Clippings

To say it still more explicitly, the view here is that we start out with the sense that our parents are omnipotent and omniscient, we develop certain relations with them—different degrees of mental health in those relationships, depending on the nautre of the relationship between the parents and the child—and then we grow up, and as we do so, we discover that our parents are not perfect. No one is, of course. There is a part of us that is deeply disappointed. There’s a part of us that has been inducted into a dominance hierarchy and doesn’t like the uncertainty of having to deal with things for ourselves. You know, one of the many reasons that are given for the advantages of military life and other powerfully hierarchical societies is that it’s not required to think for oneself very much. There’s something calming about that. And so, according to Freud, we then foist upon the cosmos our own emotional predispositions. You may or may not think that this explains a great deal about religion, but it is something I believe worth considering. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov,

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

“The main character’s from a rich family,” I say, “but he has an affair that goes sour and he gets depressed and runs away from home. While he’s sort of wandering around, this shady character comes up to him and asks him to work in a mine, and he just tags along after him and finds himself working in the Ashio Mine. He’s way down underground, going through all kinds of experiences he never could have imagined. This innocent rich boy finds himself crawling around in the dregs of society. … Those are life-and-death-type experiences he goes through in the mines. Eventually he gets out and goes back to his old life. But nothing in the novel shows he learned anything from these experiences, that his life changed, that he thought deeply now about the meaning of life or started questioning society or anything. You don’t get any sense, either, that he’s matured. … All he does is watch things happen and accept it all. I mean, occasionally he gives his own opinions, but nothing very deep. Instead, he just broods over his love affair. He comes out of the mine about the same as when he went in. He has no sense that it was something he decided to do himself, or that he had a choice. He’s like totally passive. But I think in real life people are like that. It’s not so easy to make choices on your own.”

But inside our heads—at least that’s where I imagine it—there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.

We all die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle. Say that wind blows. It can be a strong, violent wind or a gentle breeze. But eventually every kind of wind dies out and disappears. Wind doesn’t have form. It’s just a movement of air.

It’s been estimated that, because of the exponential growth of the world’s population, between 10 and 20 percent of all the human beings who have ever lived are alive now. If this is so, does this mean that there isn’t enough statistical evidence to conclusively reject the hypothesis of immortality?

First, take a deep breath. Assume Shakespeare’s account is accurate and Julius Caesar gasped “You too, Brutus” before breathing his last. What are the chances you just inhaled a molecule which Caesar exhaled in his dying breath? The surprising answer is that, with probability better than 99 percent, you did just inhale such a molecule.

For those who don’t believe me: I’m assuming that after more than two thousand years the exhaled molecules are uniformly spread about the world and the vast majority are still free in the atmosphere. Given these reasonably valid assumptions, the problem of determining the relevant probability is straightforward. If there are N molecules of air in the world and Caesar exhaled A of them, them the probability that any given molecule you inhale is from Caesar is A/N. The probability that any given molecule you inhale is not from Caesar is thus 1 − A/N. …if you inhale B molecules, the probability that none of them is from Caesar is approximately (1 − A/N)^B. Hence, the probability of the complementary event, of your inhaling at least one of his exhaled molecules, is 1 − (1 − A/N)^B. A, B (each about 1/30th of a mole, or 2.2 × 10²²), and N (about 10⁴⁴ molecules) are such that this probability is more than .99.

Why is it, incidentally, if all the 3,838,380 ways of choosing six numbers out of forty are equally likely, that a lottery ticket with the numbers 2 13 17 20 29 36 is for most people much preferable to one with the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6? This is, I think, a fairly deep question.