On Doing One Thing

Ridibunda to you. Strange creatures, these humans. It seems that one of them called Archimedes got tremendously excited when he got into his bath and noticed the the water level go up. Well rekekekesh to him.

Of course, we frogs have known about water displacement for some hundreds of millions of years. We understand fluids. You spawn in some corner of a puddle, and that space is no longer available for water; we could have told him that.

This Archimedes must have been a bit of an introvert: didn't listen to other people much - let alone frogs. Only interested in what he sussed out for himself, I dare say. Brilliant man, no doubt; but he does seem to have been a tad slow on the uptake when it came to certain basic truths.

I suppose he was led astray by living in a world of supposedly solid objects: stools you could sit on, balls that hit the floor with a thump, metal crowns that kept their elaborate shape; that sort of thing.

We frogs live in a world of fluids: muddy water, watery mud, spawn and so on. In our amphibious, ambivalent world, it's not natural for things to keep their shape, or their mass, or their number. Things flow into each other and mingle. When you tread on the bottom of a pond, it indents. When you swim through the water, it allows passage but resists. When it rains, the pond gets deeper and wider: when the Sun shines, the pond contracts.

The only constants in our world are the properties of fluids: they like to keep their density, and if you try to push them out of one space they will occupy another.

Any frog could have told this Archimedes that you can't do just one thing. If I jump into the water (plop), the ripples spread outwards. If I eat too many flies, I create more ecological space for the next generation of flies to breed into. If we frogs have too many offspring in a small pond, the water becomes depleted and too few tadpoles can survive. If I sit on a lily pad, it deforms and sinks lower in the water, whose level rises slightly (and not all simultaneously, but in ripples spreading outwards). The water at any given time has a shape in three dimensions; but more fundamental than the shape is the density. If you try to change the density (by squashing or stretching the water), the shape will change in a way that tends to restore the density.

Many humans seem to have trouble grasping the fact that things they see are reactive fluids, governed by more fundamental, invisible, properties.

Take clutter, for example. Humans sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if their habitat is cluttered, they need more storage space in which to put the junk. Of course, if they make more space they quickly aquire more junk to fill it up. The clutter is visible, but the more fundamental factor is the density of clutter they can live with. Add space, and soon there is extra clutter to fill the extra space to the same density. What these people actually need is less storage space, so that they are forced to get rid of junk.

A similar phenomenon appears in the technological revolution at work. Computers increase the processing power of a worker; therefore they could make the worker's load lighter. But what actually happens in the employment market is that more is expected of each worker, with the result that people still in work have to work harder than ever. Work expands to fill the worker's capacity for it. The fundamental factor is the amount of effort that can be exacted from a typical worker in the prevailing market (the more liberal the market, the greater the effort that can be exacted).

It would be nice if everyone could have more money; but if everyone did have more (or, at least, if everyone spent more) prices would rise (the fundamental factor being the standard of living deliverable by an economy at its level of productivity). Whatever the neo-liberal economists say, it seems to this frog that inequality does matter: the rich drag prices up for everyone. But then I'm just a humble amphibian; a small frog in a small pond. What do I know ?

Well, the Sun is going down, and it's getting distinctly chilly up on the surface: the insects have been plentiful today, but now it's time for a warming post-prandial swim.

Plop.