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Cerebral Contents: Update for 05.13.08: Backsliding by Cynthia Ruth Lewis 05.05.08: Five Feet and Building by Joel Van Noord Grocery Aisle by Richard Lighthouse Cross the Road by Ashok Niyogi 04.29.08: The Modern Covenant by Daniel E. Wilcox Death by Onions by Michael Frissore 04.21.08: Future's Children by Kimberly Raiser Identity Theft by George Anderson A Great Deal of Money by Justin Hyde 04.14.08: Mr. Papaya and Dale by Eric Suhem California by Caroline Imreibe Aftermath of Vehement Argument #1,068 by Cynthia Ruth Lewis Trip-Hammer Vitality by Lisa Nickerson 04.07.08: The Florence of Basel, or Why Readers of Nietzsche Need to Read Burckhardt by Jeff Crouch Friends of the Poet by Sean C. Bowen Picture Perfect by Leah Baldwin 03.24.08: Staring Down a White-Tailed Doe by Aleathia Drehmer 03.17.08: The Hairbrush by Vernard Kennedy Dog Days of Winter by Niall Berkeley Poem From My Grave by Michael Lee Johnson Mashed Potatoes and Hamburgers by Matt Finney 03.10.08: Hard Work by Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal Jetty Cake Pigs by J.D. Nelson |
Percentage Truth
by Jeff Crouch
How does one come to grips with thought-puzzles like "If a Tree Falls in the Forest" or "The Emperor's New Clothes"?
The first puzzle is easy if we belong to a community that understands behavior based on science. We can come up with terms and conditions that make the presence of sound predictable. Since we already suppose that where there is a medium for sound to travel, anything that normally makes a sound — whether or not someone listens to it — will continue to make a sound. Of course, we can always throw in a twist such as, "What if someone planted a sound canceller in the forest"? In this case, we would have a special forest where a falling tree would produce a sound wave, but the sound wave would be cancelled by the sound canceller. The question then becomes, "Does the sound wave count as sound if the sound canceller cancels it?" We could then talk about the nature of instrumentation. What we still lack, though, is the certainty of sound in a given event. But now we can also conclude another something about our thought-puzzle: that as a puzzle it asks, "Is sound about experience, or is it about laws based on experience"? Ultimately, we can doubt the presence of sound in a given situation, but the probability of its presence is what we can determine. Indeed, what we have with modern science is predictability, not necessarily certainty, and we need not delve into Heisenberg or Feynman to reach this conclusion. This line of thought leads to another conclusion: the predictability of a given environment depends on how many constraints we can give it.
For those not averse to modeling, whether of the computer or cartoon sort, trees can fall and always/never produce sound, trees can fall and randomly produce sound, trees can fall and "oink" when they do... Without re-contextualizing the aspect of community in this discussion, but moving now from a community of science to a social/political community, how does a work like "The Emperor's New Clothes" play out? Well, an interesting route on this question is to look at what Richard P. Feynman says in QED on the predictability of light in an event and what he says in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" about the behavior of light in terms of spectrometry. Predictability for science is always paramount, but in the case of quantum mechanics, predictability is about percentages, which can themselves be certain results, and in spectrometry, it is about certain results simply — definitive 100% results. In the scientific community, we describe behaviors and attempt to assess the terms for their repeatability. However, we do not always have certainty because we cannot fully constrain events, but aside from unconstrained events, we also have percentage behavior present in fully constrained events such as the Rutherford experiment (Geiger-Marsden experiment), and those percentage behaviors often prove descriptive — and repeatable. In the social/political community, we have also engaged the world of percentage behaviors, and Karl Rove was the purported master of playing such percentages, but can we carry the analogy of percentages from science to the social-political? Well, we already have. And, for an analogy in the other direction, see Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind. What is it about the Emperor's clothes that brings to the fore discussions on politics and power, truth and lie, and different ways of seeing?
Perhaps it is all of these different interpretations (all of these contradictions) that reside already within the group, the subjects of the Emperor, but then too, the Emperor may not be ascribing to the values of his subjects. He may, indeed, may be looking to another group for his values. —In the same way a forest might contain a sound canceller. But in the land of silly similes, the truth as it ruptures "The Emperor's New Clothes" is an accident much like the discovery in the Rutherford experiment: "It was almost as incredible as if you fired a fifteen-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you." For in "The Emperor's New Clothes," naked is the remark of an innocent, and here, innocence, idiocy, accident... serve to re-focus the group (the subjects) and give it power. —Like an oink for the sound of a tree falling.
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