Stuart,

Both buttons refer back to my original comment and I’m not entirely familiar with the mechanics of medium, so I’ll reply here;

“Are you thinking dialectically here?”

Not entirely. I don’t think the synthesis can be fully derived, so I’m seeing it as a particular relationship, between energy and form.

Look at galaxies. Energy radiates out, as form coalesces in. Cosmic convection cycles.

Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system, to sort through the forms precipitating out, as well as referee the emotions and impluses bubbling up. Motor and steering.

Society is the tension between the organic energies bubbling up, while civil and cultural forms coalesce in. Youth and age, liberal and conservative.

One very significant point I keep trying to make is that as mobile, intentional organisms, we experience our reality as flashes of perception and cognition, then sort and judge this information, in order to navigate our environment. Then we learned to narrate our journeys and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge. Which creates a couple of conceptual biases.

The first is that we view time as the point of the present, moving past to future, which seems somewhat mystical and physics only seems able to codify it as measures of duration.

Though the evident cause is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential>actual>residual.

Duration is this physical presence, as events coalesce and dissolve.

There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it, aka, causality and conservation of energy. No time traveling through wormholes in the ‘fabric of spacetime.’

Time is asymmetric, because what is measured, action, is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not both. The relative order of the overall system, entropy, is not being directly measured and is irrelevant.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism. No space travel necessary.

As a dynamic effect, time is like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our environment, bodily functions and emotions, not the sequence of thought, so we can be more objective about them.

The left, cause and effect, linear hemisphere of the brain is analogous to a clock/ruler, as the right, emotional, intuitive side is to a thermostat/barometer.

As the energy churns around, it goes from one configuration to the next, past to future. While these configurations go future to past. Processes generating patterns.

In a factory, the product goes start to finish, future to past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

As lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness goes from one thought to the next, while these perceptions come and go.

The feedback is that the patterns steer the process.

So when you have to consider these go opposite directions of time, there is serious, unremitting tension. The only synthesis is this fluctuating rhythm of the present.

Consider the tension within societies, as every individual wishes to achieve their highest potential, while the actual is never more than a small fraction of the potential and the residual, of history and remembrance, is but a tiny fraction of that. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. Though without acorns, there are no oak trees.

Which gets to the next bias. Those stories with the most effective narrative impact are going to be most remembered and repeated. Which naturally teaches the lesson of life that it is all going somewhere definitive. That ideal state, be it heaven, or the singularity, rather than these thermodynamic feedback loops physically occurring.

Which tends to amplify our natural hunter/gatherer focus on the goal, then sensing the networks and context holding it all together.

For instance, the current mantra of the economy is efficiency, which is to do more with less, so the ideal of efficiency would be to do everything with nothing.

That necessarily leads into economics.

The functionality of capitalism is that it amounts to an ecosystem, with the various public and private institutions, along with individual and cultural factors, all competing/cooperating within this system. So the medium which allows this to function is money.

The reality is that money is an accounting device, essentially a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt. Yet we experience it as quantified hope and security and try to save it.

Econ 101 tells us money is both medium of exchange and store of value, but how does that work? For instance, in the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store, or for cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store. Neither doctors or highway engineers would confuse the two, so do economists possess some secret of nature, or is there a problem here?

As a contract, in order to accumulate and store the asset, roughly equal amounts of debt have to be created. One way is for the government to borrow it up and spend in ways which don’t compete with private sector investment, such as welfare and warfare. Neither of which are going to support a healthy society, in the long run. Not that welfare is bad, but it is a patch over much deeper issues, where the money only flows through the people, into the pockets of the corporations.

As a medium, we own money like we own the section of road we are using, or the fluids flowing through our body. Storing it creates enormous, ultimately unnecessary problems.

I wrote an essay on this; https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-worm-in-the-apple-of-modern-capitalism-a46081000d5a

I could expand on this in various other ways, but I’ll leave it here and see what you think.