Today's inbox contained a comment/question from an old friend, ally and Mud Report reader, BH, about the communication's bridge building project. BH is a long time climate change activist and widely published op-ed writer who knows the topic well. The email in part said, "I only have a vague idea who you mean by Greenville and Growthton members." The comment and my answer "i guess the populations of the two sides are cloud like in that they too are symbolic representations." are as good a place to start this next group of articles as any.BH's comment points out that it's impossible to actually draw a circle around, isolate, define any group of people because everyone of us is different. Inevitably every attempt to represent a group of people on any topic ends up looking like a cloud who's boundaries are undefinable and constantly shifting. The same thing is true everywhere we look. The truth is there is no solid truth. we live in a probabilistic world not a deterministic one. The closer we look at anything the more we understand that there is no there there.
Communication though requires some type of symbolic representation that always ends up drawing lines where none actually exist. The physicists tell us that we live in a quantum world populated by probabilities, but when asked to use words or pictures to describe the quantum they're stymied because defining a thing locks it into a deterministic reality that doesn't exist. Without definitions words are gibberish, without boundaries pictures are meaningless, so the physicists use mathematical equations whose values are all derivatives of other derivatives. In a communicative sense at least, more gibberish.
In a non-deterministic universe communication can only be achieved by reducing our cloud like nature to symbols so rudimentary that only symbolic significance can be achieved on any topic. So, for utility's sake we simplify the interplay of the boundary-less clouds of reality into the representational simplicity of Venn Diagrams and the infinite fields of possibility into probability distribution curves. This genius humans have for communication by collapsing the infinite possibilities into manageable probabilities has allowed us to develop the technologies we employ to, temporarily at least, ride the waves of uncertainty.Science, technology, art, literature, are all forms of symbolic representation that employ simplification of the incomprehensible quantum world as their tool to communicate their truths. Tomorrow this old fool will walk out to the mid-span of our new metaphorical communication bridge and try to use communication's reductionist tools to tell his truth about the field possible solutions to our environmental and social quagmire offered by the quantum reality that 'we're all in this together'.
