BIG04.THEORETICAL SOCIOPHYSICS

BIG04.THEORETICAL SOCIOPHYSICS

“Well I think the key thing is to acknowledge the role of culture but not to treat it as some autonomous force, some surrounding gas, or some force like gravity that just magically causes people to behave.” - Steven Pinker (my emphasis)

How do we measure meaning and time?

BIG outline: If I was to mention terms like gravity, information, reality, spin, relativity, forces, matter(s), time, mass, laws, etc you’d probably think I was talking about the subject physics. I’m actually talking about the social world of humankind with those terms, and in this TED-style lecture I’m going to make you aware how physics has taken and adopted all of those terms from social world phenomena to apply to the physical world to such an extent that you only think they apply to the physical, and not the social world of humankind. That is a historical process, of human biography not human biology. The dimension of culture has laws and in understanding how the mechanics work then we can move towards understanding the underlying equation underpinning all cultures, where measurement is the outcome of this BIG. As a reminder, the sum total of all human expression is time (placetime) and the sum total of all those unfolding impressions are meaning (meantime). If we say a cultural expression, and/or a movement is ‘timeless’ that is not a physics-related definition of time, but it is a profoundly human and cultural statement. Don’t just read that last sentence, think about what we mean when we say that a piece of music is ‘timeless’. Only once we have this deep, solid understanding of how culture works then we can realise that the processes of the human virtual world have parallels in the physical world. I’ve got my work cut out to show that within 18 mins that there is an equation underpinning all cultural activity (but that is indeed the case), and that meaning is the gravitational social binding the social world together, not magically causing people to behave but something influential and measurable. That matters, but not a physical matter, the virtual matter with a weight. If something is meaningful it matters, has weight and we can measure it.

BIG outcome: We are the equation. That might sound bleak and deterministic, but the opposite is true. We are not moved around at the whim and process of physical and natural laws, but tellingly by social and cultural processes that we shape through our expression, and expressed interest. Seeing how this equation unfolds, and understanding our part in it is awesome, for want of a better term. This new discipline of theoretical sociophysics explains how culture works to the rigours of the social and physical sciences and through insight into the laws of the virtual world we can bridge into the physical sciences sophisticating our understanding of the corporeal world. Albert Einstein may well have discovered spacetime, but he wasn’t aware of meantime and placetime, and how they relate in trilectic connection. I will keep the jargon to a minimum, but the trilectic diagrams are very good at illustrating these connections, and interconnections. That is one of many things that theoretical sociophysics brings to the table. The book that started me off on this journey which is into its 3^rd decade now was The Social Construction of Reality. What theoretical sociophysics helps us understand is that while different forms of plant and animals life have ‘a range of actuality’, the human range is reality. Reality is not everything that is out there. Reality is the very human engagement with the external world around us, individually and collectively. Stephen Hawking had been hunting down ‘a theory of everything’ for several decades, but now refers to ‘model dependent realism’, and more than he knows right now, that is a move towards theoretical sociophysics. In the best traditions of Raymond Williams I have a nice A-Z of terms that highlight the range and reach of theoretical sociophysics, always trying to make what might seem tricky, even magical, be accessible and understandable.