The World in General

So I've been ruminating all day today about complexity, progress, perception, and reality. Or you could say I've been thinking about the parts of the blind folks' elephant that they are for quite some time now.

I know you feel a rant coming on, so in the interests of brevity, let me attempt to summarize in a few brief sentences:

1. The world is incredibly, inexplicably complex.
2. We perceive but a part thereof, and jump to wild conclusions and hypotheses based on observed phenomenon or (let's face it) bombast and hot air.
3. We then set out to affect the reality we scarce understand based on what will, in time, be proven naive and flawed plans.
4. Thankfully, one surprising facet of this reality we don't understand is also that in the short term and the long, we do make what seems to be progress most of the time...
5. And in a world where the laws of thermodynamics seem to be holding in both the short and long terms, we spend a finite amount of energy to achieve a predictable result, and leave the reality we seeked to impact forever changed (hence increasing its entropy).
6. So I've been ruminating about what it is that keeps us from, you know, falling flat on our faces...

If you didn't get some or all of that, let me stop using pseudo-geekspeak and give you an illustrative example.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... humanity itself.

I think it is fair to say that no scientists or politicians or philosophers or men of industry - or anyone else in history has ever had a blooming clue what's what with the world. A milder version of said statement would be that none of us has ever completely understood the world and planned or acted based on anything other than a limited or flawed understanding of the world.

So we have thoughts, ideas, policies, religions and wars being designed and executed basically by people who have some miniscule part of the puzzle solved. They are all of ephemeral half-life and for good or bad end up changing the world in their own way.

And from their cues and miscues we have this emergent behemoth made up of billions of living, breathing, eating, shitting, humping, and sometimes thinking organisms that is human society and it is (arguably) better off than it was when this mess started a geological second ago. There are even macro-trends that can be deduced and macro-projections of our trajectory that we can make... so long as we forgive ourselves the fact of not seeing the occasional hundred year economic depression or thousand year dark age in this corner of that continent or some such.

So I'm wondering what is the secret... the guiding force... the fountainhead of all this "forward" motion?

(Here I will ask you to imagine I inserted a diatribe on whether it really is forward motion or simply chaotic helter skelter that our limited minds with their limited senses perceive as forward motion)

Of course, when I think this, I have no blooming idea what the answer is. I'm just saying I'm pretty sure no one else does either.

Also, I realize that the so called "illustrative example" I set out to give has in itself become a vague diatribe in need of an illustrative example or simplification of its own.

Ah well... enough said for now I think.

PS: What? You feel like tearing your hair out because I just blathered on for a few minutes without actually going anywhere but I did actually (maybe) manage to engage if not entertain you for a while? Well... there's your illustrative example then.

I'll save some more crap for later. Toodles!