Are People Made of Books?

So today I got done with classes, went back to my dorm, and realized, crap. It’s 2:30 on a Friday. And the problem with 2:30 on a Friday, I’ve found, is that it’s not really the weekend yet—in the sense that, most people are still in class, and those who aren’t, aren’t doing anything exciting yet. My first act as a bored person at college was to finish my book. (High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, which was pretty good.) After I got done with that, I thought, man, I want to read something else. Now, I have a whole drawer of books I brought with me from home, but somehow I wanted something else. So, because I am the epitome of Cool, I walk to the library.

The library is, without a doubt, the most impressive building on campus. There are bigger ones, yes. There are ones that impact me more directly—I don’t really go to the library except when I’m bored, compared to various other study lounges and you now, where I live and eat and stuff. But, if you walk around campus, there’s one building that clearly pins the whole thing together and has the architecture to pull it off, and that’s Bizzell Memorial Library.

Once I get to the library, I feel kind of stupid. I don’t know what book I want. I’m not really sure whether I want a book, or if I just want to look around. At first, that’s what I do—wander around shelves looking at volumes of demographic data and wondering where I would go to find the fiction-laden shelves that resemble a public library more than an academic one. (I’m in the mood for something fictional.) Eventually, I come upon something entitled the Great Reading Room, which feels far too Harry Potter for my comfort, but next to it is a door off into some room full of shelves and made of concrete. I assume it’s either some crazy back-room type thing, or somewhere I’m not supposed to be. Both of those sound supremely interesting, so I go in.

It’s the crazy back-room thing, with shelves and shelves of books and the hum of dehumidifiers in the background. It’s got its own separate stairwell where I can go down and up this parallel archive, and on the floor below the shelves are even taller. Like the shelves outside, the titles of these tomes tend toward the trying; A Dictionary of Modern Atomic Theory (six volumes), Science and Society, etc. Walking through there, I had a thought which was so striking it, and the train of thought it inspired, gave birth to this blog post. It started with a pretty obvious thought: I could never know all this. Nobody could. Then, it changed, and it became far more introspective.

Everything I will be taught in school has already been written here. That is to say, nearly everything I know is scattered across those volumes. Everything I don’t know is here too. Then I thought, everything I believe has probably been written here as well. Someone else has written about philosophy, someone else doesn’t like the concept of a metaphysical soul. Other people believe in human rights, for much the same reasons I do. This pushed me into an odd sort of crisis—an awareness of my own un-individuality, almost. Do I have original thoughts? Or, worse, have I ever had a thought not somehow already reproduced? And how would I know? What if all I am—and, really, all anyone is—is a compilation of other people’s opinions? Am I just Mill’s ethics, Hofstadter’s ideas on the mind, Camus’s thoughts on the purpose of the universe, Hawking’s creation, Dawkins’s disbelief, Russell’s skepticism, Feynman’s irreverence, poured into a person-shaped mold and popped out? And, of course, that’s still self-flattery, really, as those are great men. (No women? I need to read more female authors.) An even worse thought, then, would be that I’m just a shadow of those things.

You might protest, as I did upon first thinking this, that there are always certain experiences that are mine and mine alone. Nobody else lived my life, after all. To which I answer, perhaps—but then, I have not yet touched on fiction. Every time I talk to a pretty girl, am I really all that different from the thousands of characters in their countless imaginary universes, desperately trying to find love or whatever their authors have deemed they’re desperately trying to find? When I’m in an existentialist sort of mood, am I just Kurtz’s last realization? When indecisive, am I a flicker of Hamlet? When I’m trying to be principled and intellectual, am I just an impression of Picard? (…that last one’s probably true.) Sometimes I have those brief moments where my life feels more like a story than a reality—some situation has gone a way that seems too invented. Maybe it’s because, if the purpose of art is to hold a mirror up to life, then my reflection was crafted long ago.

Of course, two objections presented themselves and ultimately pulled me out of this funk. The first is that, somewhere along the line, someone had to have been original. Newton never walked into a library surrounded by the foundation of classical mechanics and optics. Shakespeare may have heard a story of ambition or madness, but it would be laughable to suggest that Macbeth is nothing but a reassembly of what was in front of him. That offers hope. It offers, actually, a solution to the whole damn paradox, in a sense. I may worry about what it means to have an identity in a world where so much identity has already been crafted, but although I may not be a fully original being, anything I create is mine. Sure, every work is “inspired by” a previous one, but there remains a spark of life in an act of creation or discovery. If I continue with physics, if I end up working in research science, I’ll be building on the foundations laid before me—not just Newton or Aristotle or Einstein, but the people who do the work that will inspire mine. It doesn’t mean I won’t be building.

From there, another train of thought launches. Because, after all, many of the books I read aren’t in the list above. I’m not Kant’s ethics, and I’m not Ayn Rand’s economics, and I’m not C.S. Lewis’s apologetics. But I’ve read small books by Kant, I’ve read essays by and heard sermons on C.S. Lewis, and I’ve read enough Ayn Rand that—man, fuck Ayn Rand. Obviously, I can’t be merely a collection of works poured into a mold. Something kept some of these ideas out. I may exist within a sea of influences—cultural, intellectual, personal—but I still exist, and I show myself in, if nothing else, the process of filtering out those influences like a membrane.

Ultimately, the image I conjured up in head to accommodate this process was chemical in nature. Say you have NaH, sodium hydride, a strong base. You mix it with HCl, hydrochloric acid. (You, uh, should probably dissolve them in water or something first. I should mention that I’m not really up on my chemistry.) You get a new molecule—well a few of them, actually, as you’ll find both hydrogen gas and NaCl—salt. Hopefully everyone can kind of get where I’m going with this. It’s not really important where the ideas and influences come from, the question I’m asking is: How much can a person be modeled as a molecule, built out of constituent atoms that themselves are not intrinsic to their newfound structure? Once I had it in these terms, I was able to realize the flaw in my initial thought process. People aren’t molecules; people are more like the chemical reaction that builds the salt.

Sure, at any moment in time you could take a snapshot and proclaim that this mixture of various atoms in various states of bonding and unbonding was a predictable, derivative result of the initial conditions. You’d be right, as well.
But, again, in this metaphor the interesting thing is not the state of the mixture. It’s the reaction itself, the swapping around, the constant action. In real life, the reaction ends quite quickly, as sodium and chloride want to shack up fast. In real life, though, the reaction isn’t given a chance—or, hopefully it isn’t. There’s no “final state” of a human being until they’re dead. Someone’s always coming over and dumping a vat of ions all over the experiment, stirring it, adding heat, and then flushing it all out and starting over. The resultant process leads to a chaotic, crazy switching of states as a person progresses through all the changes and processes their new environments and assimilates their new potential influences. There will never be some final construct we can hold up and say “This! This is Zach!” If we could—if we point to someone as they die, or whatever—you haven’t found the person, you’ve just found a snapshot. A single rectangle of a Riemann sum. Humans are far more ethereal things than chemicals—they’re a state of change, not an object.

It doesn’t matter, then, whether I’m original or not. It doesn’t matter if I never produce a single thing that wasn’t done elsewhere. You see, whether or not my entire life turns out to be a composite of a thousand other atomic influences, there was always a process behind it. There was, in the end, a uniqueness. Some of it was mine, some of it sprung from the way I viewed the world, the way I built my momentary self from what was around me. Some of it I can’t take credit for at all, because it was just the result of the chemicals someone threw in my vat—a product of life’s lawlessness, rather than any intrinsic quality to me. Yet, somehow I doubt that anyone else managed to reproduce me, precisely. And if I had been so unique, if I had created some brand new molecule down there in my metaphorical vat, would it have mattered? After all, by the time anyone was able to retrieve it and realize what I’d done, I would have been gone. The process that was Zach ultimately matters far more than the results of Zach.

(Incidentally, I didn't realize how far I was going to take that metaphor. Nice going.)

Pale Blue Dots and Stuff

So, uh. It’s been a while, guys. Most prominently, I’ve been moving to college. But today I feel comfortable enough to start blogging again. (Plus, I just met a cool girl who has a blog, and I need to build geek cred, neh?) Much of the following was written in early August, so that’s when I was actually in Florida.

I’ve just been to the Kennedy Space Center, which is an amazing place, and the closest thing to a pilgrimage I’ve ever made, as you could probably guess from my previously stated views on manned spaceflight. Few things make my eyes fill with Carl Sagan-esque tears quite as well as that particular scientific endeavor. Speaking of Dr. Sagan, this post will begin with an address from him:


It’s among the most humbling statements available to humanity. Every time I hear about a war or territorial conflict, the bit about “fractions of a speck” runs through my head. Hearing this affected me to the point that Sagan’s Copernican argument against normal religion has become my favorite—claiming that Earth or humanity occupy a key place in a cosmic struggle is more reasonable when the priests only knew of one planet. Now, however, we know of seven other planets around this star, millions of other stars in our particular clump of stars, and billions of other clumps. With this more modern (“more correct”) view of the cosmos, it becomes less and less tenable to assert that humanity has any privileged place, and it seems ridiculous to maintain that such a great expanse of space, time, and matter exist for our benefit. We are less than grains of sand before this infinity, and yet arrogance remains, arrogance monstrous enough to proclaim that our planet, our star, and our very universe was created solely so that a particular race could, for a few pitiful seconds of history, emerge and offer their worship to a being vast enough to compose this universe. Richard Feynman declared our gods too provincial, laughing at the idea that a personification of a cosmic architect would personally descend to our particular speck—he was right. (As usual. Feynman was always as correct as he was sexy.) In that sort of emptiness, nothing human really counts. If we were to leverage our nuclear might and incinerate this planet, all that would change is that a particular sphere would become a little more radioactive and a little quieter. A person could die the day they were born, a person could die after conquering the world, a person could die after writing dozens of plays and over a hundred sonnets. The universe does not care or notice.

It might be said that the preceding paragraph does not wholly square with a humanist outlook. I will be the first to admit that, if you wanted to start your day with a booster shot to your belief in human dignity, you should not read that. On the other hand, it is hard to argue that it qualifies as untrue—the universe really is that big. Yet I would argue that the classic humanist viewpoint that values humanity, both on the whole and as individuals, and considers both their lives and their quality of life as paramount important ethical considerations can interface well with an existentialist, absurdist viewpoint in which death is inevitable and there can be no hope of evading that truth. (I reread The Myth of Sisyphus on the plane. Great book. Will have to do a Camus post someday.) The trick lies in the placement of value.

You see, I was never religious, even as a child. So, when reading a paragraph about how the universe ultimately doesn’t care about us, my ultimate consideration is that I never expected it to. How could I? Without a belief in an overriding sympathetic intelligence which works essentially the same as my own, I never latched onto any belief in the meaning of life. This consideration brings up an important one: What would it mean for my actions to matter to the cosmos? Would I want that? Would it matter? Adding in a bit of agnosticism: How do I know they don’t? The simple uncertainty undermines the entire exercise. For all the angst about whether the universe cares, it seems we can’t even tell. (I’m still on the “not” side, personally.) After all, the universe seems to be unconscious. The concept of it caring for or about me isn’t really a coherent one.

You might see where I’m going with this now. Only conscious beings care about anything. And, in the strange, self-referential sort of way that seems to lie at the heart of many great conclusions, that loop holds a very important piece of information. The word “matter” is transitive—when someone says “it doesn’t matter”, the question is always “to whom?” A few paragraphs above, it was the universe. But, as we’ve seen, that’s not really a coherent concept within the secular humanist philosophical framework. “Mattering” only matters (to humanists) when the object is an entity capable of understanding and assigning value—when the entity is a conscious being. Importantly, that makes conscious beings unique in the universe. Not to sound chauvinistic, but it means that only a conscious being matters, from our perspective. Mankind would be perfectly justified to destroy a dozen lifeless suns for the sake of saving consciousness. The ability to value is valuable—and rare.

I keep using the word “consciousness” above, rather than “human life” or the like, because I think that that derivation has important ethical implications. First of all, it more or less serves as the basis for humanist ethics. In the sterile void of the universe, we find our own salvation—our own reason to consider ourselves bound together. In another sense, though, I don’t want to be too human with my humanism. If you’ll pardon the oxymoron, I’m talking about other forms of consciousness. Not just aliens—which have pretty awesome philosophical implications—but animals. Most of us eat meat. I eat meat, for example, because I don’t consider the lives of cows, pigs, or other animals as valuable as human lives. Obviously. But why don’t I? This framework offers some understanding—it also hints as to why I don’t feel the same way about higher apes or dolphins. It also opens fascinating avenues for discussion—how do I know that animals aren’t capable of valuing? (Just so you guys know, I grew up on a cattle farm, so it’s not like I’ve only ever experienced meat in the form of prepackaged steaks.) How sure can I be? How much doubt-benefit do I hand out? Honestly, I’m not sure I have as many answers for these as I should. It’s something to think about—and I'm always thankful for those.