Shark Near the Beach
How Much Information is in a Particle?
The information humans are interested in is however always finite, since they can hardly remember even 20 decimal digits seen only once. And the amount of information humans are capable of retrieving by experiment is still limited, since each experiment has only a finite accuracy.
Thus they simplify things to the point that all they want to know about an electron is its mass, charge and its state to a small number of decimal places.
Humankind and their simplification: to take the entire starry universe and collapse it into the eye of the beloved.
We may swim in the ocean of creation, then we walk up onto the beach and towel off and dry in the sun. Later, when it is too hot, we go back into the water. We should be living our lives between the Simple and the Complex, the One and the Many, the Limited and the Boundless.
For the most part, however, we grow out of complexity and let our fascination with complex unities to be broken up into compartments: job, family, one-day-a-week-religion, scholastic studies, professional associations, and political affiliation. We keep our lives simple and discrete, easily put into separate boxes.
Separate boxes and broken threads...
Ripped yarns in the carpet of reality where we cut off pieces of rugs from Ifsahan and walk away with souvenirs, thinking the remnants are holographic, and we can re-create the whole...
Nothing in excess. We do not like the complete evisceration of family life at the holidays when the kids spend their time mesmerized by glowing screen of electronic toys, but their autism is the aboriginal experience of Unbrokenness.
We no longer understand the Unbroken Fascinations, because we have left them behind in a ceaseless obedience to all the bosses and necessities that make demands upon our time. We resent the ease of total enchantment which our children throw into our faces with their engrossing pursuits.
The only Unlimited Enchantment these days is narcotic, and it is outlawed. People are forbidden to swim in that particular ocean. They remain on the beach and scan the horizon for sharks.
What enchantments we have left, we have commercialized into box-office receipts or weeks on the NY Times Book List or "learned criticism". Thus, we make everything mundane and tedious, so life becomes a matter of picking among the drab alternatives.
My New Year's Resolution is to go swimming now and then.
--
Posts
2 comments:
Good for you. I haven't made a New Year's resolution. I think the mere fact of my giving voice to them dooms them.
You could have called the subject this time "Multi-taking," for what is that if not fragmentation. People seeking wholeness try to turn everything off . . . even electronic entertainments.
Multi-tasking is the logical and dismal end result of 30 years of declining incomes and wealth inequity.
To multi-task is to scissors a person into scraps.
Post a Comment