R-247 Life Perspective From Old Film

Today a bit of perspective brought to you by YouTube, believe it or not.

Corpse Parade, New York, 1901

YouTube keeps coming up with “50 Pictures From The 1800s You Won’t Believe!” type presentations, in which they run through a batch of 1860-ish thru 1920-ish black and white pictures. Occasionally they have an old film. Sometimes they’re colorized and frame-corrected so they look sort-of modern.

And they’re people – portraits, family pictures, combat photos, street pictures, funerals, parades, dead folk, curious kids trying to look into the lens, masters, slaves, people who lived to 100, people who died practically at birth – you name it, and someone playing around with the new technology of photography made pictures of it.

The most striking to me are the street scenes. Crowds of people everywhere, hundreds or thousands, and their horses and carts and factories and their ridiculously bustled women and oddly ragged-looking men picking their way through the horseshit to cross streets, or on beaches, or at conventions, or strutting for the camera – sometimes an entire business-district-full of them, walking down the streets and being self-conscious or annoyed at the photographer. And…

Every single living creature in those pictures, notably the humans, are dead. Most of them long since, in fact. There is literally not a single one left in existence anywhere on Earth who could sit in my living room and watch that 1890s film clip from London and say, “Oh, yeah, I remember that. That’s me and old man Haannsson right there!”

Those vast fields of people in their thousands on the screen without exception are nothing but fading notes in bad handwriting in a genealogical research project and a few crumbling, near-unreadable monuments.

None of them got out alive. Do I need to say it? None of us will either.

And every single one of those bustling ladies, mustachioed gentlemen, factory workers, street kids, lorry drivers, soldiers – EVERY one – thought that their lives were important and that they should “make something” of themselves or do something important, or be remembered forever, or to earn eternal favor, or come back in some less mud-splattered form.

All of them, in short, thought the universe revolved around them, and bent their wills to that purpose, to “make it worthwhile”. And in the end they’re just shadows on my monitor, probably their most “important” contribution in their life’s work to “amount to something” or live forever being an accidental intersection with some now-long-gone guy with a barely functional camera.

And these are a bare fragment of the millions of people from only 100–150 years ago who are now about as individually identifiable as ants. Most never had a photo-enthusiast taking a random picture of them walking down the street to later populate my magic latern, nor did many leave any slightest clue where their unmarked graves were paved over by their successors.

So, how much of a “dent on the universe” (as Steve Jobs said) will any of us have made in 500 years, much less a thousand? A million? A million years in our past we were 4' tall pre-human savanna chimps. It’ll be pretty astonishing if anything we consider vaguely human will exist in a million years, never mind venerate our engraved granite slabs explaining what historical studs we were.

Heh. A good measure of my concern is the amount of time I spend to that end lately:

Zero, or close to it.

I’m trying to just live my life and enjoy it where I can and avoid or at least tolerate the bad parts where I must. Because in a very real sense – maybe this afternoon, maybe in 50 years, but soon – I’ll be gone, the bare flicker of my life nothing but a rapidly fading historical fluke that was here and gone so quickly it practically never existed at all.

One of the parts of all this that facinates me is how much that prospect terrifies people.

They build entire religions around denying it and convincing themselves they’re going to live forever, or come back, or float around fucking with the living. They try to to make their mark, be somebody and live under the terrible gun of believing that they may not be “good enough” to earn their place in eternity or history.

Their unhappy lives are spent pissing away their miserly allotment of time toward a non-existent goal that is always in their “future”, never in their present.

It has somehow escaped their notice that the entire history of the human race, much less their miniscule little lives, will be less than an unnoticed, near-invisible micro-second swirl miles deep in the crushing dark of the vast ocean of space-time.

I suspect that the actual terror that roots this self-delusion is the yawning abyss of nihilism which suddenly presents itself when the illusions they’ve constructed to protect their sense of self as an important “thing” fall apart.

I don’t get it. For myself, I cannot begin to tell you what an enormous relief it was, how much of a burden went away, the day I discovered that I don’t have to spend my life living and preparing for a future that I’ll never see and, that by any measure that matters, doesn’t exist. All I have to do, if I’m inclined to do so, is live my life.

As predicted, I was a nihilist for quite awhile after I discovered all this. After all, nothing matters in the long run, right? But it turns out that things DO matter. People in my life DO matter. Things I do in my life DO matter and bring joy or pain and a sense of value or waste. They, in short, matter TO ME, and I couldn’t make it NOT matter, for all that I knew it “really” didn’t.

Whats a good little nihilist to do?

Simple: A bit of so-called “Poetic Naturalism”.

First, understand that the entire multiverse, past, present, and future can be described as a single wave function using Schroedinger’s equation and that with nearly 100% certainty, the universe consists solely of waves interacting with each other in the spacetime matrix in utterly predictable ways.

Based on that, we can theoretically fully describe a kitchen chair as a complex interaction of waves at this place in spacetime with updates every tick of almost infinitely small chunks of quantum time that results in a new description of the current wave configuration. This is completely accurate at this sub-microscopic level. And utterly useless to us in our macroscopic world.

Or we could move up an “coarse-grain” the description to describe every up and down quark, glueon, electron, and all the forces associated with them of every single particle in the chair, updated with every tick of quantum time, which is absolutely accurate within that domain of description. THAT’S useless to us.

Or we could move up another notch in “coarse-graining” to actual particles made up of the quarks and whatnot, and describe every single particle and atom in the chair, it’s position, it’s momentum, it’s energy state, and it would be absolutely accurate within that doman (coarseness) of description. THAT’S uselss to us.

What is our domain of applicability? We call it the “macroscopic” level. In that domain, we can completely describe it as (wait for it) “CHAIR”. And, if there’s any confusion, “the brown chair in the kitchen”. This is all we need for an accurate description of the thing. 

Note that its “chairness” doesn’t emerge until the macroscopic domain of applicability is reached. What we, in our domain, see, touch, and sit in is a “chair” which is an emergent phenomena of the wave interactions which “actually” make it up. We don’t worry about all that. 

It acts like a chair, looks like a chair, and holds my ass off the floor like a chair is supposed to. So that collection of forces and waves can ACCURATELY be described as a chair, and that description is useful in our macroscopic world.

It goes the other way, too. Expanding out to the infinity of the universe, there is no description which is of any use to us. At that level of coarseness, it doesn’t exist at all. This is NOT a useful description for us.

In our limited macroscopic world, It looks like a chair. It acts like a chair. Ergo, it’s a chair, and the “inaccuracy” of that description in any other domain is of zero importance.

We – our bodies, our brains, our minds, our consciousness – are emergent properties, just like the chair. And, just like the chair, the only description that matters is our macroscopic apprehension of it all.

Or, as physicist Sean Carroll, a founder of Poetic Naturalism says:

“None of these atoms making up you want anything.” But it doesn’t follow that you can’t have wants. “You” are not part of our best theory of atoms either; you are an emergent phenomenon, meaning that you are an element in a higher-level ontology that describes the world at a macroscopic level.

--Sean Carroll, “The Big Picture”

You want a miracle in your life? Try this: I’m learning every day that the fact that I exist at all is a near-zero likelihood event.

After all, it’s very likely that the universe is headed for infinitely-expanding heat death.

If true, this means the universe will have no end, but also means this little blip of suns and stars and galaxies and STUFF we’ve evolved from over the last 17 billion or so years, is nothing but a low-entropy flash at the “beginning” of an infinite universe. In about 10^google years, most of the universe will be, at best, infinitely expanding near-zero-degrees-Kelvin space occupied by nothing but virtual particles popping in and out of existence as quantum expressions of near-zero vacuum energy.

Forever.

At that point no one’s going to give a shit that you dropped the fly ball that lost the Little League championship game when you were a kid.

As Vonnegut would have it:

“Gott mate mutt.”
God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Amen.

--Kurt Vonnegut, “Cat’s Cradle”

I’m gonna be mixed with The Beneficiary and scattered after I’m gone, probably somewhere up in the high deserts of Wyoming. Of course, we’re assuming here that my kids pay any slightest attention to what a powdered corpse wants (they ARE my kids, after all and are roughly as impressed with death as I am). But if by some fluke there’s a monument somewhere, I want that inscribed in bronze on it.

Why the scattering? Why the bronze placard? Does it matter?

Nope. Not in the long run, or at all, really. Except for one thing – it makes me smile right now. And at the end of the day, that DOES seem to matter to this emergent piece of the universe.

The waves, particles, atoms, and forces that “actually” make up all that I am don’t smile. They have no morals, no fantasy life, no dreams. They are neither happy nor sad, nor can they enjoy or contemplate their short existence.

And since they are literally all that I am, it’s easy to believe either that there’s “something else” in here or that “nothing matters.” Both of these are wrong. I am an emergent property of quantum wave mechanics that describe the universe. In this domain of applicability, they are an accurate description of consciousness and its derivatives, and are as real as the chair.

The difference is that I understand how short-lived and rare this emergence is, and that it’s going away soon, and not coming back. It would be a crime (another emergent concept) to not be happy in it as much as I can while it exists.

As I explained to my now-26 year old granddaughter just the other day: “Memento Mori” doesn’t mean “You’re going to die anyway, so do what you want.”

Not at all. It means this: If you were to drop dead this second would you be doing something worthwhile when it happened? If the answer is “No,” then fix it.

But make sure you understand that “something worthwhile” isn’t necessarily (or even usually) working. Idly sitting in the sun, feet propped up, and being content and happy while scratching your dog’s ears is a worthwhile use of your time.

Lucky mud, indeed.

Having A Worthwhile Moment