We need to get beyond thinking of the world as composed of things and accept a world in which everything is composed of processes. We need to think of change as something built into the very structure of everything—to think of the world as composed of little bits of change.
Poetically speaking, quantum physics is a description of the universe in which everything is made up of tiny little bits of change. Change is never absent from any picture, or from any system, for any interval. Change is intrinsic. Change is the stuff of life. Literally.
You live because of the continual exchange of gasses through the lungs, of the continual, complex construction of proteins, of the ongoing birth and death of cells. Life is change, life is complex fire—it cannot be frozen. It is always and forever a process.
(And then the devil's advocate on my shoulder says, "What about frozen embryos? They are frozen—are you saying that they are not alive?" And my answer is, yes, they are not alive. But I'm not interested here in debating the philosophic points of reproductive technologies.)
We live a finite number of days, some finite total of hours, minutes, seconds. Our bodies are changing, slowly, imperceptibly each second, minute, hour, day, but we only can see those changes once they happen over a longer period. We rarely stand still long enough to do time-lapse photography of human beings as we cleverly do with plants. We are not the same person tomorrow as we were yesterday.
But now we are into the philosophic issue of identity, sameness, and difference. And how we define identity determines what we will say is the same and what we will call different. In absolute terms, no two things are ever the same, but we extract particular features, measure them to some accepted tolerance, compare each to each, lockstep, and then insist that these two chairs or these two ideas are identical.
To think of the world as it is – that is to accept a Heraclitean vortex that gives rise to occasionally stable clumps of matter that we take up and form into the things we surround ourselves with. We do not see stability as the exception because we cocoon ourselves with those materials that are stable. A forest, a desert, an ocean are richly evolving places, a bit different each day. But inside a house, the only differences are the things we move around, or the accretion of dust.
Look around you, wherever you are and you will find your world cluttered with human artifacts—it's an even bet if you will be able to see anything from where you sit that is not in some way artificial. We don't see change because we choose to surround ourselves only with things that are are long lasting.
And of course that is a good thing. We build refrigerators so that our food won't change into poison before we have a chance to eat it. We build walls and roofs so our beds won't convert into sponges when it rains. We sew clothes so that we can remain warm enough to sit and write blog postings before we go to bed.
But our passion—our obsession—with permanence leaves us like flies in amber frozen in an illusion of fixity. Lives are not lived in amber, but in change-rich environments.
And this is tremendously hypocritical of me, since I have lived my life in amber for several years now. But that is the topic for a later post.
I'm not at all interested in new-age interpretations of physics, be they colored yellow or not. Rather I see photons of specific wavelengths reflected from particular materials interacting with cells in the retinas of my eyes, deterministically.
ReplyDeleteThe notions of an observer of phenomena or a agent producing yellow streams of phenomena are, in a purely physical world, just more complex systems exhibiting just more complex physical phenomena.
Perhaps Gonzo was "inspired" (if such prose as evinced above deserves that epithet) by my reference to amber. Which is, some might say, yellow (or yellowish) but whose relevant feature is its geological capacity to trap small biological specimens in fixed and relatively unchanged form for long periods of time.
Perhaps my post didn't make what is obvious to me clear to them: 20th century physics informs us that the sensible world around of apparently fixed phenomena are merely islands of local stability built up from blooming, buzzing swarm of many, many processes.
Specifically, VERY specifically, my point is that our logical conceptions of the world (which have their origins in Plato over two millennia ago) are constructed up from perfect, fixed ideas which contradict the always changing always fuzzy picture we are shown by quantum theory.
The entities of the physical world, very specifically, I assert are processes--most simply, elementary particles together with their worldlines.
I happily invite Gonzo to engage with me in discussion over what we should consider to be valid entities or if my notion of processes can reasonably be derived from quantum theory. Failing that, I suggest that Mr. G. find an alternative canvas for his penile drawings.
No, Socrates' method was to elicit understanding by asking questions that challenged the speaker to attend their own basic assumptions.
ReplyDeleteAsserting that a particular statement is absurd, contradictory, or false (your terms) is fair game, and I welcome careful, respectful challenges on that level. But contempt only breeds contempt and if we are that clueless, I don't think you should waste your time here.
In my email to you I considered the possibility that you might be intelligent enough to draw the obvious conclusion. Apparently I was was mistaken about the extent of your cognitive abilities. So let me make it clear: we will be happy to engage with you on a substantive intellectual level if and only if you chose to engage with us on that level.
If you continue to post in the manner above you will be not be welcome to post here in the future.
By the way, from the beginning, you (Gonzo) have inferred (incorrectly) that a single reference to Zen Buddhism makes me a Zen Buddhist. One person who posts to this blog has that background but I do not.
ReplyDeleteMy worldview is essentially physicalist/instrumentalist: what exists can be measured and what can be measured, exists. The physics of the 20th century saw several revolutions in how we now see the world as displayed in the subtleties of quantum theory and general relativity.
Don't waste our time with poems and jokes: if you know something, share it. If you have a specific criticism, take the time to lay it out. Otherwise, don't.
I'm bored. Go away.
ReplyDelete