Sunday 29 April 2018

Reductionist calculations

"Your prince's crown 
Cracks and falls down 
Your castle hollow and cold 
You've wandered so far 
From the person you are [...]" 
Keane.


Traveling just doesn't happen in physical space, whether past, present or future. It takes place, first and foremost, in our mind. It can be boiled down to how we configure our desires, pilot our plans and even execute our dreams. We have to crunch numbers beyond kilometers, days, currencies and probabilities to produce a valid output.



Missed representations

Sure, there might be people who can pick up a bag at the drop of their hats and stream their lives away from any predicated guess. These are the wanderers, the adventurers, the criminals, the anti-socials who serve as counter examples to the orderly ways of the society. Do they meet a happy ending or a tragic fate in the end? It would be hard to account for, because they set themselves up with unknown parameters from the start.




Sculpture of variable x
 
The appeal of travel is already very mysterious in itself: it's like evolution is giving continuous prompts for you to get up to speed, on your feet, into the wilderness. The challenge is always terrifying and the variables impress with their randomness. Certainly, it would pay to prepare and to validate different algorithms for potential threats. What to do if it rains? Where to sleep if no money? How to call if no network? When to leave if romantically entangled? 




Endlessly scalable

So, the human brain can compute anything and everything, real or imagined, relaxing or threatening. You can decide which path to walk at any crossroad, but you can only do so when you have envisioned what is likely to happen in a set environment. In the comfort of our familiar surroundings, this process has compiled conditioned reactions that are so predictable that they lack refinement. I know how to navigate my town to reach my home, even if the world is to end.



Infinity symbol

This is why, to sharpen our downtrodden instincts, we need to update our database in a new setting. It is testing and trialing: sometimes with major errors, often with common bugs. But the reward comes from the experience itself: going up, and down, sideways, straight or backwards; there is perpetual movement. Traveling is a deliberate surveying and mapping of the pathways towards the origin of our consciousness.