Heraclitus would have loved the web

Heraclitus was an enigmatic greek philosopher, one of the presocratics. He is best remembered for aphorisms like "You can't step twice into the same river". He argues that by the second time you step in, water has flowed and thus, it's not the same river anymore. At his time, this meant a completely different approach to philosophy, as he eliminated "Being" and replaced it by "Becoming". In his view, everything was in flux, time is not something to be measured in discrete units, there is no "now" and "then", just the flow of becoming.

The consequence is a wicked form of reasoning. If everything is flowing, things cannot be described absolutely. By the moment you have come up with a definition, things have changed. By this the only valid description is one which contradicts itself. A simple example is given in his aphorism "the way up and the way down are the same". A single thing can be described by two opposites. There is no right or wrong, as right is wrong and wrong is right at the same time. This really takes the sting out of any argument.

So much for my naive introduction to Heraclitus. Now take a look at the web. It is the tool that allows us to accelerate in the memetic rat race. As we go faster and faster, we lose the sensation of now, and experience a true form of flow. Heraclitus would have loved it. Imagine he told a carpenter 2500 years back "You are a carpenter and you are not a carpenter". He would have thought Heraclitus was insane. He was just carpenting the way his fathers and grandfathers carpentered. But I can really relate to the sentence "I am a web developer and I am not a web developer". New tools emerge, new skills are required, "the only thing permanent is change".

I have already described the downside of going faster and faster in the memetic rat race. But it's not the web's fault. The web suddenly feels organic.

Let's take a look at an elaboration of the river quote, "We both step and do not step in the same rivers". So how do we do step twice into the same river? This is where language comes in. Humans have come up with conventions of identifying things. We label things. So now a river is no longer a flowing substance, but for example the Rhine river. I can step into the Rhine river twice, although the actual water molecules have changed. This is the power of language.

Language was a big step for humans. Suddenly we were able to build and spread knowledge, and even describe complex issues permanently. What a meme-fest! They could spread faster and mutate, and by this, make our brains grow in size. But let's remember that we also cannot step into the same river twice: We now sense this is a contradictive statement, which shows that language is very limited in describing the world as it is. Permanence is an illusion induced by language. In other words, permanence is nothing but a powerful meme-plex that shapes the way we view the world. There is no "now" or "then" in reality. Language limits us, it limits the way our brains operate. It's like trying to travel at lightspeed in a Volkswagen.

This might be the reason why we are losing out in the memetic rat race. Our language is insufficient. Our brains have adapted to our language. Maybe the web is something that has the potential to capture reality much better than language. But it still relies too much on language. Maybe if its interfaces evolve and become less restrictive, our brains can manage to adapt and do not overload.

But even today, we have potentially great user interfaces. Take geospatial software, maps are already quite intuitive. You can't accurately describe a map, even with thousands of words. A map allows us to process information much faster. We need interfaces like maps in order to keep up. By this I hope we can manage to model the Volkswagen into a spaceship.