Newton's Cradle & Illusion of Individuality

 

On this individual/group thing was thinking about old Newton's cradle. We might think there is just one ball moving that somehow passing "through" the middle balls. Or we can see the system as a whole which passes from one state to the next, from which the moving balls at the ends are just side effects. So the "individual moving ball" thing is an illusion, its really a whole system in change. As far as I can work out its obviously the second interpretation. And this "illusion" of an individual ball is the same illusion that the Indians say is the illusion of a self with individual action. Remarkable similarity between the ideas.

Trying to push this to get an insight into "energy" which always seemed a bit bullshitty. My understanding of energy is that its like a second magical world that allows things like Newton's Cradle to work by allowing momentum and energy to pass through the stationary balls without actually being there. A ghost world. I wonder if the Buddhist conception is better. There is no ghost world. The world is just like computers, shifting from one state to another. But to allow this we must do away with "individual existence" and have Quantum-like "fields" that represent the whole system state.

One of the most extraordinary things I heard of recently was Noether's Theorem  Conservation Laws (like exhibited in Newtons Cradle) actually come from symmetries in the underlying systems. So if we do away with "individual" existence and look at things in terms of distributed systems the conservation law becomes just a symmetry. Jim you are physics/engineering does that sound right?

And that is the very battle between "individual" and "group" in politics. But it seems the individual is the more primitive idea, cos it needs a whole load of theories to explain how the individuals are joined up. While the field idea sees individuals as products of an already expansive society. That is Society being a spatial temporal field like space-time in which humans live.

This explains for instance how Wallace working in SE Asia had the idea of Evolution by Natural Selection at the exact same time as Darwin working in Kent.

Altho proponents of the individual theory will point out that Darwin says "he was inspired into action to write his theory after reading Wallace's letter." Did Darwin really fake all his research and retrospectively reinterpret the Beagle expedition to make it look like he originated the idea? Field is a better interpretation?