Quotes about Locality

The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth. The invisible shapes of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, and the movement of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. Our own reflections, we might say, are a part of the play of light and its reflections.

By acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the sensible world that contains us. Intelligence is no longer ours alone but is a property of the earth; we are in it, of it, immersed in its depths. And indeed each terrain, each bioregion, seems to have its own particular intelligence, its unique vernacular of soil and leaf and sky.

Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams – all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.

Classical physics rests upon five basic assumptions about the fabric of reality:  reality, locality, causality, and determinism.  These assumptions were postulated to take place within a framework of an absolute fixed space and time.  It was also taken for granted that the mathematical descriptions of physical processes corresponded to the actual behavior of objective events.

            The assumption of reality refers to the idea that the physical world is objectively real.  That means it exists independently of whether anyone is observing it.  The moon is still there even if you aren’t looking at it.  Locality refers to the idea that the only way that objects can be influenced is through direct contact.  Unmediated action at a distance is prohibited, as this is uncomfortably close to the occult suggestion that invisible spirits can cause things to occur, and the occult concepts are anathema to science.

            Causality assumed that the arrow of time points in one direction, and thus that cause → effect sequences are absolutely fixed.  Continuity assumes that there are no discontinuous jumps in nature or in that the fabric of space and time is “smooth.”  Determinism assumes that, as Einstein once quipped, ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ meaning that things progress in an orderly, predictable way.  We might not be smart enough or know enough to predict everything, but determinism says that in principle we can predict the future completely if we knew all the starting conditions and causal linkages.