Narratives may be designed not to mirror reality but to elicit certain behaviors. In other words, "narrative truths" might serve to correct our innate response to the world around in context of acquired information on the individual level, somewhat like the way that our innate and acquired immune systems function on the cellular level.
Like prairie dog barks, thus for example, the idea that we as individuals are responsible for our actions is not so much a mirror of causal connections (e.g. of a homunculus that controls everything we do according to conscious logic), as it is a narrative designed to redirect our innate reactions (e.g. with paleolithic roots) into acquired reactions which work better in a high-population world. What are some other examples of this use of ideas to redirect perceptions and reactions toward more constructive ends?
Ideas are only a pale shadow of the world around, but it's fun nonetheless to look for ideas that reflect reality as simply as possible. What can do this better than a reflective sphere?
various energies
We encounter energy in many applications with different units. The quantities in the first units menu of this widget provide clues to how they relate. Are the first menu list entries all in order of increasing energy? Which entry corresponds to the thermal noise in an unpowered RC loop? What quantities would you add to the list?
one-gee constant proper-acceleration
Plot proper (traveler) and map times elapsed, as well as proper and coordinate speeds, as a function of map distance traveled for one acceleration-leg of a constant proper acceleration round trip.
historical and natural units for information
Note: Changes in Wolfram's widget-engine after the fact began obfuscating the simple log-relationship (s=k ln[W]) between bits, nats, & bans as well as J/K, with the result that the two widgets below were not working reliably. The problem may now have been fixed.
This first information units widget was inspired by the Information Storage Unit Converter widget, and allows conversion from a wide variety of information units including historical thermodynamic units like J/K.
bits of reciprocal temperature
The widget below calculates the coldness of the environment relative to the human basal value in natural units (about 175 ZB/Cal absolute) given the temperature in historical units (degrees Fahrenheit). This quantity relates to the information value of available work, as well as to the thermodynamic value of a cool place to dump excess heat. Just as the Fahrenheit scale was designed to go negative at the bottom range comfortable for human habitation, so this coldness scale goes negative near the top of that range.
1 comment:
Organism-centric explanations are a natural first-step in the development of constructive narratives to this end. Hence a natural first-response to earthquakes is that "the earth god is angry".
One of the issues we face to today, for instance with help from the concept of herd-immunity, is that in large communities "the sneezer" is not the problem, but rather "the herd's failure to vaccinate". Of course to the paleolithic parts of our brain, "sneezer discrimination" is a much easier concept to grasp.
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