Synch or Skate
page 76-77 from Everything IS, a visual and philosophical theory of everything
Flowing traffic appears to be in synchrony. Decisions made by hundreds and thousands of individuals create this synchrony. One individual cutting in front of another individual can change the sync of the entire group. Is the group an entity, acquiring more and less form to our perceptions as it flows into and out of sync? Is that the reason it can synchronize?
Does it dissipate or sleep while everyone works and wake up for the evening commute? It would never be the exact same entity from one moment to the next, but then neither is San Francisco the exact same city from one moment to the next. Someone is always moving in, someone else is moving out; someone is being born, someone is dying; a new business is opening, an old business is closing.
Nor am I the exact same individual from one moment to the next. Cells are lost; cells
are created; new sights and information are stored; old information is reinforced like a well-trampled trail, or forgotten in the mass of new information; friends and family are reproducing; friends and family are dying. The old saw that a person never walks in the same stream twice applies to Everything.
Are we treated to the outline of different entities when we identify a group of anything moving in sync? A school of fish swims past in perfect synchrony—is it one entity from some other perspective or granularity? Does the school contain a group sentience that exists purely because the fish have grouped? A group of fireflies, flash in concert. Are we actually glimpsing some other entity?
Is the emerging science of synchrony missing the vital concept that spontaneous order (synchrony) is created by individual decisions which are made for the multiplicity of reasons any of us might give to justify any decision we make?
Are synchronously flashing fireflies a pom pom team or soccer team or street gang or an army that is posturing for other species of fireflies? Are they also an entity with its own sentience, composed of the combined sentiences of the individual fireflies, which, much like an octopus changing color and texture to match its mood or surroundings, is performing an artistic light show for entities whose granularity is such that we cannot identify them?
