An Essay on Everything
The first line of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” I can see only two possibilities, God and nothing. Both make my stomach churn. Both are impossible for me to wrap my mind around. If the “beginning” was the Big Bang, then where did the BB’s raw material originate? Not spontaneously from nothing, surely. So I come down on God’s side.
It’s a stretch to say that God knows about every sparrow that falls, no matter what Jesus reputedly said about that. But we want to live forever. Or, perhaps more precisely, we don’t ever want to die. (Not exactly the same thing, if you think about it.) Animals, I have heard, live in the ‘now’ and don’t know they will die. On the other hand, animals certainly have intense survival instincts. Bottom line we don’t really know what animals think about death. We can be pretty sure they don’t go any more quietly into ‘that dark night’ than we do. We share the will to live.
So strong is the desire for an afterlife that it has propped up most of the world’s major religions for centuries… even millennia. What else can explain the continuing vitality of Catholicism, even in the face of the perennial sexual-assault scandals? The Buddhists apparently imagine souls hopping from dead bodies into fecund wombs. With eight billion of us at any given moment, the math must require a celestial quantum computer.
Among the atheists and agnostics, two categories seem to predominate. The first are those who replace the individual with the species and religion with history. Marx, of course, comes immediately to mind. The other category, closely related to the first, are those compelled to be part of something bigger than themselves, even if it’s only a Super Bowl game. Why else would they pay thousands of dollars for a bad seat? They want to say, “I was there”… and to keep right on saying it… usually on a t-shirt or sweat shirt. I know of a guy in his late twenties, who paid two grand for a Phillies playoff game a couple of seasons back, and who still lived with his parents. Had I been his old man, we would have had a conversation.
For those who check the box ‘none of the above,’ the choices range from hedonism to workaholic. The Beatles told us all we need is love. I remember when I felt that way. It felt good. Didn’t pay the mortgage or put food on the table… but it sure felt good. It’s easier to feel that way when you’re still a student. Once the bills start piling up, a regular and reliable source of income comes in handy. If you like to work, that helps a lot. I’m with Teddy Roosevelt on this: “Far and away, the best gift life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” Amen, TR.
Artist Mary Cassatt put it this way: “I work and that is the whole secret of anything like contentment with life.” Amen, Mary.
Woody Allen was asked if he hoped to achieve immortality through his films. He quipped that he hoped to find immortality through not dying. But he knew better. There are those who don’t know any better. They are planning for immortality by getting their consciousness uploaded into a computer. That just might work. Neal Stephenson plays with this notion in his novel Fall, or Dodge in Hell. So ubiquitous and affordable has the process become that people start funds—-just like college funds—- to pay for their uploads when the time comes. In Stephenson’s virtual afterlife, these folks don’t remember their corporeal existences. They wind up starting anew. Well, heck, at least they are still in existence…. that is until some terrorist (or investment banker) pulls the plug, blows up the cloud, or whatever,
Meanwhile, Woody will live forever… every time one of his films with him in it is screened, he’ll be reborn. He just won’t know it. Is that good enough? For all but the favored few —-billionaires with the bucks to get uploaded will be the pioneers of Stephenson’s virtual world, I guess —- it has to be.
But then there’s all this stuff about quantum physics. Cats in boxes that can be dead and alive at the same time. The cats, not the boxes. Parallel universes where we live out multiple lives simultaneously… or is it sequentially? Sub-atomic particles that can be in two places at once. Or that can communicate with one another over large distances… suggesting ESP might be the real deal.
Einstein, doubting Niels Bohr’s ideas, facetiously asked, “When I stop looking at the moon, does it disappear?” (Or something like that.) In a way, yes. The moon looks the way it does to us because our eyes have evolved to see it that way. The moon is always there; what it looks like lies in the eye of the beholder. The European Robin can ‘see’ the earth’s gravitational field. That’s how the bird migrates every year. Some animals, I’ve read, are color blind. Deep-ocean animals, they say, don’t have multi-color vision; they see shades of blue, blue, blue. Makes sense if you think about it. Point is, it’s not the objective appearance of an object, but the subjective sensory perception of the viewer, be it human, mammal or sea urchin, that defines each one’s specific reality. And it works. But that’s not the same as claiming the cat is simultaneously dead in one box and alive in the other.
Anyway, I’m suspicious that quantum physicists and mathematicians have a lot in common with Jackson Pollock. They’re just putting us on to make themselves seem more significant.
Speaking of significance, what is it about dictators? To their opponents and critics they usually look like buffoons. Yet millions of people follow them, often like lemmings off a cliff. Think about: Hitler’s mustache… Mussolini’s ridiculous posturing and outlandish uniforms with all the feathers and such… that North Korean guy’s haircut. Folks should have seen these charlatans coming from a mile away. But somehow, otherwise reasonable people just didn’t. Not until the body counts were in the millions, often including the good citizens who had voted them into office in the first place.
And what about these alpha dogs? Why don’t they get their sense of significance from making the people they lead happy? Why are they so darned selfish? Me…me…me. Plato had the right idea: a philosopher-king… wise , virtuous and selfless. That guy is harder to find than an honest man. You might have better luck looking for a philosopher-queen. Trouble is, most male voters are too intimidated to elect her.
Business magnates are more of a mixed bag. The other night I saw a documentary about Westinghouse. If the film was accurate, the guy actually cared about his workers. By way of contrast, Carnegie was salmon fishing at his castle in Scotland when his unionized steelworkers and the company’s Pinkertons were killing one another during the Homestead Strike. Carnegie hoarded his money to secure his brand of immortality, i.e., his name on all manner of public works from the university to libraries to a foundation. The workers whose blood, sweat and tears made him his fortune didn’t get their names up there with his. Private foundations remain a favorite route to immortality today, e.g., the Gates Foundation. When the tycoons can have real immortality, either in a quantum computer or in a new, young body, I wonder if they will give their fortunes away so generously. They may need every dollar to sustain their longevity.
For real immortality, how about GenAI? A silicon philosopher-king or -queen, in lieu of a flesh-and-blood one? I think most of us would reject the idea. We’ve seen too many movies in which the all-powerful deus ex machine turns on the society that turned it loose. Who hasn’t seen at least one Terminator movie? Still, at the rate GenAI is being hurtled toward the so-called Singularity, we may have little choice in the matter. Let’s hope that, when that happens, Assimov’s three laws for robotics are firmly embedded in President Singularity.
BTW, do you think the human race has a destiny? Or are we just an evolutionary accident? Only God knows. And God ain’t talking. At least not to me. How about you?
