(That is not the title of another Jane Austen novel)

If you were to tell me that all truths are relative, would not that truth be absolute? And then, if you had previously believed that there are no absolute truths, until my paradoxical question changed your mind, would that not also destroy the previously established truth? To restate the problem, one would say: It is a TRUTH that all truths are relative. If it were not a truth, it would by definition no longer hold true; yet if it were, it would be absolute, and thus equally untrue.

It’s a ridiculous scenario, a Schrodinger’s Cat of semantics. And strange as the idea may be, the parallel here is uncanny; what we face is not a problem of different opinions or world views, but instead, the impossibility of quantum linguistics. Unfortunately, a google search reveals that this not-so-clever term has already been coined, and is used to mean things which I’m not quite sure I understand (see: http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~joseph/dis/dis/node35.html). I simply intended it to be a phrasal portmanteau of quantum mechanics and linguistics, and I shall use it as such.

We’ll begin with mechanics, returning again to the dead-and-alive cat. Nobody in their right minds (or so thought Schrodinger) would interpret the scenario as a plausible argument for the existence of a cat who is both living and dead; instead, it was a scientific reductio ad absurdum which sought to disprove a common conception of quantum physics through expounding upon its absurd conclusions. Little did anyone expect for it–along with a menagerie of related questions involving trees falling in forests–to be seriously considered as a pseudo-ontological issue. But as it turned out, people still ignore years of complex mathematics and theoretical physics to entertain the notion of quasi-dead animals. In the words of Stephen Hawking, “when I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun.”

However, as violence is frowned upon, we will forgo the firearm and continue the misapplication of quantum theory to linguistics. If we use a simplified version of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (the interpretation that inspired the killing of cats in the name of science), we could posit that language, or more specifically, the meaning of words, has multiple possible meanings that could be true, until its actual meaning is determined by an observer. Meaning that, in an abstract discussion, truth can be at the same time both relative and absolute, neatly solving our conundrum.

Except not. As with theoretical physics, it only seems to work in the abstract; when it’s brought to a medium we can perceive, be that a cat or a conversation, the quantum principles that allow for multiple existences seemingly crumble. Thus, a new solution is called for, and I’ve got a radical new idea. I realize it’s nearly an extremist view, but sometimes that’s what it takes. Here goes.

We need to expand our vocabularies.

Language is fluid, dynamic, adaptive. Words are made and used and wasted liberally; just look at Shakespeare. Yet despite the infinite capability of language to give us just the right word to say what we mean, we revert to using slang, or catch-phrases, or try to imitate the words of others–in short, our speech has been morphed for the purpose of manipulation. Why is the abortion debate between pro-life and pro-choice? Because pro-death and anti-choice don’t sound too appealing in a political advertisement. Why do people disagree over what constitutes truth? Because why would you say “opinion” when you could sound so much more authoritative saying “fact”? It’s a degradation of rhetoric and a perversion of communication, but it’s what presses the right buttons for those in the audience.

It’s pretty absurd to say “a false opinion, held by enough people, is factually correct”. Yet it doesn’t seem so absurd to say “truth is determined by what people believe”. It makes me wonder if those who spouted the latter would defend the former.

Now as for tolerance, I’ve only one request: tolerate the intolerant. Trying to change their beliefs does not qualify.

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Here’s some links to things I’d have talked about had I the time and energy and patience and etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebniz

I’ll preface this by saying that I might not be the most qualified person to talk about tonight’s topic of space. I haven’t seen the stars since I arrived here in smog city. I was never much of a stargazer–I didn’t have those little glow-in-the-dark sticker stars you put on your bedroom ceiling–but even I miss our not-quite-next-door neighbours once in a while. It got me thinking about how little value we place in the galaxy beyond our fragile atmosphere. We’re no more than a biodome (or biosphere, rather) among the other planets all around; and yet never do we get the claustrophobic feeling of isolation that should reasonably come with the property. You might say it’s relative size–we’re teensy, so the Earth is pretty roomy by our standards. Yet if you were to take all the spaces that you occupy in an average day–every room and enclosed space–and added up the volume, it’d be pretty darn small. Each building and room and hallway we inhabit is even more limiting than a biodome would be; yet we’d feel more uncomfortable inside the latter than the former.

Why? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that despite the amount of time we spend indoors, the outdoors is always right there, through the window or door. It’s so close, so comfortable, so reachable, that we simply take it for granted. At the same time, it’s full of alien things; our personal contact with the world’s content is extremely limited. It was for this reason that we sought to learn about our surroundings, to discover what’s out there and integrate it into our schematic of what our world is. It’s the focus of political thought today, with people calling for others to act as the world’s citizens, not a nation’s: develop a more complete, global conception of who you are.

However, as much progress as we may or may not be making on our own planet Earth, the heavens above us seem as distant as ever. The more inclusive we are of our planet, the more exclusive the collective conscious seems to focus on outer space.

Doesn’t anyone else here feel claustrophobic?

It seems to me that just as a person isolated to his home would have the Earth to impress upon him his relative size, so should a person ‘isolated’ to the Earth have something within reach to put the Earth in its place. But space is not within reach. Sure we have the technology to send things up there, but an insignificant portion of people have experienced it, have explored and learned it, have taken it back home where it can be absorbed into the earthly schematic. Space is ‘familiar’ in some ways to those in the communications business–what with satellite technology behind cell phones and other apparatuses. Space is ‘familiar’ in some ways to those in the military, or the military industry, or the military-industrial complex; it’s the next frontier of warfare that nations are using to dominate others. Space is ‘familiar’ in some ways to astrophysicists and all those other scientists with complicated labels, with such detailed and obscure knowledge that any average Joe would be baffled by hearing a fraction of it. Yet the ignorance of the average Joe is exactly what should be changed.

Art, I think, has always been able to familiarize people with ideas. Whether it symbolically represents an idea in a sympathetic figure; or it depicts the foreign in the universal language of sight, or music; or it could simply be a representation of a thing beyond an ordinary person’s reach, putting it somewhere available for scrutiny. Through these and a multitude of different communicative mediums, art brings things closer. It’s depressing to think of the prohibitive restrictions that prevent art from reaching outer space and how many potential connections were preemptively severed. Practicality in mind, there are warrants as to why it’s so difficult–my random idea of ‘cosmic painting’, for example, which started this whole train of thought, would involve scattering different magnetic or mechanical particles across a huge portion of space and leaving them in orbit, whereupon the sunlight’s altered reflections would create a grand image against the night sky for those observing from the earth (and even better, if the particles could be moved and rotated to create new images from time to time). The impossibility of this working is clear when you factor the costs involved, the damage it would do to current orbiting satellites, the difficulty it would create for launching further projects into space, etc., but I still feel a loss at the thought that an artistic endeavor such as that one will never come to fruition. We’ve managed to create art out of everything here on Earth, place it everywhere. I’m sure one day art will access the cosmos as well, in a way that is accessible and appreciable by just plain old people like me.
After all, ‘vacuum’ is just another way to say ‘blank canvas’. Let’s paint.