VirtualExile

Models don't scale up (or down). The models that work for micro processes don't work for macro processes. Quantum mechanics, classical physics, general relativity -- each model works best at its own scale, and they cannot be successfully unified.

There's still another model left unmade, past the macro side of general relativity, and still another left unmade, past the micro side of quantum mechanics,

But the inability to unify models across scale presents a philosophical question I cannot answer.

How does the universe relate to itself. How do the sums of the small become the sums of the large. Too much is unmeasurable and so unknowable in between and beyond these incompatible scales.

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I was thinking about how this applies to democracy. At the scale of the individual, I have opinions and I can make choices, similarly to you. But at the scale of the country, I am lost, ineffectual, powerless. I am unbreakably connected to all of you throughout all of space and time, but I cannot control our outcomes. I cannot even track all of the effects of my own actions. Karma is unknowable, a summation of infinitely small effects across an infinitely large spacetime.

The effort of acquiring knowledge is its own limitation, the effort of acquiring knowledge biases the acquired knowledge.

In the face of unknowable ineffectualness, we must still derive an ethics: the Noble Eightfold Path (āryāṣṭāṅgamārga).