The Decay of Stuff

Symbols are just ideas made manifest. And symbols decay. Even the spoken word, the premier human manifestation of an idea, decays in a quickly fading echo.

All the man-made stuff that we see around us, all the TV's, cars, clothes, buildings, cities, computers, art and nuclear bombs, are just symbols, ideas made manifest, and they are all rusting, breaking down, falling apart, decaying...

So why do we fixate on this stuff, and not on the ideas behind them? Not that any really amazing ideas are behind TV...but if you think about it, there is some great science in there. Same with all of our human stuff – there's always holy science behind it. But it's not likely people are going to go around fixating on Euclidean geometry or Newtonian physics anytime soon.

As Paul Dirac (who invented quantum mechanics, another unlikely subject for the average man to spend time contemplating) observed, confusion arises from misguided attempts to translate scientific laws from mathematics to human language. He was against talking about science. He thought we should just do the math. Maybe he was right.

Einsteinian relativity, to prove Dirac's point, has some cache in the popular mind – that is, people like to think about it (or they would if they could). Relativity theory strikes the imagination. After all, the theory suggests that if you do enough methamphetamines and other speed, time will slow down and you will actually live longer. And that's not even to broach the subject of time travel, which is possible.

So, people will just go on drooling in front of their televisions. Some will, of course, dabble in translations from the mathematical (generally known as “popular science”). These are the same bunch who read history (even though history is continually being revised). At least these ideas decay more slowly than last year's Super Bowl.

The ideas that power history are good ideas, as are the ideas behind all the arts and humanities, but it is easy to see that their main flaw is that they are oriented to humans. Once the human part of the equation is removed, there is no more need to rewrite history, or to paint pictures of the ineffible.

This removal of the human part of the equation is somewhat of a problem. Mathmatics removes people from the equation (as long as you exile the engineers and the economists), but as we have seen, it's not likely that Richard Feynman will do a stand-up routine during half-time on Super Sunday. Perhaps it is more a solution lies in redirecting our gaze, and inhabiting the qualiasphere instead of the moronosphere.

As Richard Dawkins pointed out, our DNA is the life form. Our bodies are just carriers for it, helping it exist on down the generations, through the stream of time. Of course, he pointed out also, that ideas are life forms...

The way I see it, we don't have much choice, through the first thirty years of life or so, but to go along with our genes. After that (at about the age when Socrates said we might be ready to start studying philosophy) we ought to hitch the old wagon to a star...

Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the routine.