Samuel,
I do think there are various elemental issues feeding into the surface chaos.
First and foremost, we see time in reverse. It’s not the point of the present, moving past to future, but change turning future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Making it more like temperature, pressure, color, etc, as an effect emergent from activity. Think frequencies and metabolism.
It is just that as mobile organisms, we experience reality as a sequence of perceptions, as function of intentional navigation, attenuated by telling stories and building civilizations out of the collective knowledge.
One consequence is that we have an ideals based culture, where in order to function as a collective, there has to be a common goal and social structure. Which then gets abstracted as ethical systems, religions, political organizations, etc.
Yet reality and nature is more cyclical, reciprocal and the tension and balance of opposite forces.
The most basic binary is between energy and the information it manifests.
Galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass coalesces in. Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to sort through and referee the information derived from the impluses bubbling up and the environmental elements encountered. Distilling signal from the noise.
Politics generally involves that tension between the social forces driving us on, against the cultural and civil forms coalescing out of this dynamic and having to arbitrate which impulses are beneficial to the common good , which are neutral and which negative.
This is a tension between processes and patterns. The energy, constantly changing form, goes past to future forms, as these forms coalesce and dissolve, future to past. So the process churns along, past to future, while the patterns rise and fall, future to past.
In a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the process goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. The individual goes birth to death, future to past, while the species goes onto new generations, shedding old. Consciousness goes one thought to the next, as these thoughts come and go.
Anything we can observe and measure, immediately recedes into the past, as the energy goes onto future events, so we only know the past receding.
Currently there is a popular theory, especially among those mathematically inclined, that it is information all the way down and the dynamic is emergent. Which makes about as much sense as arguing emotion emerges from thought, not the other way around.
Another issue with time is the question of determinism. The assumption is that as seemingly deterministic processes govern the outcome of every event, all the future must already be effectively determined, but there is only this physical present and it is in which this process of determination occurs. We cannot fully know the input into any event, as much of it arrives at the speed of light and if the input cannot be known, neither can the output be determined.
Determination is effect, not cause. It’s just that the past is what we see.
Free will is also a flawed concept, since if the will were free of cause, it would be equally free of effect and the entire premise of will is to have an effect. We are part of nature’s selection process, as to what occurs and what doesn’t.
Another idea/ideal we have wrong would be God, as a spiritual absolute. Necessarily an absolute would be an essence, not an ideal, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the new born, than the wise old man. Consciousness seeking knowledge, than any particular form of it. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
It is just that in order to function as a whole, society needs some moral and ethical structure, passed down from generation to generations, so this father figure lawgiver and his ten commandments is one of those stories for children, to keep them in line.
Good and bad are not some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.
So this social model building is a dynamic process, where whenever it starts to solidify, cracks appear and it goes through more cycles of building up and breaking down.
As we get older and wiser, we stop automatically running after sweets and happiness and accept that there are no ups, without the downs and the price we pay to feel, is that some of it will be pain. It’s all educational.
