… this is not a short story, poem or lyrics submission… this is a rant, so block your eyes and ears!
When I was working on my nutty, unreadable, sci-fi novel, one of the sections of my book was titled “Abacus Theory.” WTF does that even mean you may be wondering right about now…
Well, let’s start with “what is an Abacus?” Before there were calculators and computers and…. lets go back even further… before there were basic writing tools, people still had a need to perform math calculations. Pebbles worked, because ten pebbles were always greater than 8 pebbles, and you could take away 2 more and always be left with 6 pebbles, etc.
Math works 100% of the time, without fail, no matter what words or tokens people use to describe it with, or how they feel about the outcome. Math has a physical presence and structure in our lives whether we perceive it or not.
To continue my rant, some really smart people created the Abacus, which is a small device you can hold in your hands and carry around with you, which has beads on several rails that you can slide left or right to help perform your daily math calculations. It was one of the top inventions of a long-dead millenium, and people got really GOOD at using their Abaci and started doing crazy math with them… like long division, multiplication, square roots and cube roots. This was not a slow tool at all; this was considered lightning-fast at the time and was a high-speed calculator that could crank out numbers quickly and accurately.
Where am I going with my rant, you may be wondering?
The reality is that an Abacus is just a place-marker which cannot perfom any math at all!!! It is made of rocks and wood. It has to manipulated by a thinking person who moves the beads. The movement of the beads follows certain rules. The people using an Abacus did not INVENT those rules, although they did have to DISCOVER them along the way. That is an important distinction. The Abacus itself is just a token and a place-holder so that we don’t lose track of our numbers. My point here is that the rules for math already existed long before people ever perceived them.
The moral of my rant is that an abacus is just one more tool that we’ve invented on our path towards progress, like we later did with computers. If you compare those two tools then the computer is obviously better than an abacus, but that misses the point. Ask yourself why is it “obvious” that one tool should be better than another? How do you define the word, “better?” Comparing one tool to another is fair, and is a measurement of which tool works best… I’m just stuck on the definitions of the words we say every day– “Good, Best & Better.”
There are laws of physics and nature which explain why the sky is blue and why gravity makes water flow downhill, yet people lived tens of thousands of years before anyone bothered to ask that question. It turns out there was a set of rules the entire time which explained the precise shade of blue skies and the exact force of gravity we feel.
All I’m asking with this rant is for you to consider the notion that “good” or “better” or “best” are not merely words, they are real concepts that we use every day in life. I know that such concepts are our impressions which depend upon our perspective at the time, but there are also rules of physics which will vary depending upon the perspective of the viewer. Physics is spooky, just like the rest of life!
If there is a rule of nature for obvious facts such as blue skies and gravity, then why not obvious facts like the goodness or badness of outcomes?
The abacus example I used is just a metaphor for who we are, I think. 99% of what we do in life is to move our place-markers left and right, to the appropriate spot, so that other people can see what we were thinking. We are focused on the tools of life, not on the underlying concepts.
All rants have to come to an end at some point… mine ends right <here>
JPD- have a good day or night being whomever you are!
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5 Comments
Good one JPD…
Good analogy, I would have never even considered using abacus to describe anything, but well done.
I think most of the times when we compare things on level of good, best, and better is base on what the thing can do for us.
Things will always get better or worse (I would hope better) because we learn from past mistake and we as human keep evolving with time.
We process information and develop from that so we need tools that will help us.
You can find three calculators that will do the same additions, but are you doing just addition or are you doing formulas that has X and Y?
Re: your comment– “I think most of the times when we compare things on level of good, best, and better is base on what the thing can do for us.”
Agreed, it depends on perspective and context, just like all other laws of physics do. When you’re riding on a subway and another train passes from the opposite direction all you see is a WOOSH. The passengers on that train only see you as a blur too. (and all of the passengers are leaning forward, but think they’re standing upright!!) That’s an example of physic and perspective.
But people think of goodness as something seperate from physics– like it’s an opinion, not a fact of nature. People think of “good” as a word that was invented to describe life, but I believe the concept is something people discovered, not invented. It was there working all the time and we merely view glimpses of it from our own unique perspectives– or we don’t. Just like the rules for math and all other physical rules.
I believe some outcomes are objectively better than others. Yes… how we think of them depends upon our own perspective– and like you said– how the outcome serves us. But that doesn’t change the underlying rule which determined one outcome over the another, does it?
I think this is where the line between science and religion; physics and metaphysics, starts to get a little blurry…
I’m agreeing with you, although I wasn’t sure what your last sentance meant, so if I missed your point just let me know!
The last part of my comment was just showing an example of our perception; what is ‘good’ is base on our use for that particular item.
I think ‘good’ has always been there, same with all abstractive ideas. The level of these abstract ideas is base on opinion, because we all precede things differently.
I think that what determines ‘good’ ‘better’ and ‘bestest’ is when things move towards a level of maximum efficiency. Abacus…cool. Calculator…extremely efficient.
All things in nature – for the most part and given my minimal understanding of the overall function of the universe – is to move towards a simpler more efficient structure where the least amount of energy is expended in order to come to a state of rest. Technically the abacus is a ’simpler’ (structurally) tool then a calculator but what concerns us is the amount of work our brains have to do. Brain not at rest? Then we can make something ‘better’ to help us with that.
Calculators, like most technological inventions, take the hard part out of thinking and replace it with mechanisms that then allow us to use our physical/intellectual energy doing things way more fun like writing stories, making films and watching porn.
Yes, I agree, our current state of minds also determine when something is good or bad. We are stupid monkey’s that way. We make robots to do our heavy lifting – good. Robots turn into cylons, kill the human race – bad. We make robots really small so that if they decide to rise up against them we can crush them underfoot – better. Until they get so small they enter our blood streams and take over our consciousness – bad. And so on.
I think good, bad and better are really road directions towards some kind of evolutionary ideal. At least I hope so.
Good comments Kroc, thanks. I would say though that the direction in nature is towards more complexity– still towards efficiency– but more complex in my opinion.
i.e.- if you believe in big bang and an expanding universe…. in the beginning there was the helium and hydrogen atom. Simplest forms of matter, enough to make stars and little else. Some of those stars collapsed under their own mass and became Novas, creating all of the heavier atoms… more complex.. they interact in more ways.. not always better, but still judged by the better-best logic of nature.
flash forward 13b years… single cell organisms give way to complex organisms, to supercolonies, to species to civilizations and societies within, etc. Not always better but judged by the better-best logic. Natural selection sorts out which species are more efficient than others. We still have to endure bad societies along the way as part of the culling process.
What I’m saying in my original rant is that “natural selection” is following a rule, and that all other rules of the universe can be specified— e=mc2, etc. So why not the rule for “better”? What makes this rule any different than gravity or the rules that make blue skies and green fields?