A bite at a time.
Climb a mountain?
A step at a time.[1]
Complete a jigsaw?
A piece at a time.
Build a wall?
A brick at a time.[2]
Knit a railway?
A pylon at a time.
These examples are not really about the individual things but are about sequencing a process. Sequencing is about relationships – dance, music. Chains are only as good as their weakest link.
These questions are philosophical questions about knowledge. What is knowledge?
We use various methods to structure what we know, the alphabet, by subject ..
Wikipedia discusses Britannica and how it structured knowledge, the last printed version had six ways, Propaedia, Index ,summary, main texts, index and atlas. One of the aims of the propaedia was:
“to provide a systematic, hierarchical categorization of all human knowledge, a 20th-century analog of the Great Chain of Being and Francis Bacon‘s outline in Instauratio magna.”
It uses a structure as follows:
1.1 Atoms
1.2 Energy, Radiation, and
States of Matter
1.3 The Universe
Is this a useful or true way to structure what we know? Search engines and AI now mean we can find anything almost immediately, but what use are all these jigsaw pieces or bricks or steps without context and relationships?
Following Einstein, energy and matter are the same thing in spacetime, so the three-part structure above is false.
What is this thing “the universe”?
The Great Chain of Being used the idea of God as the prime mover. We have replaced God with the Universe as being the Prime Mover and have invented laws of Physics etc which the Universe uses to make stuff like us.
But thinking now is that time is emergent and “the universe” holographic.[3] Maybe it is all an infinite eternal riff on nothing? The universe as a virtual particle?
What would Wikipedia, encyclopaedias, search engines and AI look like based on the music of the spheres?
Might war become an error due to a misunderstanding of how to build a universe?
Do we need a nothingcentric perspective?
[1] https://my.tlu.edu/ICS/icsfs/ConversionSourcesBritFrnRussia8pg.pdf?target=e1cd546f-6a9a-4124-b399-08930007d2aa
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs35t2xFqdU
[3] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/440139/on-the-origin-of-time-by-hertog-thomas/9781911709084
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