YOU CAN SEE SCOTLAND FROM MY HOUSE

There we go, then, first, with the Modernity. Modernity is a way to see the world (let us leave like this for the moment) adopted by rational and autonomous individuals, that began to be really important at the end of the XVI century (thought Chesterton says that the first modern man was St. Francis of Asissi, 3 centuries ahead in time in that sense. I tend to believe him, because the chubby was very convincing, and I kind of like the saint)

Let us think, however, in the Modern Man as a Galileo Galilei, really emblematic, or, even more polished and decanted, as John Stuart Mill. If we want to think, then, in Modernity as an age, let us think of the era of the prevalence of the rational individual.

Did we ever (in Colombia) get to live Modernity really? I would say that the answer is in the coat of arms of the Republic of Orland: "IT DOES NOT MATTER. AND IF IT MATTERS, IT DOES NOT MATTER EITHER". Nevertheless, to have an idea of how the world evolves it is, in my humble opinion, necessary to understand to a certain degree what Modernity is, and what is it that can be expected to replace it. When that is not understood, it is impossible to undesrstand the ideological becoming of countries in a middle and large term, and saying silly things, as Blair did when he stated that forcing all british citizens to give the government private health data was "a matter of modernity". (I got this piece of work in STiRER's blog)

What is the issue for us here, is how are we going to leave Modernity. Thinking of this, really, I must recognize that I had a great deal of help from a text by Mr. Stavrogin that I read and commented not long ago. If you want yo have a look at it, you will need to either understand written spanish, or have some fun with BabelFish translation.

The first thread I am going to follow is referred to in my text about the limited observer. I understand the rationality of the modern individual as a clear and coherent criterion to choose the best among the options that are presented to him in every moment, based on some knowledge of the consequences of every action. This requires, on one hand, that it is allways possible to tell whether an option is better than another, and, on the other hand, that the individual can allways be a skilled enogh observer to obtain the required information in order to predict the consequences of each choice and to use it properly. It is not necessary that the rational individual be a Mr. Spock, or a Mr. Data. To fit reality, we have to loosen a little bit, and accept some limited (bounded) rationality.

The Newtonian "paradigm" of the perfect observer, and that of the absolut point of view is, indeed, a necessary referent to define this rational individual. In fact, Newtonian Mechanics became later a more sophisticated theory, and with the work of Mapertuis and Euler, it was defined in terms of maximal principles, (Lagrangian Mechanics), being so that nature itself chose an optimum to behave. Very modern indeed.

But this "paradigm" of the omnipotent observer was started to be abandoned by physics in the beginning of the XX century, with the rise of the two big physical theories of the century: Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. Both of them based on some limitation of the observer by principle. A player that not allways can find the way to win, very much on the contrary of guys such as Philleas Fogg or his corny descendant James Bond. It may well expect a prevalence of a way of seeing things based on the same kind of limitation and relativity that give rise to Quantum Mechanics and Relativity.

With this, we get to the crux of the issue, and it is what is it that Mr. Lanark thinks that is going to replace the modern individual. Well, it has been suggested that it is a limited observer, even when, so far, it remains an individual. The title of this post suggest, of course, otherwise.

It turns out that a quantum observer has a limited amount of certainty, and he has to distribute among the aspects he want to observe of reality. He can give it to some observations only taking it from otrhers. (does the position and velocity of the electron ring the bell?)
Some aspects that the observer wants to observe can be incompatible with others; he must distribute the certainty (information) among them. And the way how he changes the focus on different aspects of reality is, in Quantum Mechanics, quite simmilar to the way he changes frames of refference in Relativity Theory. It is this way of changing points of view what changes with these two new theories.

Another interesting facet of Quantum Mechanics is non-locality. It turns out that when a whole is made of parts, each one of this parts has properties that the observer can focus, but there are global (nonlocal) properties as well, that are in principle incompatible with the local ones. In fact, if one chooses a quantum state randomly for a compostite system, it is far more probable, almost sure, that what one gets is nonlocal properties more determined than local properties.

And there is still more: When we separate a system in subsystems, we know that there exist global properties that make this separation illusory. When we separate the observer and the observed system, we are disdaining some properties they share. The quantum observer is entangled with what he observes, it even share a global state with it, so separation is only an inaccurate approximation. In fact, a working quantum theory of measurement must consider observer and observed as parts of a whole with a global state. What David Bohm called wholeness.

All this wholeness discourse has been called the holographic paradigm. However, as a big part of what is been written about it is ingenuos and not very rigourous, Mr. Lanark prefers to exercise the critical ability of his readers with sources that may point in that directio, but from traditions that are different to that of contemporary science. As an example, let us cite Mr. Lanark's arguments in the "Silla Eléctrica" (electric chair) forum:

An example of an ethics without good and evil goes through the redefinition of the subject. In mysticist traditions worldwide, even in the christian mysticism and muslim sufism, the self is redefined in such a way that its acts are directed to the plenitud of the realization of the absolute in all the individual, which is a-moral, and, however, fills everything with sense and even happines. In that way, the mystic does not act in a selfish way, because he acts for the development of others even more than for his own.

This results in an ethics with two results:

• The mystic acts to avoid the suffering of others, when it hinders the mind to see the unity and trascendence of the world, which happens in most cases. The suffering without a clear sense does not allow sometimes the awareness of an universal order. On the other hand, an excessive comfort is equally hindering for the consciousness.
• When he cannot avoid suffering, the mystic struggles to let the suffering ones see the sense in their situation. He can turn suffering into a chance to acquire a bigger consciousness.

To end, a quote from Carlos Castaneda:
"A warrior doesn’t know remorse for anything he has done, because to isolate one’s acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is to place an unwarranted importance on the self".

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