What's More Important: Information or Stuff?
In the room, the people come and go talking of “bits” and “atoms.” Digital and tangible. Information and stuff.
Peter Thiel sums up our age as one heavily skewed (for the worse) to information: “We wanted flying cars and all we got was 140 characters.” Too much focus on bits, not enough on atoms.
But is the debate new?
The cultural pendulum between manufacturing and apps, or between mechanical engineering and marketing, seems ancient. Christian theology speaks of “the word made flesh,” that is, the bit made atom, the internet made IRL. In Hebrew, the word davar means both word and thing.
In the middle ages, bits people went by the name of “nominalists” while atoms people went by the name of “realists.” Nominalists think that names, not things are where it’s at. Realists think the reverse. William of Ockham, were he alive today, might say that SEO matters more than craft; “distribution eats product for breakfast.”
Nominalists think night begins when I stop working or when I declare it so (with some ritual, say, an evening prayer) or when the clock tells me. Realists think it begins when it’s dark out. There’s often a correlation—we used to stop working when we couldn’t see, i.e., when it was dark. But with the advent of electricity, or even the mass reproduction of candles, that’s no longer the case. The result is that nominalists might still talk about their “day” ending at midnight. “Is time a function of the clock (human culture) or the sky (planets, nature)?” has historically divided us so intensely we’ve sometimes called our opponents heretics. While we are no longer as heated about the calendar, the same kinds of debates continue to ravish contemporary culture.
The realism vs nominalism debate also plays out in the arts, with some artists wanting art to be about the world (realism) and others wanting it to be about itself (nominalism). The finger pointing at the moon is really pointing at the moon vs. the finger pointing at the moon is really pointing at the finger.
Questions:
Do you identify more with nominalism or realism? Why?
Which parts of culture do you think skew in one direction or the other? How do you explain it?
Does liberalism presuppose nominalism insofar as tolerance requires us to bracket our realism in favor of human convention?
Could the reason we don’t have flying cars (besides the laws of physics) have something to do with the technological limits of our culture being too nominalist?
What are the respective advantages and disadvantages of nominalism and realism for living well on a personal level?
