Least Action Principle, just for Human History
August 28. Welcome. Grab a coffee and let’s get smarter together.
The dark rings under my eyes are too dark to hide and there’s a bit of COVID fog in my mind. God, am I tired. Good thing I planned to talk about the Least Action Principle all along.
Least action is yet another principle from classical physics that’s worth looking at when discerning human nature. Classical physics is dominated by Newton. And the principle behind it is when you know the coordinates of every object in a system in three-dimensional space at a specific moment and the direction of their velocity you know the whole past and future of this system. There are formula that allow us to calculate changes step by step by step. That’s a lot like you wanting to find the straight line between two palm trees on a beach to learn how long your hammock should be. And you start out with your back to one tree and you put one foot in front of the other until you reached the other tree. You turn around and, voila, your straight line.
But when you think about our tree example, there’s an easier way that doesn’t involve carefully placed steps. You could just tie a tow around one tree, wind it around the other, and pull until it’s straight. That’s the least action principle that is only concerned with the starting point, the end point, and what the shortest path is that leads from one to the other, the one that requires the least action and energy. Knowing the exact steps on the path is irrelevant.
It turns out that in physics the path calculated in the step by step approach by Newton & Co. is always also the path of least action. Using either you get to the same result. But again, like with an extrinsic and intrinsic POV, the way you look at the problem is different and thus allows for different solutions.
This is what it mean when applying it on human nature. The Newton approach would be what we got in archeology and history. We put events on a step by step timeline and try to figure out how we humans got where we are now by attempting to explain the conditions that determined each step. The least action approach would be to find the starting point and the goal, both derived from an intrinsic viewpoint of us humans as part of the single wavefunction that makes up the universe, then to look for the straight line between the two point: What behaviors would get us there with the least action? The behavior can be evaluated ethically and we thus can make a real statement about the nature of humans.
But even more interestingly, we then are also able to discern where people have left the path of least action what without fail would mean that the natural path of least action was artificially complicated. Someone/ something out of some reason used force (in the physical sense, not necessarily violence), enough of it so that the path they wanted the humans they influenced to tack suddenly appeared to be the path of least action. Appears because this is there the stage where the spherical cow is popped by adding the complications again, in this case the human mind. Especially after the end of the last Ice Age the roadblock for the natural least action path will be a manipulation of the human world generation protocol via creating a monopoly on information, via creating a monopoly on exploration to force more exploitation of fragments of existing knowledge.
Explore. Make a habit of exploring. Let’s make curiosity and exploration, the leaning into the unknown, the norm again.
Like, comment, share – and follow, lest you miss an opportunity to improve yourself and society. Once you do, we’ll meet again. At the coffeepot.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
#science #history #reality #leastaction #leastactionprinciple #force #physics #POV #WorldGeneration #self #mind #brain #thinking #explore
