I could never be a scientist, because I'm too much of an empiricist.
That sounds nonsensical, I know. But it's the same reason my religious career never took off: I have always struggled to fathom the incredible. There are certain facts about the world in which we life that just stagger me.
Things like atoms.
Dark matter.
Supernovas.
The big bang.
The idea that the universe is infinite.
The idea that the universe is finite.
Christ, I still struggle to comprehend that the earth is round.
At the risk of sounding like a Contiki tour of an acid trip, the things that the sciences require us to believe as fundaments of their respective disciplines leave me breathless and gaping, forehead pink and wrinkled like a baby taking the in-breath before a wail. If I can't fathom the foundation stones of these temples of thought, what hope do I have of mounting the dizzying spires at the pinnacle of scientific hypothesis?
I have been thinking a lot lately about things I can't possibly understand because one of my dear, dear friends wants to die.
Or rather, she wishes she could never have existed. She longs for oblivion - she struggles through each day dogged by the seductive siren song of nothingness. And no matter how eloquently she expresses it, I cannot understand, because the prospect of an idea as huge as oblivion terrifies me. It's a concept as vast as the ocean, and my mind is a grain of salt. Whenever I try to face it, I cannot help but be consumed by it, lost, dissolved.
How can we humans grasp the enormity of nothingness? I am a conscious being. Every single thing I experience is filtered through the gates of my ego, my sense of self, my "I." The idea of not being conscious, of not existing, is fundamentally not within my capacity to grasp. And so, because I have no way of understanding it, I fear it above all things.
Eternity is just as much a source of blind terror. I remember being about eleven, and trying to explain to my bewildered parents that I was crying because I'd realised that, according to conventional beliefs, the afterlife was either eternity or oblivion, and both options drove me into a fit of complete panic.
Perhaps I'm being immature or churlish. After all, birth and death are the only things we all share. There's a great Laura Marling song that goes 'Til I'm laid into my final resting place/Just like the rest of human race who've done it/Without complaining all the way.' So perhaps this is just another symptom of a bourgeois youthful mind clinging to a fin de siècle intellectualist tumult. But damnit, I like being alive. Right now, I have no plans to go gentle into that good night.
So though it sometimes feels like I'm embracing ignorance, I'll go on pressing down those unquiet waves of fear and insignificance. A good dose of wonder is good for the soul, but unless I moderate my thoughts, I'll never get anything done. For now, at least, I'll content myself with the little sneaking moments of vast epiphany that pounce on me on occasion, grasp me by the ears and scream 'Do you even realise how outrageously incomprehensible your own existence is?!'
We all need that now and then. But I sure couldn't do it for a living.
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I think scientists are the robots. They do not realise the enormity of the task they are undertaking. It is their job to not. If they did I am sure they, like you, couldn't do it.
ReplyDeleteI think this contemplation of the abyss amounts to philosophy - and I have never met, or read of, a happy professional philosopher.
I disagree with you there anonymous. I think that despite the enormity of the task that's before them, they break it down into achievable goals. One philosopher likened science to trying to tune a TV channel to the perfect picture - you'll never get it absolutely clear, but you could twiddle it a little bit clearer than it was before you came.
ReplyDeleteIt might be that you're saying "only those who don't grasp the impossibility of what they set out to achieve, leave their homes and try", but regardless of spin I think it's derogatory towards the scientific community to liken them to automatons.
And if you'd like a happy professional philosopher, check out Epicurus.
oblivion doesn't scare me, nor fill me with wonder. nothing could be more mundane! (by definition, natch.) i don't have any particular desire to be dead, but neither do i have any particular desire not to be. i don't much fancy dying, though, so i'm going to stave that off as long as i reasonably can.
ReplyDeletewhat i don't get about people who fear the oblivion after death is that nobody looks back on the time before they were born with horror and contempt -- mark twain (i think) said something like: "i don't fear death, and why should i, having been dead for thousands of years before my birth", and i think that's basically on the money.
i can sympathise -- no, more than sympathise -- i can directly relate to your oblivion-hungry friend. in my grimmer moods, if i look back at my life, i remember and feel more negatively than positively. i figure, if you want to put it in these terms (and i do!) that the universe would be a net happier place if i simply had not existed. possibly that's true. i certainly wouldn't complain. even at my happiest i have to acknowledge that there's no real reason for me to fret at the thought of my own death, because i wouldn't be there afterwards to be put out by it. i mean, i know all that is simple enough and you've probably read it or thought it before, but i can't relate to that terror you talk about when you think of eternities and oblivia.
in respect to what you say about science and unfathomable fundaments, steve's second-hand analogy of tuning a television is pretty ace, i think. trying to wrap your brain around the size of an atom -- or of a supernova -- is no more possible than counting to infinity. no, try not to think that there are Facts you need to Get to Understand Science -- think of things like relativity, and uncertainty, and try to consider that what we know from science isn't a set of facts but a series of conceptions growing clearer and more sophistocated every day. don't try to grab hold of fundaments and fathom them in all their complexity: think of them just as gradually increasingly accurate ideas, nothing more. they will make you feel way less wack. and for the love of christ, sarah, put down the LSD.
oh, and this is jem, by the way.