Quality and Quantity
Quality and Quantity
When I was twelve years old a television show called Star Trek debuted on NBC and ran for three seasons producing seventy one episodes. Most of us are familiar with it. It spawned movies and two more television series. The small budget offered to the producers prohibited having a shuttle craft to land the characters on the various planets they visited as it would have required another expensive set, so they came up with what they thought was a theoretically possible alternative.
It was called the “Transporter”, and I was fascinated by it. A group of crew members from the USS Enterprise would stand upright in a room, a separate operator would flick a switch and they would dissolve from view, sent to a nearby planet where they would reappear complete, no harm done.
I thought about it. I was an avid reader of pretty much everything at the local library including science fiction and I was able to suspend judgement on some fairly fantastic ideas. However, I needed to reconcile them with my own world view. That is, whether to my mind there was any chance at all that these concepts were possible. For example, I wouldn’t, and to this day won’t, accept time travel. Too many problems with logistics.
The transporter concept had some problems too, but I decided that what could be happening was that all the DNA, RNA, TWA, AAA and FA in the bodies of those people was being scanned very quickly and an exact copy was reconstructed from this coded information at their destination.
I also accepted tentatively that at that level of complexity their souls, as I understood “soul” in a rudimentary religious way, would be transferred as well. It was enough to allow me to accept the premise.
We live in a digital world. Everything, we are told by the binary weenies, futurist pundits and computer prophets, can be reduced to code.
- Really?
Code this, wise guys
The moodiness of the colour blue
The tactile sensation of holding a book
Anything funny
The taste of maple syrup
That ache in your left big toe
The rapture of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
The pain of childbirth
Simply, Aha ! Hmmm…… and Yay !
Your own self-awareness
Angry protest
Consider this: These are all qualities. And if you think I’m merely talking about emotion and sensation you don’t get it yet.
Let’s take the book and the maple syrup. The book has a number of pages weighing maybe a pound and contains print representing language. The syrup comes in a jar twice as tall as it is fat which holds X fluid ounces and sells for X dollars. These are quantities. They say nothing about the direct, subjective experience of syrup and books. Quantity is abstract, its conventions strict and its classifications arbitrary. This is what computers and code are good at.
The qualities of reality are what we experience as sentient beings and they belong to awareness, identity, personality etc………They belong to the realm of the (for lack of a better word with less organized religious overtones) …… soul.
The “Transporter” couldn’t possibly have delivered anything more than a biological, corporate machine bereft of a ”buck stops here” CEO.
Quality is the territory, not the map.