Published on 05 March 2015
There are an infinite amount of places this sentence can go. In closed systems, that space can be severely limited; to the point where a language comprised of one non-duplicatable value would only have a single possible state. Recently, I’ve been asking myself often what determines our intuition about bounded states that occur in, for lack of a better word, ‘real life’. I didn’t attend Philosophy 101 in college; I may not be using the right vocabulary throughout this, and I’d ask you to bear with me if that is the case.
For instance, I am currently in a cafe. I could walk outside of the door and do an infinite amount of things. However, when asked what I am going to do later, the answers will be highly bounded - I am going to go eat, or go home, or maybe if I’m feeling particularly crazy I’ll go to another cafe. The odds that I will walk out of this cafe, throw my backpack into opposing traffic, and begin swimming towards Alcatraz while screaming about the giant platypus in the sky are very, very low (I hope). But that’s a possibility. We all know about this - it’s something that we’re taught early on, in the same breath as ‘creativity’ and ‘living outside of your comfort zone’.
However, we don’t generally talk about other applications of questioning the bounds of possible paths or areas within the decision space.
My friend Simon tweeted recently that he didn’t know “how I feel about these 2k person slacks that are starting to crop up.” I responded, casually - do you have to feel a certain way about them?
I know intuitively what Simon meant - he was airing that he may have some unfinished thoughts surrounding a relatively new phenomenon online, and what it portends for the future of the internet (and for our jobs and lives, as online-living and -working people). I was trying to respond to his feeling about it - though. Why would he feel anything about the phenomenon, at all? This swiftly got interesting when he responded:
Simon: I’m not apathetic about most things I’m involved with?
Me: Sure you are. You’re being really selective of the fields of interaction you’re choosing to notice.
Think about it. In the multiverse (a word I really don’t like but am going to use anyway), there are an infinite amount of things one chooses to take notice of. This doesn’t necessarily have to be about the multiverse - in the universe, there are an infinite amount of ways I could carve up reality into segments that involve interaction with me (there are probably a finite amount of segments that I would find semantically different, though). I could choose to interact with my coke bottle next to me at this cafe, or with the label, or with the Cousteau-like nautical light in the corner. Until I looked at the lamp just now, I had no preconceived statements I could make about my value judgements of it. But now I do. And I could repeat this process, infinitely.
Choosing which objects to conceivably identify as worthy of emotional weight is a thing I can do. And it’s a thing you can do. It’s a way of dealing with limitless possibilities, and it is, in a sense, controllable.
That may be what I was trying to say. I didn’t communicate the above thoughts as clearly as I could have. This may be, even, where I wanted this post to end up. I won’t know until I consider alternatives, and I am going to choose a path that involves me not following this line of thought presently. You don’t have to stop - the comment section is right beneath this final sentence.
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