august 3 2021
now i know what we've lost by way of replacing religion with science: direct satisfying experience, and wholeness, oneness. now, we don't observe gravitational waves; we observe machines which we built to detect gravitational waves and report to us what they see. our senses cannot experience gravitational waves. we build machines to observe what we suspect based on theory, and then translate the machine's results into a form we can perceive, such as a chart on a monitor. we don't observe except by proxy.
does this mean that we observe what we intend to observe because our theories are prejudiced? i suspect that the qualities of our world are much more complex and exotic than what can be imagined in the theories we construct.
scientific truth is always in revision. because it separates information as if two parts of the world are not ultimately connected. for example, physics texts always state that gravity is weak compared to electromagnetism. but that's like saying my right hand is stronger than my right arm, when both are obviously two parts of the whole. from the begining, science erroneously separated gravity from electromagnetism because scientific methods could not directly observe how they are two parts of a whole (that would be the unified field theory, as yet not defined).
i'm trying to imagine an arm and hand equivalent of stating that gravity and electromagnetism are related by exchanging gauge bosons. that may be irrefutable in mathematical terms, but it's totally unsatisfying.
reading about the LIGO observatory and the detection of gravitational waves, i realized the dilemma in what heisenberg said a hundred years ago, that we will never directly observe "electrons in orbit". and that situation is described as a statistical problem in quantum mechanics, totally unsatisfying. irrefutable, and unsatisfying.
perhaps a few properties can be deduced about the quantum world, such as entanglement, but it's like pointing your telescope in one direction, not seeing a quasar, and then concluding that there are not many quasars. space volume expands exponentially with every step removed from the observer. the same must be true in both directions, getting larger and getting smaller. and people still don't seem to realize that things are getting more complicated. that every solution comes packaged with at least one new problem.
i believe at some point the photon and graviton are my hand and arm working together, and if we see them as unrelated, one stronger than the other, it's because of the same prejudice, that we did not start out with unification in mind. if we had started out with unification (because it is one world right? not a fractured mess.) then we would not be in this pickle now of trying to put together all the mess we discovered by seeing everything as a separate entity. the things we apparently see have names like my dogs, munshi and peelu. but now somehow dogs are actually composed of non-dog fundamental particles/waves and what can we call that non-dog stuff that dogs are made of now? bosons?
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the difference between a direct experience and a proxy experience, if you want to know what we've lost, now struggling to read complex human emotions in a text message on a flat surface...
do this experiment: first, send someone to get a massage for you. have them report back to you about the actual experience of receiving a massage. is that very satisfying? now, go get the massage yourself. compare the direct experience with the proxy experience. now you have an idea what we've lost as we replace real human interaction with technology. replacing a real smile on a real face with an emoji.
maybe it was the pizza/massage conundrum: you can send someone to get a pizza for you, and that will be satisfying. they do the work and you enjoy the pizza. unless they eat it first. BUT if you send someone to get a massage for you, that's not going to be satisfying.
i get the same emoji from five different people. don't we need the nuances of individuality anymore? i personally need to see the actual human face. and it's scary that i have to write a journal entry to declare that, because nobody else seems to understand why i am complaining.
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i'm reading dr. pang's book about how she used decision trees to work out human social queues (she's autistic). now that we are replacing real human interaction with tech, how does anyone read social queues?
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but now people are totally addicted to their machines. it looks more an more like those people in the pods in the matrix. how do we turn back from that? and now this covid lockdown is making all that worse.