The Sense of Direction

Modern physical theory has Life constrained by the determinations of simple relations: invisible in their interactions, (some hardly beyond the substance of our imaginations!) yet ubiquitous as they are uniform; universal orderings such as gravity, electromagnetism, the strong & the weak nuclear efforts; obligations that seem to assert a predictability that belie the contingent. An indifference to historical health or morbidity that is reciprocated by an unwavering enthusiasm for the conserved, the symmetric & the govern. Persuasion of the fruitful, the dialectics of love & charity could hardly satisfy the ambitions, let alone bind by a testable narrative both the cosmic & the atomic. Physical Law being the discoverable habits of an abiding determinism that knows no time & never “goes native”.

And than there is a philosophy that purports physical law is but a special description of mathematical truths—truths so fundamental to the operations of the universe that all instances of chaos, of instability, of weather, the “random walk” of evolution & even the act of choice itself are subject to & controlled by mathematical determination. “It is hard to see how any line can be drawn to separate physical action under mathematical control from those which might lie beyond it.” These truths deny conception, extant prior to any mental effort. They are what the efforts of reason seek, to make evident its own enlightenment. They are the creatures of a transcendent world of mathematical perfection. We know truth not by our ability to create, but by our ability to discover. Incompleteness haunts only our efforts, vagueness the effect only of our passions, accidents the virtue only of our speculations. Platonic truth disdains such mire. Life is a taint that spreads corruption through all facsimiles of the ideal mathematical form—inhabitants of a divine world of perfect stasis; purged of all spontaneities, of all imagination; that knows neither birth or death, love or charity.

The famulus that submits to such reckoning, has no need for a philosophy of hope. Desire is the source of much error—the mirror’s flaw & morbid reflection. Those of us who see promise in error, who desire the accidents of creation, indulge in the excess of love, look to touch as a way to inspire interest, see no need to submit even if we thieve such reckoning for our own begettings.  The perfection of the alive is to be open to all influences of the Adventure that leaves nothing unchanged.

To those of us who are bound by nothing but the creative, physical laws & their mathematical equivalences are like a path through a field of high, burnished grass, wind-whipped as it vanishes into obscure forests that bristle from the backs of bull mountains lurching across a landscape that provokes novel formulations at all points of this bound-upon-its-own-path, sun-inspired planet.

The well trodden provide us a sense of direction. They free us of the need to clear away the immediate & allow us to concentrate on the abstractions of our walk. We can ponder & hypothesize; take measurements & collect data; observe in great detail the great details that crowd in upon our path from every direction of time & space. Paths are determinable; govern by constant use; and once established, controlled by the mathematical elaboration that make pregnant further inferences of our thought & what we learn as we walk this way through the world. Upon a path we know from whence we came & how we got to where we are. The very behavior of a path permits us the prediction & testability of the “good idea”--- the one that tells us where we are going. Paths provide us a way to amplify our focus, a way to elaborate into formal systems our habits of knowing, a way to keep us consistent & not allow us to be ensnared by the brambles of intellectual incoherence that thrust their bull canes out from the banks of swift rivers that heave most of Reality past our padding, into unknown seas.

If not for a path (if not for physical law) our factual endeavors & the makings of coherent scientia would be continually beset by the unexpected that corrupts our explanations; beset by the accidental that returns the intractable to our calculations; beset by the vague that sickens dynamics with instabilities; beset by the injuries to deduction, effect of a lack of direction; beset by endless revisions to our theories because by not having a path, we find ourselves often lost in dark inconsistencies at the fall of a night of haunting contradiction.

Paths become a way for Reality to be reduced to the measurable, the hypothetical & the repeatable piece of “real phenomenon”, and thus the object of our knowing & the confirmation of our path-like axioms, postulates & theorems. Physical Law & Mathematical Truth are the makings of the well-worn through a path-size portion of the world.