Re: <nettime> Space of Flows: Characteristics and Strategies

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@uiah.fi>]

Felix --

I re-read the flows essay last night and wanted to comment on what I 
see as a major flaw in your argument -- that in your examples and in 
your language you are moving primarily in a space of materialist, 
object-oriented, and mechanistic thought.  I think that the entire 
premise of a Space of Flows has to be fully rooted in (something of) 
a Quantum model.  I can't give a specific example, but anywhere where 
an object is the defined field of action, the implications of flow 
really can't be considered properly.  It is only when the nature of 
objects is modeled as a field of energy in an indeterminate state 
(among other characteristics) can one proceed to higher/broader 
considerations of the implications, say, in a social field of action.

Having said that, it is also clear that Quantum is not fully 
developed enough in the present moment to act as a unitary model -- 
so one has to fuse together other models, including, for example, the 
system of the I Ching which does indeed make considerations from the 
micro to macro, nature to human, and the implications of the vast 
range of flows that exist around and within us.

The following excerpt from a brief essay by Piet Hut entitled "There 
Are No Things" sketches one aspect of the idea:

"That's right. No thing exists, there are only actions. We live in a 
world of verbs, and nouns are only shorthand for those verbs whose 
actions are sufficiently stationary to show some thing-like behavior. 
These statements may seem like philosophy or poetry, but in fact they 
are an accurate description of the material world, when we take into 
account the quantum nature of reality.

Future historians will be puzzled by the fact that this 
interpretation has not been generally accepted, 75 years after the 
discovery of quantum mechanics. Most physics text books still 
describe the quantum world in largely classical terms. Consequently 
anything quantum seems riddled with paradoxes and weird behavior. One 
generally talks about the "state" of a particle, such as an electron, 
as if it really had an independent thing-like existence, as in 
classical mechanics. For example, the term `state vector' is used, 
even though its operational properties belie almost anything we 
normally associate with a state..."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/story/33.html

John
-- 
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
network artist & visiting lecturer
dept of fine arts
university of colorado - boulder
domain: http://neoscenes.net
email: <jhopkins@colorado.edu>

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