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Notes -
I'm always working on philosophical meanderings for storytelling and sensemaking purposes, and this one's a doozy -- though not related to Triessentialism, so posting it here instead of my TE thread.
I've been fascinated for a while by the concept of waves: why were sci-fi writers of the 30's through the 70's so fascinated by waves, rays, and beams? Think of how Captain America was not just injected with a serum but also bathed in "vita-rays". Why did they imbue them narratively with almost magical powers? (I've since realized it's just the evolution of technobabble, and "quantum" has taken the place of "waves". But I digress.)
But this focus on waves was also present in real science. What are 3d waves like, in contrast to the simplified 2D diagrams in all the science books? What does it even mean that light and matter have wave-particle duality? The interference patterns of the double-slit experiment are fascinating, but what's the physical reality behind it all? There was always something missing, something on the edge of thought which made waves a slippery concept for me.
At some point, I had an epiphany: waves are a copy of the shape of a thing impacting a medium, propagating through the medium.
Consider a diver, executing a flawless front dive with pike. When she hits the water, she displaces the water around her, carving a 3D tunnel through the water which collapses around her as the gravity returns the water to its lowest local energy state. The wave propagates outward, its shape initially precisely mirroring her shape as it touches the water. As the wavefronts of different continuous impacts of parts of her body interfere with each other, the shape becomes muddled, approximate, and eventually the shape is lost, having averaged out to a circle through this entropy.
Consider a metal cube touching the surface of a still pool. The cube makes a square wave on the surface, which quickly becomes a round wave the further it is from directly touching the cube.
Consider a hologram, a 3D recording of a laser wavefront on a special kind of film substrate. What's captured is multiple perspectives, continuously, simultaneously, and analog. Holograms have always seemed like science magic to me, but now they make a bit more sense.
But that wasn't the doozy! I've recently been considering how systems tend to lose focus on their original purpose and turn into simulacra of what they had been.
Consider problem-solving organizations. Whether that's a system of government, a system of commerce, or a charity with a specific goal, without constant refinement or straight-up replacement, they regularly become jobs programs focusing on makework.
Consider computer operating systems which start out with purpose and clarity, but through the entropy of installations and uninstallations, become slow and befuddled.
Here's the doozy: while a focus on entropy or on individual failures in systems may be useful in modeling them, it may also be useful to model them as waves with interference. Initially, the solutions are shaped by the problems, But over time, additional concerns will round the sharp problem-conformed edges of the solutions.
This suggests what's needed for a sustainable problem-solving system is not a problem-conforming entropic wave, but a solution-propagating wave, like a flute's finely designed and well-played sound waves creating a melody.
Hm. I need to read John Gall's Systemantics. I've heard that it may shed some light on how systems fail and why replacing them is easier than fixing them.
Parting thought: an answer and its question shape each other. ("Why? Because." "How? Thus." "What? This.") But is the answer a wavefront of its question, or the other way around? Hm.
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