A Fascinating Question

The many minds of Substack. The whole stronger than the parts? Mereology. Do thoughts have ontic status? The long sleep and the green fuse.

One of the great joys of Substack is meeting so many interesting people and their thoughts and perspectives. It is very enriching, like being a participant in a global salon of very bright conversationalists. Yesterday, one of those people, Eric Fish, a PhD and Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, whose truly excellent substack, All Science Great & Small (from James Herriot of course; both Herriot and Fish being writers I highly recommend) posed a fascinating question to his readers concerning technologies or inventions that have most effected their lives. What an interesting question to mull over!

I thought about it and wrote something about computers; others wrote about the internet and smartphones.

But my mind always works laterally and I went from mechanisms to minds and ideas very quickly.. I wrote:

“…but your original question asked for things we know. What about things we don't? I suspect the invention that has most changed my life is one that I've never heard of- obscure, hidden in a technical journal. The unseen machinery that supports the world. Perhaps even an idea that came out in some conversation unremarked, that went out into the world and met another idea, the two's union created a third that will eventually spawn changes that move the world.”

This kind of thing is why Substack is so incredibly valuable: this meeting place of ideas is more intelligent, more creative than any of its participants. Eric's question gave me new questions and ideas that I had never considered before, and probably wouldn’t have otherwise.

There is a branch of both logic and philosophy called Mereology: the study of parts and wholes. Eric's question got me thinking of ideas as things-in-themselves, actual entities, parts of Minds, inhabitants of them, but not bound to them. They can swim out into the wide world and meet other Minds, other ideas. Sometimes the meeting spawns a new idea, never before thought of anywhere! A new being is born, enters the world. This, I deem, is miraculous. A commonplace miracle, but of profound significance nonetheless.

For forty-thousand years humanity was tidally locked with a worldwide technology- the Neolithic tool set. Forty-thousand years without a new idea!

Then something happened and everything changed.. Six thousand years later look where we are technologically! An idea got born somewhere and spread, and the mechanism of its spread were the ancestors of Substack. This is the whole of the burning parts, the force that burns the green fuse. As the great Dylan Thomas said,

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.”

Parts and wholes, ideas and minds, gatherings around campfires during forty thousand years of slumber. Time held all of us close, and there was no idea to awaken us. Now much greater campfires.. worldwide. Ideas proliferating, spawning children.

Formerly held in the palm of Time, but now flying free.

Is there a connection to all these ideas some coherent Whole?

Need there be?