We interpret the world. It is "natural" that we seek information, and translators of the information we find which is for the most part not exactly "spelled out" to us. We are in a permanent state of being UN-initiated to consciousness, to the bringing of our breath which is taken in trying to comprehend the data we gather.
Ah, and the point?
Our interpretation is historical. We learn what we take as known from the perspective of Period.
For example, in ancient times, our explanations were filled with gods who acted a lot like humans, on steroids. Olympians could fly, tranform, shape-shift, do battle with dragons and giants, while simultaneously creating everything. God used technology the ancients were familiar with -- like fashioning figures from clay, separating and sifting, breeding two by two. Birth was the big miracle and we used the mystery of coupling to explain the mystery of existence, how things and creatures came into being, using Words. Naming invoked the thing in a virtual way. Ancient explanations had an Animal Physicality: Nibelung, Baggavad-gita, PopoVul, Olympus, Genesis, these are all books of birthing and kinship structures, the begattings and creatings. We counted using fingers and toes, piles of pebbles, colored quipu, and an abacus sheet of sliding beads on a wire.
By the 17th century, the universe began to look like a clock, a mechanism, a marketplace transaction. Galileo's pendulum swinging in a Newtonian gear box opening spectrums of light and particles, with life as a moist oxidation on the surface of a cooling sphere. We counted using slide rules, orbits, water clocks, ratcheting gears, and trading companies. Thomas Aquinas was canonized for having converted Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle in the nick of time, while the Summa was still Theologica.
By the 19th century, the study of force fields was hot. Magnetic attraction and repulsion, the electrical pulse, the particle light wave, radio transmission, and radioactive emission, were all bent to the work of ontology. We measured differentials on gauges and things were counted inside sealed vacuum-tubes. It no longer mattered what anyone "believed" about the tides, the hidden hand of the market place, or the tribe and its gods.
As the 21st century unfolded, it is no surprise that the universe started to look like a computer. Compare, 1960's Edward Fredkin and Konrad Zuse. The "calculus", the little pebbles the Latins used to measure, sort, and compare alternative countings, were imbedded in sheets of silicon switches, forming a bank of abacuses. We began creating a 2d virtual reality communicating on networks. We counted using algorythms and bits. The trope of the priesthood adapts to the familiar, and life "evolved". The Pope declares Evolution to be divine. Our semi-conductor on the train of explanation takes us far beyond the Thunder God sitting astride the pile of pebbles.
Now we are staring at quantum phyics, and of course, a quantum computer (QC). We now take the universe as being not only built of atoms, but of atoms in a constant state of interraction -- exchanging, pardon the expression, "information". Compare, Seth Lloyd 2006. This QC is modeling its own complexity, each local part reflecting a greater part, computing itself. There appears to be plenty of room for an epistomology here.
ENTROPY. I cannot help but ask in this presentation of Periods, where Entropy fits in. Clearly we face the 2d law of thermodynamics -- entropy increases when any action is carried out.
ReplyDeleteIf the atomized/field parts of the universe are elaborating in some way into greater complexity, then previously, at an earlier time, were things less molecular and more protronic, less field and more plasmatic, less information and more...potential.
Will the QC which is continually exchanging information also be continually exchanging entropy?
Reminds me a little of the work done by Margaret Wertheim THE PEARLY GATES OF CYBERSPACE: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Although I think imagination plays almost no prospective role in human affairs, and its retrospective role is primarily ironic, reflecting a geometrically expanding inclination toward coincidence, and physics is no exception, she is one of the few who understands the significance of the small to the large: The almost nil to the almost all.
ReplyDeleteExcerpt:
ReplyDelete"In Luke 18 we read of a rich young ruler who comes to Jesus asking how to receive eternal life. He brags that he has always fulfilled his religious duties but, apparently, he realizes that this is not enough. Jesus agrees. He tells him that he must do one thing more - "Sell all you have, give to the poor, and follow me." And the account ends by saying that the man went away sad, because he was very rich.
Now, people obviously see this as an instruction which cannot be followed literally, or society would dissolve into chaos. But this teaching is different from those which tell us to love, turn the other cheek, forgive and take up our cross. It is not meant literally - it's a metaphor. The irony, however, is that the spiritual meaning of this teaching is even more demanding than the literal interpretation.
...
EXCERPT from: Saint Sloan!
http://www.beyondreligion.com/su_meditations/sell.htm
Karen Armstrong, became a nun while young, was pushed into further "separation" -- discharged for her beliefs, fired for epilepsy, not "passed" for PhD, and so "not qualified" to teach. Now explores common themes in the Religions of the world--HISTORY OF GOD, for example. Her "test" of validity for theology is not whether there is a God, but whether compassion is part of it.
ReplyDelete