Emergence is the closest thing to magic.

I’l try to explain “magic” to you now, but you may not understand it. ;P

First imagine how it looks to individual soldiers when they have to do some weird backwards move away from a vulnerable objective they just know they could take. It’s frustrating to them because they don’t know that getting the enemy to focus on escape at that one location opens up an even bigger opportunity elsewhere. We use compartmentalization to keep soldiers from being able to give away battle plans.

Why is this important? Because the first thing you need to understand is that complex larger and longer-term effects can be participated in by intelligent individuals that do not understand what they are particpating in. They can only see the trees, not the forest.

This requires a plan, however, right? Someone has to have planned it all out for something like this to occur, doesn’t it? The answer to that is a resounding no!

What if I told you conspiracies may be real but require no conspirators? What if I told you emergence can even occur inside a single mind; that what looks like a plan can occur without intention?

Blind cooperation occurs all the time.

Let’s say that there is a giant wall with a bar through it. Above it the bar is also connected to a bowl of fruit that could be knocked over if the bar was raised but the bar is too heavy for a single monkey to raise by himself.

If I’ve already shown my test monkeys other examples that were lighter, they’d naturally attempt to get the fruit by raising the bar but find it too heavy by themselves.

If, however, I have groups on both sides of the wall with the fruit pay off for both sides of the wall and then also have some sort of noticeable event like a loud buzzer that goes off every once in a while, something will happen. Randomly, the monkeys trying to raise the heavy bar will synchronize with each other and the beep and by cooperation they will receive the fruit. Without ever knowing they are cooperating with another monkey.

This happens in economies constantly.

These sort of blind interactions can become multi-layered and involve vast numbers of components. Unfortunately they can also result in the creating horrific consequences along with the benefits but that’s a discussion for another time. The important thing to understand is that opportunities arise apparently spontaneously but are factually a sort of aggregation of actions which are synchronized by some method.

The important thing to note is that the cause is not as much the linear chain of events as much as it is the timing or synchronization of them. This is not the normal way we think of causes.

This is why we think of emergence with magical thinking ideations like invisible hands of the market or god. It’s why we (still often) believe in creationism. We cannot see how simple benefit at smaller levels can lead to large scale organization and creation of systems.

Even the various system of a human mind can come together in a way to accomplish tasks that look intentional but require no intent and no plan.

Now how is this “magic” if it just happens on its own?

Because we can harness this power in a way that is like sorcery. We need not plan the individual events to create complex structured outcomes.

Do you think DNA is altered with very tiny tweezers? Yet we do it, right? How do we do it? We know how some circumstances will evolve and how various things will interact with each other and we just mix things together in the right amounts and at the right times.

This is the sort of magic carried out at the highest levels of governance when the intention is to destabilize a government we dislike etc. We take known components and mix them. We need not have finite details worked out for the components to interact in very particular ways. We simply mix the right solutions and the DNA is changed, no super-tiny tweezers required.

“That’s reliable for things like chemicals but people are way more variable! Your analogy is breaking down!”

For some things people are extremely variable; for others they are very reliable. When dealing with aggregates of people on things that are reliable, it’s like mixing chemicals. There are even factors of social influence that create a convergence towards the mean that allow you to ignore outliers and unlikely events. It’s much easier than it looks at first.

“I was more interested in a single person doing something like magic…”

Well, that’s possible for an extremely artistic mind, but not a pedantic one. They usually can’t even grasp these concepts because using imprecise methods looks like complete failure to them and is indeed a failure with hard things like mathematics and electronics. That’s why I think all mathematicians should be forced to learn advanced biology to round out their ability to understand complex variable systems better.

The way an artistic mind (and natural systems) accomplishes magic is by being able to overlay or superpose multiple related sets of information such that their interconnection is obvious. This is the most powerful use of art: Multi-layered data.

The above is an artistic expression of art itself. It directly communicates the ability for white space and imprecision to compress data. Imagine if the two interleaved images were related in some way that showed a relationship between them instead of the arbitrary interlocking shown above?

How about this picture of acting made from actors? With it we get just a little closer:

“Okay cool, fine, multi-layered or compressed info… what’s this got to do with emergence and compartmentalization? Do you even have a point?”

Yes, point is that the performance of real “magic,” or the closest thing to it, is using the power of being able to put together concepts in an overlapping fashion such that they are arranged in a way that is more about lateral connection than it is about linear connection. It’s much like timing. It’s an arrangement that has certain power that is like a coiled spring or conformational energy in biological molecules. It’s energetic information that can have an impact.

“Oh, come on! Now, you’re just talking wooish BS. Energy in concepts? Seriously?”

Okay I told you I might lose you. Right now, however, the interaction of information with energy is a fertile field in physics. There’s not much I can give in the way of a defense that will appeal to a pedantic mind other than to focus upon those developments and specifically shannon entropy if you’re actually interested in exploring.

The point here is that fuzzy imprecision is the closest thing to magic and I’m answering how it can be used, or at least conceived of, by a given person. We use probability to deal with imprecision and chaos. Even deterministic chaos that has very finite immutable mechanics must be dealt with by using imprecise methods like probability.

Using emergence requires certain tools and concepts to even deal with the complexity. It’s not really magic, but it might as well be since certainly levels of complexity are unapproachable using precision based systems.

One last analogy and then we’re done:

Imagine thousands of tiny conveyor belts of any length you want could be arranged in space however you like. Imagine you wanted to assemble all the parts to an engine using these conveyor belts, such that you set all the parts in space at the right point and aimed the conveyor belts properly such that all the pieces ran into each other in just the right way.

One would have to be able to conceive of not just the arrangement of the engine in a linear fashion but also the simultaneous locations of all the parts that would eventualy come together.

If you could see the way our reality comes together in a broad enough sense and knew the way things transformed via the butterfly effect, could you not arrange strangely disconnected seeming things in way to come together like those conveyor belts to create something that is not just a collection of events, not just a pile of car parts, but an engine capable of doing something more. Could you not create a convergence that is greater than the sum of its parts because of its simultaneous arrangement?

I believe our minds are capable of doing these things using the same skill an artist uses to arrange concepts in an overlapping fashion.

I know I attempt to use “magic” all the time. I’m doing it right now. Otherwise why would I even care to tell you all this?