I lie in bed.
Birds serenade the sun.
The day begins.
I gather the thought carefully.
Deep within the center of my consciousness.
Molding each particle of power to Zen-like purity.
I fling the command into the universe.
“Coffee! Make thyself!”
Silence. Failure. Despair.
The semester begins and I fight a more than normal disorientation. With the exception of teaching my online course, I have been pretty much "off the grid" for the last two months. We have been vacationing and visiting friends and family - West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, South Dakota. No doubt some Wall postings will spring from those rambles. But in the midst of them, often the richness of immediate experiences overwhelms any directly related musings. Instead, when I drift off into Alternia - that cotton-swathed land that hovers somewhere between the sleeping and the waking world - my thoughts tend to be even less firmly tethered than usual to the reality churning before open eyes. These are some of them.
The third tenet of Distilled Harmony, Distill Complexity, derives from the assertion - based on my own observations and the far less subjective work of others in a variety of disciplines - that often what initially appears complex is actually far less so. Consider E=mc2. Einstein's five symbols fundamentally altered our perception of the universe. We most often interpret them as five symbols that point the way to comprehending the incredible complexity of the physical reality in which we exist. Yet, it strikes me that perhaps that notion results from looking through the wrong end of the telescope leading us to that conclusion: "E=mc2 reveals the awesome complexity of the universe." A glance from the other end of the telescope may yield a more helpful perspective: "The awesome complexity of the universe points us to the refreshing simplicity of E=mc2." We should move from the complex to the simple, not the other way around. Distill complexity.
Reflecting on life from the perspective of “complexity distilled” leads to some interesting reflections. Consider, for example, the relationship between metaphor and reality. A colleague of mine used to warn against "getting stuck to the metaphor." It is a concern that grows naturally from the extensive use of metaphor in teaching. Because of our real world experience with spiders’ webs, using the "World-Wide-Web" as a metaphor for the Internet creates a powerful representation of the connectedness of the Internet. Similarly our experiences on highways allows the metaphor of "the information superhighway" to capture the dynamic notion of how information both flows over, but can also become congested on, the Internet. These are indeed helpful metaphors. But the warning not to get “stuck” on them grows from Korzybski’s general semantics assertion that "the word is not the thing, the map is not the territory."
Maybe so, maybe not. Consider the extent to which the global positioning system - aka the gps - actually has become the territory. The little screen often takes precedence over the “real” world passing by outside the vehicle even when we know "she" (No, I don’t know why the voice always seems to be female.) is wrong. The “reality” of the gps may signal a similar, more widespread rise in the dominance of the metaphor. This makes me wonder if the traditional idea that "the map is not the territory" aka "the metaphor is not the reality" may be giving complexity unwarranted precedence over a more distilled option.
OK. It's going to get a little strange now. Bear with me as I consider the relationship between metaphor and supersymmetry. Supersymmetry is a concept in theoretical physics. More specifically in quantum mechanics, that posits a specific set of related particles. If you have particle A, supersymmetry demands that particle B must exist to "partner" particle A. And that is really as far as I am going to go with supersymmetry in its normal world of particle physics. I am more interested in what supersymmetry may teach us about metaphor and "reality."
Remember the reason for metaphor. Metaphor, when properly constructed, distills complexity. It makes the complicated clear. I wonder if there is more to metaphor than that, something far deeper. Just as the complexity of the universe points to E=mc2, perhaps all the metaphors that clarify a particular reality, are also a part of that underlying reality. And that each of those clarifying metaphors, being an actual part of that underlying reality, can increase our understanding of the underlying reality. This asserts that a kind of supersymmetry unites those related metaphors, and that by "getting stuck" to any one of a group of supersymmetrical metaphors allows us to further distill the underlying reality - to approach the "E=mc2" - that unites that cluster of metaphors. So each metaphor can become an actual tool for understanding and utilizing the underlying reality. Just as the physics and geometry of various flying and gliding creatures aid in the design of planes, drones, gliders, etc., the "sticky" parts of each related metaphor help us to better understand the underlying reality of the supersymmetrical metaphor cluster.
And that's not all! Stranger still! Don't forget entanglement! If we hop over to quantum mechanics for a moment, we learn that when two particles become "entangled," a change to any property of one particle is instantly reflected in the other particle regardless of the distance between the two particles - Einstein's "spooky action at a distance." Chinese scientists recently demonstrated entanglement over a distance of some 1200 kilometers. Look in one end of that telescope and the complexity is overwhelming. I mean how can that be? How do the two particles know how to change? If the information regarding the change travels from one particle to the other “instantly” the information must be traveling faster than the speed of light and that is the Mother of all physics no-nos.
But if we look in the other end of the telescope - distilling the complexity - a different reality comes into focus: there aren’t really two particles. There is only one particle connected in ways we do not yet understand. We will understand how eventually, and scientists of that future will wonder how we overlooked such a simple connection.
Perhaps the same kind of simple connection underlies the supersymmetrical metaphor cluster. There is only one reality being described by the cluster. We fail to recognize it because looking in the complexity inducing end of the telescope reveals what appears to be a complicated scattering of metaphors. It is only when we peer through the distilling end of the telescope that we see the unified reality. And, that takes me to the last, and perhaps most outrageous conjecture of this post.
Again, bear with me. We fail to see that what we believe to be two entangled particles are really one particle because we can manipulate their physical properties in such a way that our measuring devices report the existence of two particles which nevertheless act as one. Metaphors also appear to describe varying realities that nonetheless appear to act as one. In both situations we appear to have identical realities that somehow became separated.
But what if they haven't really become separated - but rather have been stretched to such an extent that they appear to us as separate? And where might they have been originally unified - upstretched? At what where/when point of compression of information was the underlying reality and all its related metaphors “unseparated,” “unstretched?” Yes, I'm afraid that is where I am heading. Back to the original singularity before the Big Bang. It was the Big Bang and the resultant instant of inflation of the universe that drove everything, particles, the realities underlying metaphors, everything apart. So, it was the birth of the universe that created the illusion of separateness, and the resultant mask of complexity.
And what was the reason for the instant of the inflation of the original/ singularity? And will the universe continue to expand? Or will the expanding universe eventually meet the expanding edges of other universes and coalesce into new more informed singularities that continue to compress until some concentration of information demands a new inflation? And again and again and again, universes without end.
So what? I hate it when I go rushing through this torrent of suppositions and come to what seems a logical insight only to be faced with the wet towel of "So what?" I have a bit of an answer that seems to fit with the current torrent: Things are not as complicated as they seem. Look for what makes reality - people, ideas, beliefs, philosophies, facts - the same. Look for commonalities, not differences. Distill Complexity.
