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Nabokov and Control

“Time precedes existence.”

Ilya Prigogine

 

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer without boundaries.

One of his most interesting sentences is What can be controlled is never entirely real; what is real can never be entirely controlled.

And so it is with Nature.  Or rather, with our understanding of Nature.  At the beginning of the last century, there was no way to entertain our scientific knowledge with concepts like high-energy particles, Chaos versus Complexity, and dissipative structures.  We could not even connect ideas that are absolutely clear to us today, such as the impossibility of the relationship between symmetry, time, and our perception of reality.

But given the parameters that allow us to grasp the world, what defines knowledge is not just the direct relationship between the person who knows and what is revealed to him/her.  There is a temporal relationship, obviously classical.  It is the Arrow of Time that sets the metabolic limits of what we perceive, and how we perceive.  Furthermore, our sense of reality is closely related to what we ignore.  All the signals that our brain considers to be noise.

This is where Nabokov comes in. And classical physics.

Newton is praised by the scientific community, and his physics -although deterministically representing a very specific piece of Nature- is the physics taught in schools to this day.  Why is that?

Because determinism protects us from our imminent death; it obscures uncertainty, it soothes the soul that is dissatisfied with its own end.  But determinism is a palliative, a Xanax taken from reality that can be administered throughout life.  In this case, very close to the vegetative state.

The alternative is to have our death as our best friend and live all there is to live for.

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