I wrote briefly in one of my previous posts about the idea of an unquantifiable reality.

The idea comes from the fact that our mind constantly narrows the stream of input it receives down to conceptions, definitions, and categories.

It allows our mind to manage the massive complexity of modern life, make predictions, decisions and inferences about what is currently happening. We have evolved this way for a specific purpose, and humans have been doing it back when we all lived in caves or the wild grassland of prehistory.

Our minds treat objects not as they are, but as abstract categories of things. Men are treated with a certain subset of behaviours, women with another. We treat all physical objects as if they are the idea and not the thing. Bowls are treated all the same, as are knives, or fridges, or televisions.

But really I think that life is at a base level unquantifiable. All things seek to transcend their definition, and concrete descriptions break down when you turn up the resolution, and look at life in wider or closer detail. The harder you study what defines a certain thing, the more you see the diversity within the category it is contained within.

It’s a hard concept to  get our minds around, but our every thoughts about a certain thing are not about the real things themselves, but about our internal concept of what that thing is.

The rise of modern civilization and capitalist systems depend on people working like this, because when you can quantify a thing, person or place, it allows you to put a hard value on it.

What price can be put on an hour of your life, or a finite resource like oil or water quality which is the common good of all. What price can be put on the land inhabited by a people for thousands of years, and their culture? It would be impossible to do without a narrowly defined value placed on it, by maiing quantities out of things that should be free.

It just can’t be done unless the quantisation is taken to the extreme levels we see today, where everything is a commodity, and there can be decisions made.

Tags: brain function, capitalism, definition, reality, Unquantifiable Thinking, value, value on an hour