Think Bottom-Up

by : Aria Ratmandanu

        One of the most general shorthand abstractions that, if adopted, would improve the  cognitive toolkit of humanity is to think bottom-up. Almost everything important that happens in both nature and society happens from the bottom up. 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 through nothing more than the input of energy into he 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 tself 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 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 to displace top-down kingdoms, and dictatorships. Economic and political systems are the result of human action, not human design.

       A One way to get people to adopt the bottom-up shorthand abstraction as a cognitive tool is to find examples that we know evolved from the bottom up. Language is an example. No one designed English to look and sound like it does today (in which teenagers use the word "like in every sentence). From Chaucer's time forward, our language has evolved from the bottom up by native speakers adopting their own nuanced styles to fit their unique lives and cultures.

        The Internet is the ultimate bottom-up self-organized emergent property of millions of computer exchanging data across servers, and although there are some top-down controls involved-just as there are some in mostly bottom-up economic and political systems-the strength of digital freedom derives from the fact that no one is in charge. For the past five hundred years, humanity has gradually but ineluctably transitioned to bottom-up systems, for the simple reason that both information and people want to be free.