14 November 2022

“Hey, dad!”

“Yes?”

“How can I know that you see the color green in the same way that I do?”

“What!?”

“Yes, I see the color green in a certain way. But I cannot describe it to you. Green is green. But maybe you see green with the same color that I see blue. And still for you it will be green, right?”

“Errrr…. right…..”

“Isn’t that a bit disturbing?”

This is a real chat with my son some days ago. The level of instrospection that a 13 year-old can show is amazing, and here I have my kid disturbed about the relativity of experience, and he’s talking about colors!

Imagine when he starts climbing up our Abstraction Stack™, that I introduced last week!

Joy? What is joy exactly? How can I know that you experience joy in the same way that I do?

As we move from things, to actions, to feelings, to ideas, to concepts, we enter into a blurred territory of broadly defined terms.

What is a friend for you?

How would you define loyalty?

The Tower of Babel

Most of us know the Bible’s tale about the Tower of Babel. It’s an arresting image: the defying humanity decides to build a tower reaching for the heavens using worldly means. Yahweh, pissed off with man’s arrogance, scatters humanity across the Earth and condemns us to the confusion of using different languages, dividing humankind for eternity.

It’s a fine tale as an etiology of why people live across the land and use different languages, but I think God did something more subtle and more clever than just that. Perhaps an insurance policy in case we all ended up using one same language—legend says that Gabriel García Márquez declared poor English (“el inglés mal hablado”) as the universal language.

What God did was to abstract the terms as we climbed our Stack so that they lose strength as we move up and, in our attempt to unite, they end up dividing us. Our Abstraction Stack™ becomes our very own Tower of Babel… was this what the authors of the Genesis were really referring to? 🤔

Our higher level abstractions are an attempt to simplify the multiplicity of the Tangible Reality™. Things and events in Reality™ are transitory, always unique, but through the abstraction we try to encapsulate them into what is constant, single and eternal—the dog greeting me becomes an expression of loyalty, a value, an idea, that is endless—. It’s really an attempt to understand the Patterns of Heaven 🌞, and a fundamental tool to align the wills of millions.

But because those abstractions are so removed from reality, so interpretable, eventually the tension between the multiplicity of the tangible and the unicity of the celestial is so high that it breaks 💔, dividing our interpretations and, with them, our wills.

Just think on how many people have been aligned by the idea of freedom and how many people have been divided by it. And, in both cases, think on how removed from Tangible Reality™ the concept might have been—avoiding more dangerous ground, I live in a free country (two very high abstractions, btw), but I cannot even move freely across the land, unless I want to be run over by a bus 🚌 or severely punished by trespassing private property 👮🏻‍♂️; what is freedom in tangible terms?

Speak particle, speak wave

But, despite the futility of the exercise, climbing the Abstraction Stack™ is an irresistible temptation. If we could master the higher levels we would be one step closer to godly wisdom. The Truth is Up there, and we’re not going to settle for some shadows on the wall.

The way I see this, at the bottom of the Stack, our language behaves like particles 🎱; at the top, it behaves like waves 〰️.

Particles are specific, measurable, verifiable, timebound, they are very close to the impermanence of Reality™. We like particles. When we define goals, we love speaking particle. SMART objectives. 🎯 Definition of Done. Speaking particle allows us to project ourselves into a Tangible™ future, and that creates action and aligns wills.

But particles don’t travel far, nor they stay for long. They are incisive but limited.

Waves, on the other hand, can expand into infinity. They don’t carry mass, which makes them ethereal. A wave, like an idea, cannot be destroyed. But a wave can easily be interfered, to the point of nullifying. But it is not destroyed, as long as the wave exists, as long as an idea exists, the only way to nullify it is to keep emitting one with a negative sign.

I don’t think you can influence people by increasing the amplitude of the signal, by shouting 🤬 or insisting 🧐. In the particle realm, yes; not in the wave realm. If the message is not right, the influence ends after you leave the room.

(Have you not had that feeling? That something makes sense only while someone is telling you, but the minute you give it a second thought simply does not click?)

Resonance is what you are looking for. Resonance is what translates waves into Tangible impact. Resonance happens when the wave emitted is tuned to a natural oscillation frequency of the receiver. Resonance can tear down bridges. Resonance can move mountains.

But I don’t know the Laws of Resonance™. I wish I did. There would be something divine in those Laws, if they existed. An understanding of this world that we all strive for.

Why does something resonate?
Is resonance absolute or circumstancial?
Personal or universal?
Can I shape a message to resonate, or is resonance inherent to the message itself?

As always, more questions than answers.

And I fear for my son, adrift in the middle of the sea.

He doesn’t know the green I see, which is almost always beautiful and optimistic and full of possibilties.

Does he see the same green? Or is it different?

He floats in a sea whose surface is disturbed by a million overlaying waves.
A world of extreme fragmentation.
A world of noise.
His breadth too shallow to enjoy the peace of the underwater.
How can he find resonance in that sea?
Promising ideas swiped up by the next TikTok.
Resonant proposals nullified under waves of Twitter comments.

Is this good or is this bad?

I don’t know what to make of it.

I don't know what my work is.

So I will just keep writing,

hoping to find truth in the next metaphor.