The Indigestible

Physics is a field that con­tin­ues to sur­prise. In the early 1900s the belief was that it was effec­tively fin­ished — apart from a few minor details, there wasn’t any­thing new left to dis­cover. Those few minor details ended up being the set of insights Einstein had which rev­o­lu­tion­ized our under­stand­ing of energy, mat­ter, space, and time.

While finess­ing what we now know as General Relativity, Einstein came across some­thing that didn’t make sense to him; actu­ally it so offended his sense of order that he chose to work around it rather than explore it. Later physi­cists, fol­low­ing up on Einstein’s work, found that it led to inde­ter­mi­nacy, which essen­tially means that we can­not simul­ta­ne­ously know a particle’s speed and its loca­tion. The physics of Quantum Mechanics devel­oped from that.

More recently, the LHC in Europe may have found traces of a sub­atomic par­ti­cle which might or might not tie together cur­rent the­o­ries in physics; or it could be a sta­tis­ti­cal anom­aly. And else­where, devel­op­ments con­tinue in teleportation.

Not the Star Trek ver­sion of it. So far it’s only sub­atomic par­ti­cles that have been tele­ported, but it is hap­pen­ing. Essentially what hap­pens is a particle’s state is ana­lyzed, dur­ing which the par­ti­cle is dis­as­sem­bled, after which it gets reassem­bled on the other side of the room. That it’s the same par­ti­cle is con­firmed by its quan­tum state — a sort of fin­ger­print. Eventually, we can imag­ine the same hap­pen­ing for larger items such as atoms, marsh­mal­lows, miss­ing socks, and pos­si­bly even liv­ing enti­ties such as gold­fish or people.

So sup­pose you step into a tele­porter one day, and zap your­self to the other side of the planet, where you spend some time shop­ping and eat­ing inter­est­ing foods. When you’re fin­ished you tele­port your­self back home. As you step out of the booth, you’re accosted by a wild-​​eyed per­son who insists that you’re no longer you, that you’re actu­ally dead.

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I can’t say with any­thing like cer­tainty that I know what hap­pens to us when we die. To some extent I think it might be a bit like the reverse of what hap­pened at birth, only a bit more rapidly and drastically.

Of course, what hap­pens at birth is itself an inter­est­ing ques­tion; after all, fetuses are viable before birth, capa­ble of liv­ing with­out the womb. You have to go back a num­ber of weeks to find a fetus that can’t sur­vive on its own. What’s intrigu­ing is that you don’t get signs of coher­ent aware­ness, of a string­ing together of con­scious­ness into the nar­ra­tive that calls itself I, until well after the baby has come into the world.

Death, on the other hand, can be abrupt. It can just as eas­ily be a grad­ual process, one that hap­pens slowly enough for every­one to get used to the idea. I have a feel­ing that grad­ual deaths are eas­ier for the loved ones to deal with.

From another per­spec­tive, though, we’re really dying all the time, in the sense that the per­son I was a minute ago — or an hour or a day ago — is not the same as the per­son that I am now. Even rel­a­tively minor events have changed my per­spec­tive, so it can be argued that the past me is dead in one sense. However, there is his­tory, there is a con­ti­nu­ity, there is that con­tin­u­ing motion of con­scious­ness whose entire job is to join together dis­crete, dis­parate events and sen­sa­tions into a beaded string of appar­ent wholeness.

There’s a rea­son for all this phi­los­o­phy in this post.

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One of the more dif­fi­cult parts about mov­ing, for me at least, has always been the attri­tion. Deciding what’s going with me and what’s being donated — or, in some cases, sim­ply pitched out — has always been more dif­fi­cult than I think it should be.

Nowhere is this more obvi­ous than with my book col­lec­tion. It’ll come as a micro­scopic sur­prise that I have a fairly sub­stan­tial library, prob­a­bly 80% of which I’ve read. The rest is on the wait­ing list. When your library con­tains some 500 titles, that’s obvi­ously a pretty big I’ll-get-to-it-soon stack.

Why on Earth would any­one even want that many books? I used to be asked that some­times by class­mates when I was in high school. (One even com­mented, in all seri­ous­ness, “I’ve never been so bored that I had to read.” It goes with­out say­ing that she and I never dated.)

To some extent, this is my father’s influ­ence. I used to go into his study as a child and stare in utter, silent awe at the wall of books there. The col­lec­tion showed a wide range of tastes, includ­ing lit­er­a­ture, fan­tasy, and SF. The first time I read Dangerous Visions, I was about four­teen, and it was from his col­lec­tion.¹ DV was not the kind of book you’d nor­mally think of a young teen read­ing, but that was how it went in my fam­ily. As long as it was a book, and wasn’t from a porn shop, there was no censorship.

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We will prob­a­bly never fully under­stand just why Jared Loughner decided to do what he did¹ on that day in Tucson. This should actu­ally make us feel bet­ter about our­selves, when you think about it. I’d far rather be baf­fled by a spate of irra­tional killings than have a clue as to the rea­son­ing behind them.²

This hasn’t stopped an imme­di­ate and intense response from quite a lot of peo­ple, in quite a few cor­ners, each appar­ently try­ing to simul­ta­ne­ously absolve them­selves of guilt while assign­ing it to oth­ers. Ironically, the argu­ment about incen­di­ary lan­guage in polit­i­cal dis­course has itself become quite incen­di­ary. So it goes.

Rather than seek to attach blame to one “side” or another,³ I’d like to dis­cuss the lan­guage we use reg­u­larly in dis­cus­sion of any kind, which is fre­quently over-​​the-​​top and improper for our pur­poses. By “improper” I do not nec­es­sar­ily mean insult­ing, offen­sive, and so on; instead, I sim­ply mean the wrong set of words.

For exam­ple, many years ago, Hostess adver­tised their Twinkies and other baked can­dies as being “whole­some”. I believe I know what whole­some means, and it is not a word that I would apply to some­thing made almost entirely of sugar and so pumped with preser­v­a­tives that, assum­ing its pack­ag­ing remains undam­aged, it has an essen­tially infi­nite shelf life. Usage of the word whole­some is, here, improper. We might call Twinkies fla­vor­ful; we might call them con­ve­nient; we might call them tasty. We would be hard-​​pressed to defend call­ing them whole­some.

This is a good exam­ple of decep­tive label­ing. It could be argued that, since Twinkies do not con­tain cyanide, they are tech­ni­cally whole­some; how­ever, whole­some is not a syn­onym for non­lethal. Using a word that is con­ven­tion­ally asso­ci­ated with healthy cheap­ens the value of that word, and robs it of effec­tive mean­ing — par­tic­u­larly if that word is being used to describe some­thing that, eaten in any­thing but extreme mod­er­a­tion, is in no way healthy at all.

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One time, many years ago, a monk was walk­ing along in the for­est. Suddenly a rob­ber leapt out and demanded money, food, and so on. The monk, of course, had noth­ing to give; this infu­ri­ated the rob­ber, who began rant­ing about all the trav­el­ers he’d beaten, how dan­ger­ous he was, etc. The monk lis­tened, unfazed, for so long that even­tu­ally the rob­ber became impressed. He wanted to know how the monk could be so appar­ently at ease in the face of such dire threat, when the rob­ber him­self — who was in a posi­tion of power — seemed unable to let go of his anger.

Eventually the rob­ber con­fessed that steal­ing was an ingrained part of his per­son­al­ity. “Wherever I am, no mat­ter who I’m with, when I see some­thing, my urge is to steal it. It doesn’t mat­ter whether it’s some­thing I need; just to see some­one pos­sess­ing any­thing makes me want it for myself. I’ve actu­ally tried to stop steal­ing, but I just can’t. I know I’ll be caught one day and exe­cuted, but I sim­ply can’t help myself. Is there any­thing I can do to make it stop?”

The monk pon­dered for a moment. “When you get the urge to steal, sim­ply be aware of it,” he said.

The rob­ber blinked. “That’s all?”

“Yes, that’s all.”

Bemused, the rob­ber parted ways with the monk.

A year or so later, they met up again on the road. The monk didn’t rec­og­nize his one­time adver­sary; the man had con­verted, and was now a monk as well — no longer a rob­ber. “Somehow,” he said, “just being aware of my urge to steal helped it to fade and lose its power over me. How did you know it would work?”

The monk shrugged. “Every lust is a thought,” he said, and in that moment the for­mer rob­ber was enlightened.

These sto­ries always seem to be about wan­der­ing monks. I don’t actu­ally recall the full thread of this one, and I can’t seem to find the ref­er­ence any­where; the monk might have been Bodhidharma, who was the itin­er­ant Buddhist that brought the prac­tice to China.¹ It really doesn’t mat­ter what the par­tic­u­lars are, because the essence of the story is what I’m focus­ing on here.

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