It’s amazing the extent to which human beings attempt to rationalise the random, unpredictable and amoral universe in which we find ourselves. It’s a tendency that’s written all over; our labelling of the days, mapping of the earth, the advance of science, the teachings of religion. Somebody with more schooling in psychology than me could probably say it better, but we essentially we create a mental model, and we then rationalise our experiences with respect to that model.
To put it more simply, we see what we expect to see. A great example of this is in an ad being shown in London cinemas to promote awareness of cyclists; you’re shown a clip of two teams passing basketballs, and you’re asked to count how many times the team dressed in white make a pass. It’s fairly easy to get this right, but then the ad asks you if you spotted the moonwalking bear. Sure enough, when they replay the clip, a person in a bear costume does indeed moonwalk right across the shot.
I think it’s interesting the ways in which our mental models of life constrain us, mould our ways of thinking. The model becomes the framework of our lives. It shapes our subjective experiences of objective events, maps a rough outline of our future. The model makes sense of the past, and makes sense of the future.
I suppose that what’s most painful about a life-changing event, like a break-up or a death, is not the event itself, but the dislocation of the change forced on our mental model.
For a while, the insulating blanket of the rational model is ripped away, and you’re exposed to the full dizzying, vertiginous, inexplicable randomness of life, and the intense pain of living in a world where you truly have freedom of action – where any course of action is possible. The past is no longer what you thought it was, and the future once again becomes a true unknown, and what’s more painful, it’s not just unknown, but unknowable. The idea that what we perceive as reality is just a subjective interpretation is nauseating when you fully realise it – when you feel reality shifting like sand under your feet.
I don’t know about anyone else, but as much as I wouldn’t like to admit it, I find the idea of a truly unknowable future terrifying – the freedom of action is paralysing, not liberating. I guess this is why reading existential literature makes me feel better at these kinds of moments – it’s rather like having a support group for my otherwise rather private insanity.
I’ve recently been reading World War Z by Max Brooks, and it made me realise that science fiction, or speculative fiction, is often really underrated as a literary or cultural art-form. While things like Star Trek or Stargate are more often identified with science fiction today, they’re really not – strictly speaking they’re more like space opera: soap opera, but in space, or cheap action-adventure thrills with a loose sprinkling of pseudo-scientific nonsense sprinkled on top.
A real work of science fiction takes a big, but vaguely plausible, extrapolation into the future, and then from that draws the possible consequences it will have on society, on people’s lives. The aim of the endeavour is to make you sit up and think, explore the boundaries and parameters of human existence. In a way I get a similar feeling from history – people biologically almost identical to ourselves, but living under vastly different conditions. The circuses of the Roman Empire for instance are unthinkable today, but they’re the product of their time, and we can get an insight into true human nature by stripping away the ephemeral layers of our society.
One book I think did this wonderfully is The Light of Other Days by the late great Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, where the central idea is that a technology is invented for creating wormholes between any two points in space, allowing the instant transfer of light from one to the other; it’s quickly realised that the other end of the wormhole can just as easily be in the past, making it possible to see any point in history exactly as it occurred. The book maps the effects this has on judicial trials, politics, personal privacy, etc. and the ramifications the resulting changes in society have on the characters.
I could type forever listing the books that contain similarly wonderful ideas, but it’s already getting late, alas. Some of them include: a branch of mathematics that can predict the behaviour of large human populations, and its application to restoring a fallen civilisation; creating human beings designed from conception to be happy and fulfilled in a particular social role; what if you could immediately fabricate any item, given just any kind of matter as the raw material?
Bonus points if anyone can identify the books those come from.
Meanwhile, on Stargate Atlantis, a heat-sink that’s connected to an alternate universe by a space-time bridge puts the lives of a conference full of scientists in peril when it malfunctions, causing them to be trapped (by also malfunctioning plasma shields) in a facility rapidly cooling to below freezing. Oh, and one of the characters declares her love for another, mere moments after she was legally dead from hypothermia. Oh, and then, they joined the Mile High Club.
Seriously. Not making that up.
Really.
I’ll properly review World War Z in maybe a couple of days when I can do it justice.
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