Apperceptive Mess #8: COVID-19 Discontinuity Plans, Lucretius as a Scientist, and The Domestication of Modern Life
Hello friends,
As you may have already not notice, there wasn’t a regularly scheduled newsletter sent last week. And you will be right. Last weekend, in a truly Singaporean “kia-see” way, we drove 6 hours from our house in Los Angeles to join my partner’s family here in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
Granted, a substantial amount of lifestyle changes had to be made as we settled down into a socially-distant life in the desert: we stopped going to restaurants, only ordered food for pick-up, washed our hands at every intervening juncture, and started home-cooking a lot more.
I suspect this coronavirus outbreak will, if anything, be making us much better (and cleaner) chefs out of all of us.
Conversation of The Week: (???)
In light of being in the middle of the desert and exercising my civic-responsibility of “social distancing”, there will not be any conversations of the week going forward (or will there?)
I’m still in the midst of figuring this all out as I settle into a routine here — I may just hop on the Zoom bandwagon and do it on there instead.
Meditation of The Week: Art as The Frontier of Ideas
Inspired by Lucretius, I have started to challenge my perception of reality by thinking about the history of modern inventions beyond tangible objects. That has lead to the following lines of questioning that have since lodged themselves deep within my internal brain-chatter:
Was Lucretius a pioneering physicist, and Aristotle a computer scientist?
As a thought exercise, they sound naively preposterous until we consider the influence their ideas have had on their modern applications.
Here is Lucretius’ attempt at explaining the fundamental law of Nature:
(on Nature) her first principle: that nothing’s brought Forth by any supernatural power out of naught … Nothing can be made from nothing — once we see that so, already we are on the way to what we want to know
— Nature of Things (I, 149 - 158)
and Wikipedia’s definition of the law of conservation of energy:
energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another.
The Nature of Things was written by Lucretius in mid-century BC, while Galileo demonstrated the conservative conversion of potential and kinetic energy with his famous “interrupted pendulum” demonstration in 1639.
You can also observe the same analogous relationship between Aristotle’s The Organon (2nd century BC), with much of its evolution then taking place with George Boole to give us Boolean Logic (1864), Claude Shannon that mapped Boolean logic onto the physical world with electronics (1938), and of course, Alan Turing who showed us how to design the computer (1936).
Underlying these examples demonstrates a bit of a meta takeaway: all breakthroughs, like Lucretius’ proposal of how nothing can be made of naught, is an iterative and progressive work in progress through time horizons beyond our mortalities.
Accrediting institutions confer diplomas that separate Arts and Sciences, and we show up with an impression that Art is the lagging field while Science is the frontier. That is simply not true. Just as the adage that says the philosophy of this generation is the common sense of the next, Lucretius’ proposal a thousand years before Galileo’s discovery of the pendulum demonstrates why we undervalue the Arts.
Art is a medium in which we express our imaginations of today, and without it, there will be no science and technology for tomorrow. Art is the frontier.
Read Of The Week: Children today are suffering a severe deficit of play
Everyone knows that play is good for growing up, but no one is brave enough to fly the banner that it has a part to play in being an effective contributor to society.
Told through the lens of how modern life has affected the way children grow up today, this article is also a must-read for anyone who has also found themselves domesticated by modern life: the preference for standing chairs over just taking a walk, using a Kindle to cope with eye-strain as opposed to being disciplined enough to step away, and an increasing reliance on food-delivery as opposed to making your own food.
There are larger mental health repercussions at play here as we try to optimise away the little things that keep us sane.
Quote of The Week
“Survival” means different things. It means having a strategy whose downsides you’re preemptively familiar with, so you’re prepared both psychologically and financially when they occur.
That is all we have for the week! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it. If you have any questions, suggestions, complaints, or feedback, please feel free to reach out by replying directly to this email!
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See you next week 👋