#bottom-up thinking

[snow-serenade]

Everyone you meet is a lesson, whether you know it or not. Even if you never learned what that lesson was, the Universe has this uncanny ability to keep sending that lesson your way until it gets through your thick skull.

Because yes, my thick skull needs a lot of lessons and hurt feelings to understand the bigger picture.

[jkmilton]

Think Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down

One of the most general shorthand abstractions that if adopted would improve the cognitive toolkit of humanity is to think bottom up, not top down. Almost everything important that happens in both nature and in society happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom up, self-organized emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life is a bottom up, self-organized emergent property of organic molecules that coalesced into protein chains through nothing more than the input of energy into the system of Earth's early environment. The complex eukaryotic cells of which we are made are themselves the product of much simpler prokaryotic cells that merged together from the bottom up in a process of symbiosis that happens naturally when genomes are merged between two organisms. Evolution itself is a bottom up process of organisms just trying to make a living and get their genes into the next generation; out of that simple process emerges the diverse array of complex life we see today.

Analogously, an economy is a self-organized bottom up emergent process of people just trying to make a living and get their genes into the next generation, and out of that simple process emerges the diverse array of products and services available to us today. Likewise, democracy is a bottom up emergent political system specifically designed to displace top down kingdoms, theocracies, and dictatorships. Economic and political systems are the result of human action, not human design.

Most people, however, see the world from the top down instead of the bottom up. The reason is that our brains evolved to find design in the world, and our experience with designed objects is that they have a designer (us) who we consider to be intelligent. So most people intuitively sense that anything in nature that looks designed must be so from the top down, not the bottom up. Bottom up reasoning is counter intuitive.