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Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: Out of Focus
May. 9th, 2015 09:47 amThe fifth April Moon prompt is... confusing. It's a father, maybe from an owl, on a background that's a few patches of light shining through what could be a barred window behind the camera. The lit stripes have an orange tint to them that is reminiscent of tiger coloration.
The image itself, however, is out of focus to the point where everything is blurry. Which, as it turns out, is a pretty good metaphor for life, as we are creatures that always have incomplete information. Our pictures of life are always out of focus to greater or lesser degrees, since we lack the ability to know everything even on the simplest of things. The interesting part of that is sometimes the lack of focus makes things that are uninteresting with looking at, and other things that are lookable become blurred and fade away.
What would having perfect information look like for anything? To be able to see all sides of an issue, and all of the motivation behind all of those perspectives, their contexts and influences, and how each of the options that are presented will turn out, with their ripple effects, changes, and consequences. To get perfect information on just one decision would probably require more storage space and study time than any one human could manage, and it would be out of the reach of the storage capacity of most computers. And even then, it wouldn't guarantee a good result - wed just know what was going to happen based on the information. If the options were "You're screwed, you're screwed, and you're totally screwed", then I can see the forecasting system becoming part of the scrap heap quickly.
I've heard two different versions of Pandora's Box that tell the same narrative and only diverge at what's in the box when Pandora closes it for the first time. Most versions have Hope in the box, which convinces Pandora to let it out so that we can survive against all the other evils that are already out. The one that stuck with me, though, is the one where Pandora slams the box shut before Foreknowledge gets out. Because if that one has gotten out, there would not have been a human species to speak of, with every person knowing exactly the course their life would take. That's the scarier version of the tale - a true catastrophe averted, rather than there having been a good thing in the box to help with all the bad.
And as it turns out, the universe itself is a bit fuzzy. At our current level of technology, we can see where an electron is or where it is going, but not both at the same time. There are particles that change their state upon being observed, some to whatever the observer was expecting to see at the time of the observation. It is possible to pair particles, separate them over long distances and then change the information in one set and have it replicate in other other set almost instantaneously, despite the distance. It may be possible to unlock these secrets to develop greater communication possibilities or to make the vast amounts of distance between Terra and other stars and bodies shrink such that they can be traversed in a lifetime.
We will never have complete knowledge of our own universe, because we are part of it, and that stops us from knowing all of it, but it's in the fuzzy parts, the bits that are out of focus, that our curiosity, our inspiration, and the requirements to act on situations all lie.
So while the picture itself may be unremarkable, the composition of the image is not. This applies to more than just pictures.
The image itself, however, is out of focus to the point where everything is blurry. Which, as it turns out, is a pretty good metaphor for life, as we are creatures that always have incomplete information. Our pictures of life are always out of focus to greater or lesser degrees, since we lack the ability to know everything even on the simplest of things. The interesting part of that is sometimes the lack of focus makes things that are uninteresting with looking at, and other things that are lookable become blurred and fade away.
What would having perfect information look like for anything? To be able to see all sides of an issue, and all of the motivation behind all of those perspectives, their contexts and influences, and how each of the options that are presented will turn out, with their ripple effects, changes, and consequences. To get perfect information on just one decision would probably require more storage space and study time than any one human could manage, and it would be out of the reach of the storage capacity of most computers. And even then, it wouldn't guarantee a good result - wed just know what was going to happen based on the information. If the options were "You're screwed, you're screwed, and you're totally screwed", then I can see the forecasting system becoming part of the scrap heap quickly.
I've heard two different versions of Pandora's Box that tell the same narrative and only diverge at what's in the box when Pandora closes it for the first time. Most versions have Hope in the box, which convinces Pandora to let it out so that we can survive against all the other evils that are already out. The one that stuck with me, though, is the one where Pandora slams the box shut before Foreknowledge gets out. Because if that one has gotten out, there would not have been a human species to speak of, with every person knowing exactly the course their life would take. That's the scarier version of the tale - a true catastrophe averted, rather than there having been a good thing in the box to help with all the bad.
And as it turns out, the universe itself is a bit fuzzy. At our current level of technology, we can see where an electron is or where it is going, but not both at the same time. There are particles that change their state upon being observed, some to whatever the observer was expecting to see at the time of the observation. It is possible to pair particles, separate them over long distances and then change the information in one set and have it replicate in other other set almost instantaneously, despite the distance. It may be possible to unlock these secrets to develop greater communication possibilities or to make the vast amounts of distance between Terra and other stars and bodies shrink such that they can be traversed in a lifetime.
We will never have complete knowledge of our own universe, because we are part of it, and that stops us from knowing all of it, but it's in the fuzzy parts, the bits that are out of focus, that our curiosity, our inspiration, and the requirements to act on situations all lie.
So while the picture itself may be unremarkable, the composition of the image is not. This applies to more than just pictures.
