The History of things

“The emptiness of actuality can be estimated by the possibilities that fail to attain realization in any instant; only when they are few can actuality seem full.”

Upon reading this statement, I am reminded of two other quotations I came across recently:

a)”When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”-Sherlock Holmes, and

b)” An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”-Laplace

In short, I don’t really see the validity of this statement. The author, like Holmes, seems to be assuming that the full set of “possible” events and outcomes is a finite quantity, and hence that actuality is, to some extent, accurately determinable. The second quote states that once the actuality of the present is realized, the future would cease to be unknown, and would perhaps be something we could directly experience in the present (I am, in a way, comparing it to a point I made in one of my previous essays).

But it seems that actuality is something that will never be even moderately known to us, so the amount of thought that goes into this subject just seems to be a little futile. As the author mentions, the inadequacies of our senses prevent us from ever attaining actuality, an obstacle even our technological advancement cannot overcome.

But it’s interesting to note how the nature of actuality can actually differ between species, or even, people. Prior to this i assumed actuality was merely a description of existence, and everything that goes into it, including events from the past. But the author’s argument that the events from the past cannot be known to us directly, and only through (rather dubious) signals, hence should be excluded from the definition of actuality, does make sense. The point he seems to be making here is that our senses, and only our senses, can actually receive direct inputs from the world around us to shape our notion of actuality. Here, i wonder if that’s an assumption that can be made...and whether our senses are actually “perfect” enough to be making accurate sense of the world around us. But then again, i guess we’ll never know any alternative.

But one point i don’t really agree with is how he claims that since “the perception of a signal happened ‘now’, but its impulse and transmission happened ‘then’”, we have to exclude the past from notions of actuality. It doesn’t matter when an event actually occurred, and when the signal was sparked and transmitted, as time itself is a subjective quantity, dependent on the space and nature of observation. Hence, all that should matter is the perception of the signal, not the generation of it.