Yes we know the basic interactions between the elementary components of the universe, but for living entities the Schrödinger equation is too complex to be solved. But believe me life emerges out of the fundamental equations describing how matter interact". Why not ? But it appears to me as a leap of a faith of the same nature as the one about the belief in God's existence. Even describing complex, but not in the realm of life, phenomenons like an avalanche, out of the basic interactions between snowflakes doesn't work really well. At some points it is going to be to costly, from a computational point of view, and you will abstract some subphenomenons just to be able to actually do the math.
Typically those problems happen when a model that works well for scale A is applied for scale B. Emergence is the marker term that you are using a tool outside of the range for which it was designed for. Believing that it has to work outside of this range is just a leap of faith. Social media offers a startling counter example.
Anisotropy of information flow
An extreme experience of scale shifting took place at the end of 2022. Elon Musk tried to adress the twitter crowd directly.
It was very different from the Donald Trump experiment. Trump used Twitter to circumvent legacy media to directly talk to the voters. It was a one way street. Trump was talking shit and not really listening, at least not directly, to the swarm reactions. The Elon Musk experiment was a two way street. He had a lot of interactions via polls and back and forth discussion with users. Inevitably it went wrong. He censored an account publishing the location of his private jet, and banned users because they put links to other social media accounts. Both of the decisions that ensued were understandable from a personal/coroporate point of view, but completely out of touch at the same time. This is where you can witness that the flow of information has not the same properties when going from the swarm to the individual and vice versa. The image of the Hydra may come to mind.
“Never apologize to the mob” is folk knowledge in our digitized culture. It is actually a good tactical point but it is more than that. A mob is not a human. Speaking to the mob is not the same as speaking to an individual. You can’t have a meaninful discussion with a swarm. It appears that you can, because it is technically possible to send a message to every member of the swarm but it doesn’t react as you expect. Even if you use polls to agregate the answers as Elon Musk tried. There is no subtlety nor middle ground to be found. It is not a conversation at all. It rather looks like a permanent strength contest. The scale shifting issue is fully at work here.
Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.”
Mark 5:9
Google Earth Effect
I have spent so many hours using interactive maps and Google Earth kind of things. I was always fascinated by maps when I was young. If you give me a list of cities to memorize I will envision the trip between them to remember the sequence. But this technology, together with the new habits we so easily got used to, you know using fingers to zoom in/zoom out (by the way it didn’t exist just 15 years ago weird no?) , are deeply misleading. They make you forget that shifting scales is a very difficult enterprise. Likewise it has never been that easy to access statistical data and “use” it at a particular level. But thinking doesn’t appear to work that way. When TV anchors switch from statistics to personnal recommandations (on how to be a good citizen in light of the “problème du jour”) is an illusionist trick.
It is not clear exactly what can be conclude out of all this. A first idea is that things are not what they appear to be. We all know that forever, but it is even truer in the digital world. A second idea is that IT makes scale shifting particularly easy: from the statistics to the individual via smartphones. Maybe we should have visible signs, just like the ones surrounding advertisments (at least in french TV), to make it clear that such a process is ongoing. A kind of warning.