A summary of human activity

Thursday, 23 April, Year 12 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

As you perhaps know, I live up on a hill.

The other hill over, there's a stone quarry.

This fortuitous arrangement of configurations permits me to observe, and therefore for your benefit summarize, human activity.

Here goes :

  1. First, you find a chunk. Make sure it is a good chunk!
  2. Then, you grind the chunk into a flour, which you put in sacks and cart away from there.
  3. Separately, or at the same time, you find another chunk. Make sure it is a good chunk as well!
  4. You grind this other chunk into chunklets, which you load into trucks and cart away from there.
  5. You gather up the chunklets and the flour at a different place.
  6. There at the new place, you mix the flour with water and the chunklets. Once it dries, it'll make a good big chunk!

Aren't you tired yet, seriously now ?!

Even taking an insider look at the madness, and admitting therefore that the original chunks were "no good" and the resulting chunk is "much better" or somesuch local truths : don't you think summarization is therefore rendered meaningless nor merely as the occasional activity, but outright as the mere theoretical possibility, altogether ? In which case... nevermind me, why do you do it, at all ?

Human activity is incompatible with rationality, not "in general" nor in some kind of "sum total" but outright and altogether, in every fold and each aspect however considered.

The ants also process chunks into chunks, tearing down chunks to build chunks ; but at least they don't build expectations, summaries, reasonables and other such wonders.

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