Root 2 (Part 2)

Part 1: https://steemit.com/mathematics/@matthew.raymer/root-2-part-1#comments

The translation of ‘near perfect’ works of literature almost inevitably always means loss of ‘literary value’ to the translated version, because a) of the translator’s inferior genius to the original author’s; and b) because that a work of great literature in its native language is like a beautiful large translucent gemstone set perfectly in a gorgeous ground; a gemstone which a translator has wrenched out of its surroundings, perhaps scratching or abrading it in the process, and s/he has then attempted to mount it in a recreated lookalike but inferior ground for it and under her/his own terms. In the same way, by the same arguments, any ‘translation’ of a theoretical model or blueprint from science of any kind into actual machinery or technology or hard substantial fact; is also inevitably liable always to entail a generation of some qualitative ‘loss’ arising; loss integral within the practical machinery created.

This might be a general rule: that drawing-board schemes when put into practice suffer loss of theoretical effectiveness of a course.

This is the case even when wear and tear, friction and other known entropies are all allowed for in the blueprints. It is not due to human error or to human imprecisions either. It is due to the inescapable fact of inherent imperfection being present in all sensorily perceived material things. And no matter how much one ‘allows’ for them, there will remain a heap of unknowns, perhaps unknowables, all of which carry their own levels and types of imperfection, all of which bears upon the effective practical usage of such material things. We just have to accept that we don’t know it all.

William Empson again:

“The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”

This ‘waste’ which remains and ‘kills’ poses unanswerable questions; such as why items age; not in a mundane sense but in an enquiry which asks why ‘things’ are all ‘set up’ so as for them to decay and to deteriorate, in the way everything does on earth and in the known universe. One is able to see very clearly how the many and varied cultural myths of there having been once a ‘Golden Age’ are so prevalent and powerful.

Our machines and technological helps in their very shaping into their uses by their human manufacturers and designers may appear to buck this rule of ubiquitous deterioration; not because they don’t wear out; they do; but because they are systems and processes which harness physical and other science to produce a targeted and useful result for humankind. A washing machine; a telegraph pole. In their capability to harness the data of science for the furtherance of human convenience, these technological objects and their systems and processes might be seen as though they bore a simple balanced equation which says; as much as one harnesses processes and systems for human benefit; so an equivalent amount of deterioration and decay is unleashed in the unharnessed and unharnessable outputs, the ‘wastes’, from such devices and going into the ecosystem and into the order or the lack of order in the universe overall.

Living things are perhaps less ‘wasteful’ in this way in general; and partake in cycles of regeneration and decay; yet there remains a great deal of attrition amongst populations and species in order that the recycling systems of living things are able to be upheld. This attrition appears to be the price to be paid for the sake of preservation and maintenance of the natural recycling systems of living forms. And yet living things are yet caught up in, because they subsist physically in, the decay and deterioration of the non-living world and universe. These decay and deterioration are assisted greatly by the human-made technological unharnessed attritions arising out of and emanating from their machines and their gadgets as outputs.

My reasoning here may look like it is depending on some kind of inverse law to the scientific law of the conservation of energy; which is a law which is a generalisation and which has not nor can be tested to proof; only to its denial. This inverse law might say something like: One conserves energy always but this same conserved energy as we observe it over the longer term finds itself always more greatlydissipated than before its alteration or shift. This may not be the case of things. Things perhaps might be created or even be being created anew and possessing also tightly concentrated integrated parcels of energy which drive them, somewhere somehow in the realms of space or elsewhere. I don’t know.

But just as Newton’s Laws are useful and workable within our solar system and at our levels of human maginiiude; so to on the earth and in its vicinity, there is seen this ever and continuous winding down of material things going on ubiquitously all around. The great Shakespeare comments on his own observations saying:

“The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself—

Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve,

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. ”

Whereas mathematics, being ideal – by which I mean – in the mind – and so subsists as a series of deliberately discrete and segregated steps by which to try to harness the amorphous and continuous physical world; this means that maths indeed mat perhaps be eternal and unchanging in so far that it is ideal – but for these same reasons, and in the final instance maths remains useless to us as physical persons ‘crawling between earth and heaven’. This is because its format, its architecture, its foundation, just do not align with, do not fit, are incompatible with, the continuum and processes which are our material being and environment.

Take the figure 1. It is unity. It is static, unchanging, It cannot for these reasons ‘contain’ anything which we find in existence in the material world; since this material world is always ‘on the move’ messy and diffused; and perhaps as a set of pretty-fully interfused relationships which subsist interdependently in one another. Not like 1 at all.

But yet maybe there is hope in all this for we people? These imbalances and imperfections, and their messiness in their goings-on in the physical world seem to me to be necessary to what we might call ‘the learning curve of life’ for human beings. What I mean is that they are present not by logical or by physical necessity; although they impose on us logical and physical necessities. They are present as they are, but I do believe things have or had or have had a possibility of being/having been different in their set-up.

I believe that the set-up we have was chosen and has a purpose. I believe that that purpose is a pedagogical one; it is that these material imperfections and all the surprises and unpredictabilites, the knocks off course, and the inabilities to handle, that they bring to humankind one day after the next, are our life-teachers. They are our life-teachers knitted tightly into the fabric of material being so as to be there to ‘knock us into shape’ and so to make a people fit for living and for humanity.

They are then the instruments of a God of Love who has placed them here, so as to educate us in his ways and about his person. The static and non-dynamic differentiations of maths are a double sided blade; cutting one way to show us that perfect at least theoretically, is possible; and cutting the opposite way to show that human self-belief can be seductive and so draw a person away from what Wordsworth has called; ‘the essential passions of the heart’ and so they are able to puff us up in a false estimate of ourselves and of our capabilities. It is such a pride which in a weak sense is ‘necessary’ so that that ‘fall’ which is inherent within it and which ever follows on from it, is able to be efficacious for us and so to ‘awaken’ us a little more from our as yet unjettisoned pipe-dreams still cherished, and which we constructed for ourselves and for our own esteems since our beguiled childhoods.

The Book of Proverbs tells us that ‘To spare the rod is to spoil the child’. Our lives then, in the ways I have tried to show, inevitably experience God’s rod upon us, his children, by way of our being creatures caught in a pincer-grip between brute animal being and our hopes and spiritual dreams of comfort and beauty; dreams, hopes, which when they are given just a bit of thought, tend to conform what is possibly, what is even probably, the case – thought confirms the presence of a realm of fulfilled dreams and realised hopes, in the real and actually subsisting, being present in the purlieus of The Lord God.

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