When I was growing up, my teachers in primary and secondary schools liked to scare me about fate - how I am actually tied up by invisible strings called cause and effect that would lead me down all sorts of paths not to my choosing. After all, what is choice, they would glibly say, but a small puppet of our own making: a shadow of ourselves - an indistinct memory of a monument to the fiction called soul that we composed in our soiled cribs so long ago. Of course they articulate this in a much more subtle manner through stories, real or imagined, and through quantitative laws that model our observations. At first it was the fairy tales - the man who ran from death only to find death waiting for him in another city; the king who cast his ring away only to find it in a fish's belly. Then it was in the guise of science: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; for every chemical reaction, the ratio of the products to its reactants remain constant at a fixed temperature with time. When I entered high school, my teachers made me read about Odysseus and told me to analyse his futile struggles against the gods. They assigned books like War and Peace, controlled meditations on fatalism. They taught us calculus, where we had to appreciate how an infinity of infinitessimals, when guided or determined by functions, must approach rational numbers. The list goes on. How terrifying, I thought. How can we enjoy life when it's like this? Should we simply smile at it, and take pleasure in its absurdity - the absurdity of having a vague sense of control that keeps getting washed away by different forms of evidence?
 germanicus2 · Thu Nov 29, 2007 @ 03:54am · 0 Comments |
