Putting Dollars On Sunshine – The Unquantifiable World

By Steve Mills

Our mind constantly narrows the stream of input it receives down to definitions,  conceptions and categories.

It makes it easy for our brain to manage the wide complexity of modern life, and make predictive decisions and inferences about what is currently happening. I am sure that we have evolved this way with good reason, and I bet we were doing it back when we all lived in caves or the wild grassland of prehistory.

Our minds treat objects not as they are, but as abstract categories of things. Men are treated with a certain subset of behaviours, women with another. We treat all physical objects as if they are the idea and not the thing. Bowls are treated all the same, as are knives, or fridges, or televisions.

But really I think that life is ultimately unquantifiable. Everything always seeks to transcend its definition, and concrete descriptions break down when you turn up the resolution. The harder you study what defines a certain thing, the more you see the diversity within the category.

It’s a hard concept to grasp, or get our minds around, which is always a good indicator that further thought and study would be worthwhile.

Really our every thoughts about a certain thing are not about the real things themselves, but about our internal concept of what that thing is.

This has made it easy for our modern civilization to develop, because when you can quantify something, person or place then you can put a value on it.

But really, what price can be put on an hour of your life, or a finite resource which is the common good of all, or even the land inhabited by a people for thousands of years, and their culture? It just can’t be done unless the quantisation is taken to the extreme levels we see today, where everything is a commodity, and there can be decisions made.

Should I work today or enjoy the sunshine… hmmmm, not working will cost me $200. The sunshine is worth $0. Ok work it is..  What a shame we look at the $, and not the unquantifiable reality that is really there. The pure experience of living and enjoying life.