It continues into a new problem, the problem of motivating such socially-useful actions as 'producing food', for if nobody does this, soon nobody will eat.

You can imagine lesser solutions, collective farming of collectively guarded fields, monitors on hard work and rewards of food access.  But these are simultaneously too 'simplistic' and 'overcomplicated', the very opposite of an 'elegant-solution'.  People can work harder, invest more effort, for a usually 'monotonically-increasing' reward, a function operated directly by the Environment, by 'physical-law'.  There just needs to be some system whereby, when people work, they are themselves the ones to benefit from it.

But this requires a far more complicated form of coordinated action, something that 'bounded-agents' can no longer consider as a giant macroaction of their 'collective-agent'.  The optimal macrostrategy must be lossily projected down into simplified mental rules for individuals, a notion of imaginary-ownership-tagging: if one person sows food-plants within a field, and waters them and protects them, everybody around them will behave as if that food is tagged with an imaginary pointer to that person, saying that the food may be consumed by them alone.  Or only consumed by those others the food's 'owner' designates, at their own decision... that seems like it should obviously be an option built into the system too...

And once you create an imaginary structure of coordinated action that elegantly-complicated, the consequences and further-required-features inevitably explode; and the explosion that results is Civilization's basic form nearly in toto.

It continues into a new problem, the problem of motivating such socially-useful actions as 'producing food', for if nobody does this, soon nobody will eat.

You can imagine lesser solutions, collective farming of collectively guarded fields, monitors on hard work and rewards of food access.  But these are simultaneously too 'simplistic' and 'overcomplicated', the very opposite of an 'elegant-solution'.  People can work harder, invest more effort, for a usually 'monotonically-increasing' reward, a function operated directly by the Environment, by 'physical-law'.  There just needs to be some system whereby, when people work, they are themselves the ones to benefit from it.

But this requires a far more complicated form of coordinated action, something that 'bounded-agents' can no longer consider as a giant macroaction of their 'collective-agent'.  The optimal macrostrategy must be lossily projected down into simplified mental rules for individuals, a notion of imaginary-ownership-tagging: if one person sows food-plants within a field, and waters them and protects them, everybody around them will behave as if that food is tagged with an imaginary pointer to that person, saying that the food may be consumed by them alone.  Or only consumed by those others the food's 'owner' designates, at their own decision... that seems like it should obviously be an option built into the system too...

And once you create an imaginary structure of coordinated action that elegantly-complicated, the consequences and further-required-features inevitably explode; the explosion that results is Civilization's basic form nearly in toto.

It continues into a new problem, the problem of motivating such socially-useful actions as 'producing food', for if nobody does this, soon nobody will eat.

You can imagine lesser solutions, collective farming of collectively guarded fields, monitors on hard work and rewards of food access.  But these are simultaneously too 'simplistic' and 'overcomplicated', the very opposite of an 'elegant-solution'.  People can work harder, invest more effort, for a usually 'monotonically-increasing' reward, a function operated directly by the Environment, by 'physical-law'.  There just needs to be some system whereby, when people work, they are themselves the ones to benefit from it.

But this requires a far more complicated form of coordinated action, something that 'bounded-agents'  lack the computational power to consider as a giant macroaction of their 'collective-agent'.  The optimal macrostrategy must be lossily projected down into simplified mental rules for individuals, a notion of imaginary-ownership-tagging: if one person sows food-plants within a field, and waters them and protects them, everybody around them will behave as if the resulting food-crop is tagged with an imaginary pointer to that person, saying that the food may be consumed by them alone.  Or only consumed by those others the food's 'owner' designates, at their own decision... that seems like it should obviously be an option built into the system too...

And once you create an imaginary structure of coordinated action that elegantly-complicated, the consequences and further-required-features inevitably explode; the explosion that results is Civilization's basic form nearly in toto.