A system’s ability to do useful work (or generate power) depends in some important way on the number of pertinent questions required to determine the content of the enterprise (as an information theoretical concept). Perhaps this is why nothing ever seems to change: progress depends on unreasonable people, to paraphrase G. B. Shaw, and entropy will sink a closed system, full of reasonable people, every time. Blind faith (entropy) equals no questions; thus, no content.
Curious how, in physical terms, divergence is a local measure of a vector field flow’s “outgoingness”, something derivative of the net flow of the vector field across the surface of a small region relative to the volume of that region. For me, in my limited imagination, the measure of “progress”, the volume of “useful work” in social terms, seems like a fluid in motion, and divergence from the established norms constitutes a state of nonzero. Are you a source, or a sink? Only a source provides positive nonzero flow.
Are you still with me? Thanks.
For me, science is nonzero, positive divergence. An envelope of wave action that travels as a unit that interferes constructively only over a small region of space, and destructively elsewhere, depending on the evolution equation. In quantum mechanics this concept takes on a special significance and shifts into probability waves where position and the big “mo” define states of being (or nonbeing).
Take the Schrödinger equation, add some Cartesian coordinates, a dash of Hamiltonian formalism, a pinch of the Born rule, and filter in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and you have resolved a significant problem: a tradeoff between spread in position and spread in momentum.
The problem with the term “social progress” is in the concept of change as something that moves toward some sort of an “ideal”. Sort of a directed form of evolution, something that does not, cannot, exist in nature, as far as I can imagine. For example, I can see some form of cultural evolution happening, but I do not perceive it as something directed, that flows toward an ideal. Not at all.
I rather view this social momentum thing as depending on its own special probability wave, composed of packets of nonzero sums (and often minuses), and influenced by divergence as outgoingness, as objective, quantifiable advantage based on (or operating within) a set of evolutionary algorithms that provides content and flow. Stay with me here.
Yet in some important way, I imagine that there must be some sort of point to it all, because I seriously suspect all forms of relativism, moral, social, cultural, as being excuses for mediocrity and entropy. Relativism has no momentum. It provides no questions, no content. Are there no absolute truths?
No, not as far as I can see. And yet, truth cannot be relative to some subjective frame of reference, a culture, a language, etcetera, because truth is measurable, in fact, truth can only be that which is quantifiable, that which can withstand the demands of the scientific method, that which is testable and falsifiable. So that I am left with one curious way of looking at truth: truth is what works best, until we find something that works better. Thus, I believe that we can call science the process of selection of the fittest truths. And it’s a process, not an end, and not relative to subjective whim.
I also don’t believe that there is, or there can be, one timeless and unchanging Truth, a universal ideal “out there”. I don’t buy the existence of cognitive, aesthetic or ethical values independent of human thinking, because that just makes my brain hurt too much. I believe that there can be more than one correct opinion, but for your opinion to be acceptable, to become even temporarily “true”, or even marginally useful, it can’t be “independent of human thinking”. That’s bullshit.
A system’s ability to do useful work (or generate power) depends in some important way on the number of pertinent questions required to determine the content of the enterprise. It’s Socrates’ paradox of the wisest man in ancient Greece. All points of view are not equally valid.
Most people look for answers, and they invariably settle upon biased assumptions. A few diverge, and seek the right questions, again and again. Because the answer can never be zero. Ask Zeno.
