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Paul Grobstein's picture

(physical) interactions with randomness

Submitted by Paul Grobstein on Thu, 10/23/2008 - 10:29am.

If everybody sees everything (not only poems) a little bit differently, then nobody is "totally wrong" and everybody can get "less wrong" by noticing the differences between how they see things and how other people see them ... and coming up with a new way to see them?

"Bonds or forces" are a useful way to see things in lots of circumstances. But they're not so good in others. The problem in the latter case is that bonds/forces are no less probabilistic than the location or velocity of particles. A "bond" or "force" is a statistical likelihood of an association, not a fixed or invariant relation. So a "bond" or a "force" is a name we give to an observed statistical regularity, and they have "meaning" because of that.

Yes, it is "indeed peoples' (physical) interactions with randomness that gives it meaning." The physical interactor is the brain, and it is organized in such a way that different people will, to one degree or another, have different interactions and create different meanings. Which we can use to have new interactions and create new meanings?

Is that at least a new way of seeing things?

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