I believe the word “law” when used in scientific discussions is a bit misleading, given other uses for the word.  At its heart, science is a description of the phenomenon that we all share in.  When we say something must “obey” gravity, it’s as if gravity were the reason the object must fall.  Gravity is an abstraction on the multitude of observations through the centuries of objects falling at a specific rate of acceleration under certain circumstances, but were something to shoot up instead of down nothing would be “violated”, we would simply be wrong.

Meanwhile, this abstraction is and has proven itself useful, and most any technical person would shoot me for being so pedantic if not wrong.  Seeing ourselves as surrounded by phenomenon that we’ve given up on predicting or controlling would leave us no where technologically and baseless to make any assertions to rebuild our lives.  Yet it’s true.  And nobody is going to prove logically that what has gone on will continue to do so and won’t change at any moment.  It’s impossible to prove, and it’s not infeasible that it might happen.  But we throw that possibility out in favor of our technology and innovation, with a pithy remark about modern medicine, and the world moves on.

Yet this assumption that we make shapes us very quickly.  If we let it run its course, it affects the rest of our thinking.  And it’s here that religious people often fall into the trap of reducing God’s sphere of influence to the supernatural, leaving the rest to science.  But as I see it, there is no natural and supernatural, there just is.  We’re uncomfortable with giving up our assertion that nature obeys all the laws that we’ve created for practical reasons, so God must tweak things a fair amount to interact and earmark his actions.  Then, anything “natural” that happened because of ___ must not have been God, and anything unexplainable must be God (until we can explain it).  This is a fairly modern way of looking at the world, and is at odds with the way religion was practiced in ancient times.  If you’re observant, you can see clearly the points of friction that this idea causes, and if you’re me you want your religion friction-free in certain parts (and volatile in others).

My suggestion is very simple, and it forwards an agenda at the same time.  Hold on to a dichotomy (or a paradox?), one that acknowledges the unpredictability of the phenomenon that makes up our world while denying it for practical reasons in situations that force it.  Why?  Because practicality depends entirely on context, and this context is by no means absolute.  Then when you are working on your car, you have a little more to go off of on your smoking engine than “God must have let it happen”, and when you go to bed at night you can be comfortable that you’re not a powerless deterministic machine.

Then, if anyone asks you whether you’re “free will or predestination (or determinism)”, you can tell them to shove it or argue definitions until they’re sick of you.  People who argue with you will quickly get fed up by your “changing sides”, and you can be confident that you denied them the only reason they entered the discussion: to bolster their sense of self worth in validating their own ideas by squashing others.  And feel like Karate Kid’s instructor.

We live in a discrete world.  At a fundamental level, we define our surroundings by “objects” whose “edges” determine where “it” ends and “everything else” begins.  This distinction is not intrinsic to our surroundings or their nature, it merely exists as a way for us to process so much information.  By discriminating and generalizing (two now negative terms), we can make decisions much more quickly that are “good enough” for day-to-day existence.

A beautiful rose garden is a favorable subject for a painting.  A beautiful rose garden with a rotting corpse of a squirrel is not so much.  The roses’ beauty is tainted by the death nearby, but the rose is still beautiful, it’s just the context that makes it anything but.  In another instance, “I love you so much sweetie.” would be an encouraging message from a mother, but not so much when it’s used as a pad for something nasty.  “You looked beautiful this morning…I hated the outfit you wore to dinner…I love you so much sweetie.”

The biggest issue is that we carry an enormous trailer of emotional and physiological reactions (in addition to any neurological changes) from one observation to the next.  We are affected by everything we come into contact with, and in result we change each time we experience, no matter how small.  Not only is this fact exploited daily by people seeking to sell us things, or bring us into their groups, but it’s a fact ignored by the implicit assumption we are forced to make that each judgement is objective and independent from another.

Things bleed.  They look separate, but at heart they are not.  I’m looking to find a balance in my life between seeing things as pieces to make decisions and seeing things as part of a whole to make sense of it all.

Telling people you’re going to change the world has its ups and downs. People begin to expect things out of you, or they expect nothing. People will listen intently, if they listen at all. But one of the worst things that can happen is that someone really believes you… and sees you as the one to bring that change. No human stands worthy of such admiration.

Back when I used to bring paper to class, many figures were born of this young engineers’ hand.

The little gem you see here is a horrible rendition of a house (or a loaf of bread, or a barn, the possibilities are endless).  But I messed up on a line, crossed out the entire drawing, tore the page out, and put it in my pocket.  Several days later while inspecting the pants for reuse (threeuse, freeuse), I found the truth of my annotation “perspective sucks” to be more universal than I had intended.

Any subsequent posts will fall beneath the larger heading of this piss-poor barn and my feeble attempts to understand this world from the wrong angle.