Taking apart your answering machine won’t tell you anything about the message someone left on it
“The universe,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “is made of stories, not of atoms.” This seems eminently sound to me. After all, what exactly do atoms amount to?
In The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington notes that if you imagine the nucleus of an atom to be a grain of sand suspended halfway between the floor and the apex of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the orbit of the electrons would be circumscribed by the curve of the dome itself. In other words, the distance between the nucleus and the electrons is astronomical. A creature standing on the nucleus would likely be unable to see the electrons spinning about.
Eddington further notes that if one reduced a six-foot-tall man to pure matter by eliminating the spaces between the particles of which he is said to be composed, said man would be a speck barely visible with a powerful magnifying glass. I recently heard that the entire human race currently alive, all six-and-a-half billion of us, if similarly reduced, would amount to something the size of a sugar cube.
The so-called material universe is, in fact, a vast network of electrical impulses. Perhaps we should think of it as a transmission system and focus our attention more on what is being transmitted rather than on the means by which it is transmitted. After all, taking apart your answering machine won’t tell you anything about the message someone left on it.
Message and transmission really do have little in common. No analysis of the telephone signal will tell you anything about what the caller is saying to you. Any more than a study of paper and ink will give you any insight into David Copperfield or an examination of the Globe Theater will help you understand Hamlet. Likewise, the frequency of a sound-stimulus and the electrical response the stimulus evokes in the auditory cortex are entirely dissimilar.
We like to think that early man was more in touch with nature than we are now. Maybe that’s why the earliest attempts to get to the bottom of things took the form of stories and poems. Maybe life is best understood in terms of symbol and drama. The similarity between the theory of the Big Bang and certain ancient creation myths may be more than just coincidence (which may also be why some scientists find the Big Bang to be, in the words of the late John Maddox, one-time editor of the science journal Nature, “philosophically unacceptable”).
I am not, by the way, advancing any either-or proposition. I like my science and technology as much as anyone. But I am suggesting there may be limits to an approach to reality that is purely abstract, strictly deterministic, and merely quantitative. However much such an approach may tell us about the composition of things, it seems quite incapable of telling us anything about their point. And if one regards such an approach as the only authentic avenue to truth, then one is likely to conclude that things in the end have no point. To insist that everything has a cause is, in effect, to deny that anything has a motive. The world we live in, so far as I can tell, is packed with motivation. And it is motivation that drives stories.
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When I meet an artist whose work I greatly admire, I always ask how the work was made. The technical discussion does not reveal how they thought of the idea, but it does give me time to work in the ridiculously trite question “how did you think of that?” which is what we all really want to know.
Yes. When it comes to a work of art, how it was done does tell you a lot about what it says, because in art what is said and how it is said are bound up with each other.
Great article.
. But you say :”Message and transmission really do have little in common”. Could be but also on the other hand ,could the one exist without the other?
And also:”Perhaps we should think of it as a transmission system and focus our attention more on what is being transmitted rather than on the means by which it is transmitted” I’m wondering,haven’t we kind of been doing this already and it’s only been relatively recently in the history of our species that we’ve been able to apply the scientific method as a means to, among other things .
getting a better picture of the whole of what’s going on all around all the time..
I Where you said in your reply: “When it comes to a work of art, how it was done does tell you a lot about what it says, because in art what is said and how it is said are bound up with each other.” I wanted to bring up the “Beethoven error”: which is the assumption that process and product need to resemble each other and is quickly thrown out the window when LVB who made and left with us what we have of his, is remembered to have lived in a filthy, disgusting flat with “unemptied chamber pot, strewn with wasting food” and dressed so slovenly was at least once arrested as a vagrant. … So I was going to bring this up to refute but instead, I see what you said suppORTS the Beethoven error.
I think we’re better off that we have both science and art who shed light on each other.
Again, terrific article
Well, as I said: “I am not, by the way, advancing any either-or proposition. I like my science and technology as much as anyone.”
Also, when we think of process and product, I don’t think we need include the lifestyle of the artist or his dietary habits, etc. Beethoven’s creative process seems to have been much more orderly than his habits of hygiene. All analogies are imperfect – one thing is like another only in some ways, not others. It is perfectly useful to know how the answering machine works. But that information remains different from the information contained in the messages the machine records.