What a fantastic story
I’ve always thought of knowledge as a puzzle. A single piece can be beautifully detailed, but it isn’t usually very useful on its own. It’s only by connecting them that we end up with a beautiful picture. Sometimes you’re working on one part of the puzzle, building a small island of pieces that seem to fit together perfectly… but you just can’t connect them to the larger structure. A good rule of thumb for getting unstuck is to keep the bigger part and disassemble the smaller one.
It’s a painful process, isn’t it? That feeling that you’ve wasted so much work, but without it, you can never finish the puzzle.
In a similar way, sometimes our belief systems or mental models come into conflict, leading to a contradiction. It’s an uncomfortable situation, especially if those systems have played a huge role in our lives. And I think no matter how rigorous we try to be, we all have our inconsistencies.
It’s a very difficult exercise to find your own. Our mind is brilliant at hiding them from us, at making us believe we’re perfectly coherent beings.
If you’re willing, pause here for a moment and see what comes up for you.
I’ve done this a few times myself, usually coming out of it feeling a bit naked, but lighter. I suppose if trees could feel, that’s what it must be like after a gardener has pruned their branches.
A few months ago, however, I put my finger on an inconsistency I couldn’t resolve. Two large islands of belief, obviously incompatible, but each one so large that I couldn’t choose which to sacrifice. I was pretty distraught for a few weeks.
The first island is my very Cartesian view of things. The rock-solid belief that every effect has a cause and every cause has an effect. That the simplest explanation is usually the right one. And that just because I like an explanation doesn’t make it any more probable. It’s the idea that every action I take, like writing these lines, is just a physical process, nerve impulses firing, conditioned by the structure of my brain and its inputs, and so on down the line.
The second island is more spiritual. It concerns my consciousness and my perception of free will. Because even though I can’t find an explanation for it, I have to admit that I am conscious. There is someone (me) who feels like they’re making a choice, feeling emotions… being free. And I don’t just have the impression of it, I believe in it, very strongly. I behave as if I have not only the ability but the responsibility to act on my life. I love to think, I mean really think, more than most people do.
But it’s clear that if every one of my actions is determined by immutable physical laws, then my consciousness isn’t the source. At best, it’s a consequence of my body’s physical state. Synapses fire, neurons light up, electricity spreads, an entire section of my cortex activates… and it’s all associated with a certain feeling, a certain experience. But it seems completely improbable that a certain experience could, out of nowhere, cause a specific brain activation that leads to an action.
The problem with all this is that both of these beliefs are useful to me. The scientific, Cartesian model is an excellent map, and my belief in free will is what gives me the will to actually use it to navigate the world.
It was a few days later that I had a realization. I’d been running for a good hour, late in the afternoon, along the Tagus, the river that flows through Lisbon. The sun was caressing my skin, the endorphins were kicking in. I remember I was listening to “Children of the Sky,” and I had this thought: our world is suspiciously interesting. Compared to most fiction, say, Harry Potter, our history is much wilder, far less believable. And crazier still, the plot elements seem to have been placed throughout the ages so that the interesting part starts now.
To give a little context, because if you stare at life for too long, you stop really seeing it: Modern humans as we know them appeared about 300,000 years ago, and for most of that time, our lives consisted of finding food and avoiding being eaten by enormous tigers. For the last few millennia, we’ve started building cities and mastering the world. Now a few of us are melting sand into silicon, carving runes into it that no one fully understands, and injecting it with energy harvested by splitting atoms… all to summon a form of intelligence that executes our desires.
We are on the verge of unleashing genetic engineering, building intelligences that surpass our own, and accessing limitless energy. I couldn’t have dreamed of being born at a more interesting time. I’m so well-positioned to watch the show that I’m starting to think that’s exactly what it is. A show.
So I’m choosing to do the same with life. To see myself as part of the most interesting story ever told, and simply suspend my disbelief.
