We humans are so accustomed to accounting for motives, that the unveiling of the true components of the social space may elude us, and so we may come to say that the social space emerges from it’s component parts by virtue of some unseen force, but this would be to attribute something natural to something wholly inexistent. The causes are spread over what we perceive as many layers of understanding, from chemistry to interaction at higher levels, such as that between people. However I no longer believe that the social space is something more than it’s component parts, only that the parts are hard to come by. To put it simply; spatial and chronological organisation, mirror neurons, a lot of carbon and it’s sustenance. All of these items are spread so far apart, that they are not intuitively kept in the same thought at once.
Even harder for us to contemplate, would be the organisation of knowledge, which is the most abstract of things. Contrary to information, knowledge has some internal organisation which we may find in the brains of men, and this knowledge interacts opposed to what is popular belief, with great difficulty, but sufficiently effectively to form upon it self layers of interaction. Even harder than with atoms and people is it to trace the placement of the words, as they zip through the air on invisible pressure waves. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
And so all the items on our list ad up to become exactly that figure which we should expect. But that doesn’t mean that “emergence” as a word, is entirely useless.The oxford English dictionary reveals it to mean; “move out of, or away from something, and become visible”. The components of which we speak must still be there, and the new phenomenon may well be said to have emerged from the old.
Photo curtesy of PhotonQ-Green Connections
http://www.flickr.com/photos/photonquantique/2044054903/
