Monomorphic

Humans primarily live in a world of beings, each of which has meaning. Meaningful beings appear to us interconnected, referencing practices and other beings in a referential totality. Buttons suggest pushing, chairs suggest sitting, a tractor suggests farming. A (Japanese) rice paddy may suggest the heavy labour that goes into the rice harvest each year, the tools and equipment that go with it, as well as the gradual depopulation of the village, since the young ones prefer a different line of work elsewhere. It may be part of the site and locus of an entire set of concerns and an outlook on life.

The world of beings is the one that is most immediate to us, and a world of molecules, atoms, energy or recorded data, useful as it may be, is something much further away. In each case it must be derived and renewed from the use of a growing and complex apparatus of equipment, practices and body of concepts, such as the traditions of physics or mathematics. Yet nobody would dispute that these worlds – the world of beings and the calculated world – are interrelated. In some cases they are even deeply intertwined.

But how can we reconcile the calculated world with the world of beings? How exactly do they influence each other? And if the calculated world is expanding aggressively, thanks to the spread of computational machinery and its servants, is the world of beings being pushed back? Receding? Are we abandoning it, since it is no longer good enough for us? Refusing to touch it, other than with thick gloves?

The calculated world concerns itself with propositions, true facts, formal models, records. A conceptual basis is needed to codify and engage with it. A record is formed when an observation is made, and the observer writes down what was observed. Initially, it retains an intimate connection with the world (of beings). The record is interpreted in light of the world and allowed to have its interplay with other beings. The observation “it rained heavily this week” is allowed to mean something in the context of farming, in the context of a possible worry about floods, or as a comment on an underwhelming holiday. Depending on who the reader is and what their concerns are, all these meanings can be grasped. The record may thus alter the reader’s outlook in a way similar to what direct experience of the rainfall would do.

At this level, the only facts we may record are that it rained or did not rain, and whether the rain was heavy or light. But given that we have some notion of space or time, as human beings do, repetition becomes possible. Scales for measuring time and space can be constructed, The rainfall can now be 27 or 45 mm. We are now further away from the world of farming, floods and holidays – “45 mm” of rain needs to be interpreted in order to be assigned any meaning. It has been stripped of most the world where it originated. The number 45 references only calculable repetition of an act of measurement. Enabled by the notions of space and time, already it tries to soar above any specific place or time to become something composable, calculable, nonspecific. Abstraction spreads its wings and flaps them gently to see if they will hold.

So on all the way up to probability distributions, financial securities, 27 “likes” in a day on social media and particle physics. At each level of the hierarchy, even when we purport to move “downward” into the “fundamentals” of things, layers of meaning are shed and a pyramid of proverbial ivory soars to the sky.

Spatial and temporal observations depend on measurement on linear scales, such as a stopwatch or a ruler. Such scales are first constructed through repeated alignment of some object with another object. Such repeated alignment depends on counting, which in turn depends on the most basic and most impoverished judgment: whether something is true or false, does or does not accord. Thus something can have the length of 5 feet or the duration of 3 hourglasses: it accords with the basic unit a certain number of times. This accordance is the heavily filtered projection of a being through another. The side of a plot of land is measured, in the most basic case, by viewing the land through a human foot – how many steps or feet suffice to get from one side to the other? Even though the foot is actually able to reveal many particularities of the land being measured – its firmness, its dampness, its warmth – the only record that this attitude cares to make is whether or not spatial distance accords, and how many times in succession it will accord. All kinds of measurement devices, all quantitative record making, follows this basic principle. Thus, the calculable facts are obtained by a severe discarding of a wealth of impressions. This severity is obvious to those who are being trained to judge quantitatively for the first time, but soon internalised and accepted as a necessity. Today, these are precisely the facts we are accustomed to calling scientific and objective.

But the accordance of beings with distance or time is, of course, very far from the only things we can perceive about them. The being emits particular shapes, configurations, spectra that make impressions on us and on other beings. Thus it is that we may perceive any kind of similarity – for example the notion that two faces resemble each other, that a dog resembles its owner, or that a constellation of stars looks like a warrior. We delight in this particularity, which in a way is the superfluous or excess substance of beings – it is not necessary for their perception but it forms and adds to it. Thus the stranger I met is the stranger with a yellow shirt and not merely the stranger. He can also be the stranger with a yellow shirt and unkempt hair, or the stranger with a yellow shirt and unkempt hair and a confident smile, and so on – any number of details may be recorded, any number of concepts may be brought into the description. These details are not synthetic or arbitrary. But they are also not independent of the one who observes. They would depend both on a richness that is of the being under observation, and on the observer’s ability to form judgments and concepts, to see metaphorically, creatively and truthfully.

Such impressions, which carry a different and perhaps more immediate kind of truth than the truth that we derive from calculations and records, may now have become second class citizens in the calculated world that grows all around us.