Power of Paradox Part Two

The senses generate signals from light, heat, pressure, smells. Our consciousness arises from a symphony of neurons sending electro-chemical messages inside the brain and from the record of ancient messages stored in our DNA. All these messages encode information about the outside world, that is, they create strings of symbols that represent the world.

These symbols represent the world, but of course, they aren't the world. They're something like a very incomplete, cartoonish, distorted model of the world. Think of really commonplace blunders that illustrate these models' failings: You believe you're at the top of a flight of steps when, in fact, there is one more so you bang your shin or trip. You imagine a mug of coffee is full, but it's actually totally empty, and your surprised arm flings it off the table.

Now imagine the absurdity of writing or reading a history book that tells the story of a nation over a thousand years. Next think about the hubris and lack of self-reflection of the economists or the sociologists maximizing productivity or some other such imaginary measure of hundreds or thousands, or even hundreds of millions of people, reducing their activity to some simplistic system of equations, that fail again and again to predict anything.

In other words, the full fidelity nature of the world is inconceivable. It's like the world is written in ancient Greek, but we only speak English. Perhaps there's actually no translation possible, though we don't stop trying.

For the Norse, Odin's self sacrifice allowed him to discover the runes, that is, writing, and therefor the secrets of the universe. For the ancient Greeks, it was the discovery that music, geometry, could be expressed in the formal language of mathematics that opened the door to making the world rational. The Enlightenment and age of reason thinkers, and their philosophical children, carried that project forward toward the culminating idea that one could eventually build a computer that will perfectly model the universe.

In a lot of ways, the 20th century horror show of wars, genocides, and mass scale political murder was a reaction to crumbling models. Revealed religions were shown to be a hoax. Quantum mechanics showed classical physics has severe limits. Mathematicians showed formal systems are self referential. One reaction to these limits was not just to embrace them, but to deify them: if mankind can only believe in lies, let's not just believe them, let's act on those beliefs, especially when it comes to political murder, or crazy race theories! In the twenty-first century, those same ideas now get lipstick and wigs furnished by game theory, evolutionary biology, or economics.

Ideas about what it means to be a man or woman, good and evil don't seem to come from rational inquiry. We spy the stag of truth through the distant woods, but he's always just out of reach.