Scientifically inaccurate poetry

About the balance between consensus and sensibility. Originally in Portuguese.

In this eagerness to find the newest and most disruptive software abstraction paradigm, to precisely measure the entropy of a language, or to build an operating system from scratch, I have often asked myself if I was losing my sensibility. If numbers were dumbing me down to the things that really matter. Bernardo Soares told me the other day that “there is an equal destiny, because it is abstract, for men and for things — an equally indifferent designation in the algebra of mystery”, and I stood there trying to understand what the algebra of mystery would be.

Many people I know think about life. But we focus on objective life. “Why aren’t you arrested for killing someone in a dream? What makes the reality of the dream less serious than the reality outside of it?”, Arthur once asked me. “If you had all the parameters of the universe, would the universe be deterministic, or does the wave function always collapse to a state that we will never be able to predict?”, I have asked myself. “Will we humans be capable of creating a feasible computational model that implements algorithms outside the class of Turing machine algorithms?”, I asked a professor and received a philosophical answer I no longer remember.

There is an inquiry, inherent to humans, but which faces what has not yet been deciphered as a collective problem. There is a monster — mystery — that we all join efforts to understand, because no one knows the answer. When everyone joins together, one no longer speaks the personal language. The distance between my nose and my thumb is different from the distance from your nose to your thumb. Let us invent the yard, 91.44 centimeters. Numbers and their strict regulation allow me to converse with you without error. There is beauty in the perfection of our communication by consensus.

I imagine that the sensibility of which numbers deprive me is the personal world. Mystery is no longer a well-defined problem. Maybe I have already faced the mystery, or you have, but we face it again and again. I haven’t even defined “mystery”, and you interpreted it in some way. With imprecise terms (and perhaps poetic, but what is poetry?), I awakened in you an intuitive notion of all the times you dealt with a situation where you were not sure of the answer. I evoked a sensation similar to things you have lived before. And that is sensibility: the ability to comprehend a feeling, an idea, through the baggage you bring from your life. Comprehension through the individual, not through an objective system. Comprehension through sensibility.

Yes, numbers dumb me down. But to a certain extent. I only know how to use these two tools, consensus and sensibility, to think about life. I don’t know if there are other tools, but today I express myself through a balance of the two. Perhaps Carla Madeira finds me inferior for exercising consensus, but I do not identify with sensibility without consensus. In this excerpt:

How to explain the sadness of the late afternoon without speaking of the circadian rhythm? Of the in-between of being alert and preparing to sleep? I can think of much sensitive poetry more aligned with consensus. Hormones granting us a truce: “go on, you can rest”. The saddest hour ending a very happy day. A contrast just like day and night.

Scientifically imprecise poetry strips me of sensibility. I cannot interpret the sadness of late afternoon as a reflection of the dynamics between the sexes. So scientifically imprecise, so far from consensus. It becomes so particular that I no longer identify with it. The sadness of the late afternoon happens for me, through my body, my hormones, which men and women all have. Consensus unites us remotely, and this extreme sensibility separates us. Men and women. Speaker and interlocutor.

Perhaps there is a beauty in unbalancing the tools of comprehension, exacerbating one or the other. But I haven’t reached that state yet. Carla Madeira dropped out of Mathematics and went to study Journalism. I did exactly the opposite. Perhaps the way we express ourselves reflects the choices we made.

When I apply algebra, I describe the world in equations. The quantities I want to describe transform into variables x and y, indifferent to the entities they represent. There lies the equal destiny of men and things, I finally understand. A god without special affection for humanity. A universe that explodes into a hot, dense ball and arranges matter without specific order. The Fates weaving blindly. The algebra of mystery, the balance of consensus and sensibility, is how I interpret the world today. Bernardo Soares whispered poetry in my ear.