The World Is Made Up of Networks of Kisses, Not Pebbles

Or, the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence

Nov 06, 2022

👋 Hey there! Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! My name is Abhishek. I read a lot of books, think a lot of things, and this is where I dump my notes and (so called) learnings.

I mostly write to educate my future self, but if you like what you read here, I would say this hobby of mine just became a bit more purposeful. Now… time for the mandatory plug!

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I come across interesting stories of events and explanations of facts all the time. They may not necessarily help you “directly” in better thinking or decision-making (most of them don’t have any life lessons to teach), but I feel it’s important to study multiple disciplines in order to build a worldview that can make us well-rounded individuals.

Also, you never know how you might connect certain dots and land on a new insight by chance. So, it’s always good to stumble upon random information from time to time.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been posting something fact-based in the intro section of my newsletter — almost a separate tiny essay. Henceforth, I want to make it official.

I’ve added a new section called Today I Learned — which would have something new, something interesting, often scientific, and almost always factual. Hope you’d enjoy!

Now, on to this week’s essay! The central concept is borrowed from a theoretical physics book. So, naturally, it’s slightly more abstract and a bit more esoteric than usual. But I’m sure, with a bit of patience, you would find it enjoyable. It’s about 1,500 words.

One more thing. If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart above? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍

Q: What if we regard success, happiness, and love as events, not things?

Plato had this excellent idea of translating the physics insights gained by atomists into mathematics. He tried writing the mathematics of the shape of atoms. He allows himself to be fascinated by a mathematical theorem which establishes that there are five — and only five — regular polyhedra.

He also attempts to advance the audacious hypothesis that these are the actual shapes of the atoms of the five elementary substances that in the ancient past were thought to form everything: earth, water, air, fire, and the quintessence of which the heavens are made, commonly known as ether.

A beautiful idea. But completely mistaken.

Plato’s error lies in seeking to understand the world in terms of things rather than events. It lies in ignoring change. Plato ignored the mathematics of their movements and focussed only on the mathematics of their shape.

The physics and astronomy that will eventually go on to work — from Ptolemy to Galileo, from Newton to Schrödinger — are all mathematical descriptions of precisely how things change, not of how they are. They are about events, not things.

Even the shapes of atoms will eventually be understood when Schrödinger’s equations successfully described how the electrons in atoms move. Events again, not things.

Today, let’s talk about the world. More precisely, let’s talk about how to better understand it — how not to look at it as a collection of things, but instead, as a collection of events.

There are two perspective to see the world.

We can think of the world as made up of things, of substances, of entities, of something that is — a box to tick off, a destination to get to, a goal to attain, or a thing to posses.

Or, we can think of it as made up of events, of happenings, of processes, of something that occurs, something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation — something that is not permanent.

This destruction of the concept of time represents the crumbling of the first of these two perspectives — that the world is made up of things — and not of the second.

A world without time is the realisation of the ubiquity of impermanence, not of stasis in a motionless time.

Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it. It is the only way that is compatible with relativity.

Time is the measure of change. From a scientific point of view, different variables can be chosen to measure that change, and they may not have all the characteristics of time as we experience it. But this does not alter the fact that the world is in a ceaseless process of change.

The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.

The world is a network of events, not things. The simple fact is that nothing is, things happen.

The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, whereas events have a limited duration. A pebble is a prototypical thing. we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an event. It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of pebbles.

This begs a question, how many of us regard success, happiness, and love as things and not events? Is this responsible for why we are so devastated when they leave after being in our lives for a while?

The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not just located in some specific point in space. They are — if they are at all — in a where but also in a when. They are spatially but also temporally delimited: they are events.

Will it be more rewarding to conceptualise success, happiness, and love like time? An event, not a thing? A kiss, not a pebble?

If you think of success, happiness, and love like a pebble — to be fair, we often do — it is a thing that you attain. You may have an expectation that it will persist and continue to exist.

When you have a fight with a loved one, you feel like the love has disappeared. It was there, but not anymore. When you meet with failure after a streak of successes, it seems you’ve lost the pebble of success. It was there with you yesterday, not today. Happiness, along with luck, has left you, like an unfaithful lover.

The problem is that we treat everything as pebbles. But on closer inspection, the things that are most thinglike, are nothing more than long events.

For the sake of (scientific) argument, even the hardest pebble — in the light of what we have learnt from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology — is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace in the history of humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, and an example in an essay in a newsletter on a Sunday.

The world is not so much made of pebbles as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.

This begs us to think. What if we change our thinking of emotions or states of mind that are important to us — such as success, happiness, and love — as events, like a kiss? What if we treat them as events we experience in our lives many times, but not always? What if, instead of collecting pebbles, we focus on creating the conditions that the event of success, happiness, and love require, even if they will not come to pass every moment of every day?

Interestingly, a world made of things doesn’t make any sense from the point of view of science. Let’s take a look. Atoms are in turn made up of smaller particles. These elementary particles are nothing other than ephemeral agitations of a field. The quantum fields are, in simple words, codes of a language to speak of interactions and events. Scientifically, we cannot think of the physical world as if it were made of things or entities. It simply doesn’t work.

What works instead is thinking about the world as a network of events. Simple events, and more complex events that can be disassembled into combinations of simpler ones.

A war is not a thing, it’s a sequence of events. A storm is not a thing, it’s a collection of occurrences. A cloud above a mountain is not a thing, it is the condensation of humidity in the air that the wind blows over the mountain. A wave is not a thing, it is a movement of water, and the water that forms it is always different.

Similarly, a family is not a thing, it is a collection of relations, occurrences, feelings. And a human being? Of course it’s not a thing. Like the cloud above the mountain, it’s a complex process, where food, information, light, words, and so on enter and exit. A knot of knots in a network of social relations, in a network of chemical processes, in a network of emotions exchanged with its own kind.

Newton’s mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are. We understand biology by studying how living beings evolve and live. We understand psychology (a little, not much) by studying how we interact with each other, how we think. We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being.

“Things” in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous.

The absence of time does not mean that everything is frozen and unmoving. It means that the incessant happening that wearies the world is not ordered along a time line, is not measured by a gigantic ticktocking.

The world is a boundless and disorderly network of events. It’s more like an unplanned neighbourhood that has grown up organically, not a organised city.

Perhaps it is useful to consider human emotions — the ones that are important to us — the same way. It’s not something we achieve in perpetuity, an object external to ourselves, as if we could just find it and break off a chunk to keep with us forever. Its existence is bound with our ability to experience it, only before returning to dust.

Sooner or later, everything returns to dust.

Today I Learned

The little signs we instinctively register during a conversation — the muscle shifts and tensions in the other person’s face, eye movements and pupil dilation, pitch and speed of the voice — as well as the fluctuations in our own inner landscape — salivation, swallowing, breathing, and heart rate — are linked by a single regulatory system.

All are a product of the synchrony between the two branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS): the sympathetic, which acts as the body’s accelerator, and the parasympathetic, which serves as its brake.

Charles Darwin called them “reciprocals” and working together they play an important role in managing the body’s energy flow — one preparing for its expenditure, the other for its conservation.

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is responsible for arousal, including the fight-or-flight response (Darwin’s “escape or avoidance behaviour”). Almost two thousand years ago the Roman physician Galen gave it the name “sympathetic” because he observed that it functioned with the emotions (sym pathos).

The SNS moves blood to the muscles for quick action, partly by triggering the adrenal glands to squirt out adrenaline, which speeds up the heart rate and increases blood pressure.

The second branch of the ANS is the parasympathetic (“against emotions”) nervous system (PNS), which promotes self-preservative functions like digestion and wound healing.

It triggers the release of acetylcholine to put a brake on arousal, slowing the heart down, relaxing muscles, and returning breathing to normal. As Darwin pointed out, “feeding, shelter, and mating activities” depend on the PNS.

There is a simple way to experience these two systems for yourself.

Whenever you take a deep breath, you activate the SNS. The resulting burst of adrenaline speeds up your heart, which explains why many athletes take a few short, deep breaths before starting competition.

Exhaling, in turn, activates the PNS, which slows down the heart. If you take a yoga or a meditation class, your instructor will probably urge you to pay particular attention to the exhalation, since deep, long breaths out help calm you down.

As we breathe, we continually speed up and slow down the heart, and because of that the interval between two successive heartbeats is never precisely the same. A measurement called heart rate variability (HRV) can be used to test the flexibility of this system, and good HRV — the more fluctuation, the better — is a sign that the brake and accelerator in your arousal system are both functioning properly and in balance.

Timeless Insight

The following is an excerpt from Richard Feynman’s 1974 commencement address at Caltech:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

You may find it funny, but we often engage in similar activities.

We follow the instructions, perform the rituals, and memorise the definition without actually understanding the process, without capturing the essence, and without learning anything.

There’s no learning in it. This kind of experimentation with too much focus on outcome rather than the process isn’t scientific either.

What I’m Reading

It may seem as though the self—your self—is the “thing” that does the perceiving. But this is not how things are. The self is another perception, another controlled hallucination, though of a very special kind.

— Anil Seth, Being You

Tiny Thought

Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

Before You Go…

Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.

Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋