On Virtual Competence

          On Virtual Competence

          Consider Murphy’s Law:

          Anything that can go wrong, will.

          But phrased that way, it is too deterministic – and therefore reliable, in contradiction to the spirit of Murphy’s Law. Therefore there must be a small correction, the Meta-Murphy Law:

          Murphy’s Law is slightly unreliable.

          The world isn’t completely chaotic; out of sheer perversity, it moderates its own perversity to create a local illusion of order, the better to burst the bubble when chaos comes roaring back,

          The naïve classical view of the world is that order is the main thing, and chaos is a small correction; but since when is chaos ever small or correct? The experienced modern view is that chaos is the main thing, and order is the small correction.

          Thus Murphy’s Law undermines itself. This quadratic correction is on the order of ha, when h is Plank’s Constant and a is the fine structure constant 1/137. There is also a cubic Murphy effect, which undermines the quadratic Murphy effect, and is on the order of haha. There is also a quartic effect (order hahaha), a quantic effect (order hahahaha), and so on to infinity.

          Consider also the modified Parkinson’s Law:

          Work expands to fill almost all the space-time allotted to it.

          There remains a quantum-sized region of unused resources; the so-called “cubic centimeter of Slack”.

          The quantum uncertainty relation says

          (delta E)(delta t) > h

          In this case we can read E as the Effect desired, and t as the time the effect should last. The quantum Murphy effect allows things to work, but only so long as such functioning is classically unobservable.

          The two extreme cases of this are when one of the factors is zero and the other is infinity. Thus any problem has an infinitely effective solution that works for no time at all, and also a solution that lasts forever, and solves nothing!

          Such “virtual solutions” display “virtual competence”. These virtual solutions are the quanta which glue together the human universe. They mediate humanity’s binding forces.

          Without virtual particles, matter would implode; the so-called Ultraviolet Catastrophe. Similarly, without virtual competence, mind would implode; the Ultraviolent Catastrophe. It is only due to virtual competence that human society avoids the Ultraviolent Catastrophe.