Is The World Analog Or Digital? It Matters!
Your Belief Affects Your Flexibility
Is the world analog or digital?
By digital, I mean that something either is or isn’t so. Words are how we classify the world; for instance, into animal, vegetable or mineral. Aristotelian logic reinforces this view: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”
But in some cases, intermediary states clearly exist: between night and day is dusk; between hot and cold is warm.
Thinking of the world as analog, or in other words, varying continuously rather than in steps, is a much better fit1. So even for a case that appears clear-cut, its boundary will become fuzzy when inspected closely enough.
For instance, is your car parked? A vehicle is considered parked when it is stationary with the expectation of being left for some time, and must be parallel to the curb with both wheels within 18 inches of it. But how long is “some time”? Is “parallel to the curb” measured according to the central axis or the side of the car? Is 2° off parallel OK? If the wheel is turned, which part of the tire must be within 18 inches of the curb?
I see emotions as an analog space where words describe various regions, but also leave gaps. Different languages demarcate their regions differently and have words that have no equivalent in English: hygge, sang-froid, schadenfreude, or macho.
Speech is another analog space. Different languages have chosen different consonants from the range of sounds that the human voice can make, and having grown accustomed to the segmentation of one language, it can be difficult to recognize other distinctions. For instance, many Japanese people find it hard to distinguish the English R from L2.
So boundaries are inherently fuzzy, but we are uncomfortable with uncertainty and would like a clear-cut answer so we can feel in control and make decisions. Instead, we should tolerate ambiguity and avoid jumping to solutions prematurely to resolve the discomfort. (There is a political dimension to this: conservatives are less comfortable with ambiguity.)
Death is not as clear-cut as we might think. Is it when breathing stops, when the heart stops, or when the patient is brain dead?3
Looking at the opposite of death, the beginning of life is passionately debated. Conservatives’ discomfort with ambiguity leads many of them to insist that life begins at conception. I hold that, in line with the fuzziness of boundaries, there is no single point in time. I wrote about this:
Is it when the sperm breaches the ovum? Is it when the two RNA strands start to join, or is it only when the last AT/CG bond forms? If, when there are 8 cells, they split into 4+4 and form identical twins, when does the second life appear? And so on. Life begins at conception, but comes into full existence over a period of time.
Hold fast to the idea that the world is analog, and you will cease cutting yourself on the sharp edges of digital thinking.
At the quantum level, it can be thought of as digital. The temperature of a liquid is the sum of the kinetic energies of all its molecules, and each molecule changes its kinetic energy in discrete steps. But there are so many molecules (1.67 x 10²¹) in a drop of water that its temperature is effectively analog.