A friend of mine once asked me to try and describe to him how I thought the universe/reality/whatever you want to call it works... after I recovered from laughing my ass off I said something like this... but words are actually insufficient to the task:
Imagine, if you will a vast (basically infinite) space. This spac…
A friend of mine once asked me to try and describe to him how I thought the universe/reality/whatever you want to call it works... after I recovered from laughing my ass off I said something like this... but words are actually insufficient to the task:
Imagine, if you will a vast (basically infinite) space. This space is filled with stuff. This stuff is both point-like and thread-like. All this stuff interacts with ALL of the other stuff in largely unperceivable (to us) ways and regardless of the "distance" between them.
There is (again, for lack of a better term) a plane of "now" that is moving through this space (it is in this plane of now that we see the point-like aspect of the stuff).
If you could know and track ALL of the stuff and ALL of the influences you would (truly) understand what is happening--BUT, you can't. It is simply not possible. You would also (I think but I am not sure) see that the whole thing is deterministic, arising from the initial conditions.
In order to function, we have to limit even the things that we can see and connect. Things have to be simplified. REALLY REALLY simplified. So we exist in a ghost of reality--not simply what we can see or know or understand, but an even more limited subset of that.
This is why I always talk about things like narrative and identity, because those are the things that we use to both understand and act.
It only looks like chaos from the inside (because of our limitations) and we try and conquer that chaos through narrative, even though the narrative is very very far from the actual thing.
The closest academic school that expresses what I think about this is Process Philosophy (A. N. Whitehead).
WRT Quantum Politics:
A friend of mine once asked me to try and describe to him how I thought the universe/reality/whatever you want to call it works... after I recovered from laughing my ass off I said something like this... but words are actually insufficient to the task:
Imagine, if you will a vast (basically infinite) space. This space is filled with stuff. This stuff is both point-like and thread-like. All this stuff interacts with ALL of the other stuff in largely unperceivable (to us) ways and regardless of the "distance" between them.
There is (again, for lack of a better term) a plane of "now" that is moving through this space (it is in this plane of now that we see the point-like aspect of the stuff).
If you could know and track ALL of the stuff and ALL of the influences you would (truly) understand what is happening--BUT, you can't. It is simply not possible. You would also (I think but I am not sure) see that the whole thing is deterministic, arising from the initial conditions.
In order to function, we have to limit even the things that we can see and connect. Things have to be simplified. REALLY REALLY simplified. So we exist in a ghost of reality--not simply what we can see or know or understand, but an even more limited subset of that.
This is why I always talk about things like narrative and identity, because those are the things that we use to both understand and act.
It only looks like chaos from the inside (because of our limitations) and we try and conquer that chaos through narrative, even though the narrative is very very far from the actual thing.
The closest academic school that expresses what I think about this is Process Philosophy (A. N. Whitehead).