Scale
I remember the time I first realized that there was a thing called 'government' though I didn't know the word then. All of a sudden there was this bad thing called 'littering'. I did it when I bought a popsicle and just threw the wrapper onto the ground. (I saved the sticks as toys). Over a period of time littering became a no-no. I was getting messages from teachers and parents that I should put the wrapper into one of the garbage cans that were suddenly appearing all over. That was the government at work orchestrating a national change in a habit.
Littering is the sort of thing that is no problem at all if just one person throws a wrapper on the ground but is a big mess if millions of people do it.
One summer our family drove from Toronto to Saint John going through Quebec. Quebec was different from Anglo Canada. Kids would stand on the roadside selling jars of hazelnuts. And there was no litter - it was noticeable even while riding at 50mph.
I must say that I made money from people littering. I collected pop bottles for the refund. These days I'd be called a binner. I'd find them in construction sites on the weekends. (How times change. The construction sites didn't even have a security guard.)
Scale is very significant in human experience. I've walked on mountains but the ground under my feet didn't look like a mountain. You can only perceive the mountain if you are looking at it from a distance. This is a subtle bias. Up close the mountain is something on our scale. We can kick a rock and watch it roll. From a distance the mountain seems to us to be not moving but that's just because it's moving at a rate that is slower than we can see.
When we look at the natural world we see living things that we categorize as species. To us the species seem to be static. A mouse makes more mice and a mouse doesn't make fish. But that is just a bias caused by our human time frame. In fact species are changing all the time in response to selection pressure.
Humans live in societies. The difference between an individual and a society can be seen as a scaling issue. Human individuals feel different pressures than societies composed of those individuals.
On a social scale people gather into various groups that interact with other groups. The groups gather into groups of groups - hence we get provinces gathered into countries. Everyone individually is pressured by the needs of those bigger groups but that seems to stay unconscious. Everyone also knows the feeling of making a choice that is immediately effective. I might say that 'power' in the human sense is an individual's ability to cause a group to act as the individual decides.
Scale is important in manufacturing - maybe it's the main difference between mass produced things and artisanal things. With artisanal things like pottery or furniture I can conceive of how it is made. With manufactured things like a phone I really have no idea how it's made. Yet phones can be made at a scale where they fill cargo ships. I've heard that one of the biggest hurdles inventors have to jump over is figuring out just how to make the invention in huge numbers.
I ran into that problem when I was making sets of Penrose tile fridge magnets. They were very popular but I couldn't make enough of them to satisfy demand. Also the sets were so labor intensive that I couldn't make any money.
Maybe one can think of scale as a force of nature - it's universally significant but it's not material.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.