Sometimes I find it difficult to write in English after talking to my great-grandmother on the phone; She is also my niece and in her language there are no two different words that refer to time and space. According to their kinship system, an eternal cycle of renewal begins anew every three generations and the parents of our grandparents are classified as our children. In her traditional language, she asks something that would be directly translated into English as “What place,” but in reality means “What time?” and then you reluctantly put yourself in that paradigm because…
Sometimes I find it difficult to write in English after talking to my great-grandmother on the phone; She is also my niece and in her language there are no two different words that refer to time and space. According to their kinship system, an eternal cycle of renewal begins anew every three generations and the parents of our grandparents are classified as our children. In her traditional language, she asks something that would be directly translated into English as “What place,” but in reality means “What time?” And then you reluctantly put yourself into that paradigm because you know it will take a hell of an effort to get out of it when you have to get back to work. Kinship moves in cycles, the earth moves in seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles, and time is so tied to these cycles that it is not even a concept independent of space. We experience time very differently than people who are immersed in flat calendars and surfaces devoid of history. In our spheres of existence, time does not advance in a straight line and is as tangible as the ground we walk on.
Nothing is created or destroyed, it simply moves and changes. This is the first law. Creation is a state of constant movement and as a species we must move with it because if we do not we will damage the system and condemn ourselves. Nothing can be retained, accumulated or stored. In a stable system, every unit needs speed and exchange, otherwise it stagnates. This applies to economic and social systems as well as to natural ones. Everyone behaves according to the same laws.
Around the central circle are three arches (or petals, as I seem to see them now) that show that our social system is built on the pattern of creation, according to which there are three generations of strong women around each child: sisters/ Cousins, mothers/aunts and grandmothers. The grandmother’s mother returns to the center and becomes the girl, everyone moves through these roles eternally and the child’s spirit is reborn throughout the area. Each of them also fills all the roles at the same time, so the sister is also someone’s aunt and the grandmother of her niece’s daughter.
In this way, the system differs depending on the relational context of the person viewing it at each moment. When we are the child in the middle we see one set of relationships, but when we put our child in the middle we see a different set of relationships. The child’s aunt is also someone’s child and is at the center of her own system. Every time we meet someone and form a relationship, we connect multiple universes. There is no way to be an outside observer of this system; To see it in three dimensions we must place ourselves within it, and to see other multiple dimensions we must move within it and make the right connections within it. From the outside it is nothing more than a flat picture.
In contemporary science and research, researchers must claim objectivity, an impossible position typical of a god (more than) who floated in empty space and observed the field without being part of it. It is an illusion of omniscience that faces some obstacles in quantum physics. No matter how hard we try to isolate ourselves from reality, it always has an impact on the viewer because reality changes depending on our point of view. Scientists call it the “uncertainty principle.”
I am a newbie in physics but I understand that when we look for the position a subatomic spot behaves like a particle and when we try to think about its motion it becomes a wave. Therefore, its physical reality changes depending on what we are looking for. The popular answer to this was: “If I can change reality with my mind, I want the universe to send me a Lamborghini.”
“That’s not how it works,” I hear when I talk to Percy Paul, an Australian Aboriginal and theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. It seems that he feels that the complicated equations of uncertainty have little bearing on the reality he experiences as an Indigenous person. As I listen to his explanations of how he exists and understands the universe, I try to adopt his point of view: I begin to imagine that an electron creates a field of probabilities about its possible location at a given time, and that this cannot be assigned a unique position. position in linear time; It seems as if it forms a kind of beach, where each grain of sand represents one of its possible locations. This suggests to me that tangible reality only exists when one disobeys linear time.
It seems a little silly to suggest this idea to you, which is why my ego prevents us from having further discussions on the topic. Egos always get in the way of a good conversation. Instead of talking about that, we talk about the first and second principles of thermodynamics and he shares some amazing ideas with me, but our thinking quickly diverges; The conversation ends and we cannot recover it. In the indigenous world, we cannot force people to give us knowledge: we simply accept what they believe we are ready to receive. Typically, knowledge keepers turn away when they see narcissism in us. And I know I approached this conversation with the wrong mindset. Still, I gratefully collect the seeds it gives me.
My conversations with Percy led me to revisit Schrödinger’s Cat, which seems to be the best way to help the uninitiated understand the uncertainty principle. Following this famous thought experiment, let’s imagine we poison a cat and put it in a box. We don’t know if the cat is already dead because we can’t see it. So at this moment the cat is both dead and alive. The act of watching the cat breathe would mean it is alive, and the act of seeing its hieratic, unblinking eyes behind a mask of agony and panic would mean it is dead. My God.
From the perspective of Aboriginal cosmology, the problem of uncertainty is solved when we recognize that we are part of the territory and accept our subjectivity. If we want to know what’s so bad in the box, let’s drink the poison and embrace it. After my conversations with Percy, I begin to realize that the Uncertainty Principle is not a law, but rather an expression of frustration at the impossibility of achieving the scientific objectivity typical of a god.
Tyson Forest Gate is an artist and lecturer in Indigenous thought at Deakin University Melbourne. This excerpt is a preview of his book Written in the sand. How indigenous thinking can save the world, by Herder. The release will take place on September 19th.
