In Vain

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

Feedback spirals generate obscure power formations whose engines are charged by their internal insurgencies and whose clandestine terror cannot be dealt with by any repression or external force. The opposing and at the same time cooperative polarity between 1 and 0 results in a dynamic difference which is required for shifts in direction and the perpetuation of the spirals.

—Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

From the 1920s onwards, quantum theory portrayed the constituent parts of atoms (electrons, nuclei and nuclear particles) as vibratory patterns of activity within fields. Like photons of light, they behave both as waves and as particles. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper expressed it, through modern physics, ‘materialism transcended itself’. Matter turns out to be highly packed energy, transformable into other forms of energy; and therefore something in the nature of a process, since it can be converted into other processes, such as light and, of course, motion and heat. Thus one may say that the results of modern physics suggest that we should give up the idea of a substance or essence. They suggest that there is no self-identical entity persisting during all changes in time. The universe now appears to be not a collection of things, but an interacting set of events or processes.

—Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion