And some pleasure not stopping thinking about the idealization of a
'mechanism' with 'no moving parts'.
Of course one reason we idealize it is simply that it's very frustrating
when our machine-slaves don't perform flawlessly, and we all hope that by
avoiding the fault intolerance of moving parts, we will achieve the
perpetuum mobile, the device that always works.
Of course there is a lot here already: machines that break down remind us
of our own inevitable deaths, of our moving parts, hearts that stop
beating, symbol in our machine-discourse about ourselves of that lack of
immortality. So 'no moving parts' is perhaps more like a spiritual machine,
like an immortal soul, and perhaps part of the modern charm of the brain,
vs. the heart (other resonances there), which has no moving parts ...
Except EVERYTHING has moving parts ... blood flow in brains, polarization
cascades in neural axons and ion concentration ripples across synapses, and
molecular diffusions, and ...
But the example given was sound reproduction ... well, the electrons don't
actually move, at least not in a way that matters much to the electronics,
or the motion's relevance depends, like everything, on the scale at which
we describe the phenomenon ... but what does have to move of course is the
element in the speaker that sets the air to vibrating so we can hear the
sound, at least. With modern speaker elements, you can get that vibration
without 'moving parts' in one sense, i.e. at one scale of motion, but it's
necessarily still there at some smaller, faster scale nonetheless.
One of the famous paradoxes of motion is whether there has to be a part to
do the moving. In a famous demo, you lay a "slinky", a long coil-spring
across a table, stretch it a bit, bunch the coils at one end and release
them ... a 'pulse' moves down the spring ... but does the _spring_ itself
"move"? it certainly doesn't move on the same scale as the pulse does (it
just wiggles back and forth a bit, while the pulse travels a long way in
one direction)...
This is the mystery of wave motion, related to the mystery of varying
fields, which is what's going on in electronic gizmos with no moving parts.
Changes in the degree or intensity of something (e.g. electric charge,
voltage) that 'propagate' through space ... very different from the usual
idea of a thing, a part, that moves from one place to another. Motion of
matter vs. motion of ... not even quite motion of energy, more like motion
of 'something measured' ... a second kind of relativity of motion, between
observer and 'medium' (that whose measured degree varies) vs. between
observer and thing-moving. In many examples you can still find some matter
moving somewhere on some scale, even if it's not the right scale
(corresponding to the observed or inferred motion) ... but in the most
famous example, light as self-propagating electro-magnetic field(s) in a
vacuum, there is no material medium that moves ... no 'ether' ... and
logical consequences (Einstein's relativity) to there not being such a
material medium. We can still evade and think only about photons as little
moving parts, but that's not good enough to fit what the theories and
experiments tell us. This is where it gets mysterious again. An
'immaterial' medium?
Field theories. A reality that consists of nothing but
qualities-that-can-be-measured, without any THING there to have those
qualities ... except us as measurers hoping there is ?something on the
other end of our measuring apparatus .... nothing but a relation, gratia
Bateson, and not even clearly two things between which it's defined ...
more like the relations implies, in our folktheory, two things ... with the
paradox intensified by the fact that there is an enormous difference in
scale between what's supposed to be on one end (us,
us-as-measurement-system) and what's supposed to be on the other ... an
infinitesimal variation in ... the result of our measurement (the amount
light deflects an electron, the energy of a single photon ... a way-small
scale relative to the size of a system on our human scale that it takes to
know that the measurement has been made).
Field theory. An alternative paradigm for materialism, one that is much
harder to distinguish from the idealism of pure mathematics, a much more
Platonic materialism. It's very scary, because it lies at the roots of
every known rational theory of matter and energy, i.e. of materialism. It
also can't quite be the ultimate story, because the odds are that a
complete or adequate story always has to have both a continuum-like,
degree-ish aspect to it and also a thing-like, discrete or categorial
aspect to it ... or better still, something that erases that most
fundamental of all distinctions among our tools-for-thinking. Which would
produce an even less comfortable materialism.
All nonsense? unfortunately not ... necessary mysteries and paradoxes and
limits to how we make meaning ... just barely transcended, or extended,
when we elaborate language into mathematics, and simple statements into
complex, larger-scale systems of mathematical propositions that, grasped
together, suggest alternative ways meaning and reality might be.
Immortality? just as likely as not.
No parts? no problem ... the motion continues.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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