Teaspoon of Chaos

Control is something we don’t like to admit we lack. Even now, as I type these words, I find myself automatically trying to sort out my ideas, to make sense of whatever it is I’m trying to express. Words have a power over me that I can never get my hands around. Order in the face of chaos, light in the face of ignorance, purpose in a world that does not know or care who we are. We want to believe we can explain it all, that somewhere out there lies the truth of why we are, where we come from, where we’re headed. Like with a math problem, we seek to solve the puzzles and unveil reality from the shroud of myth, to banish the subjective and reap the answers we hope will give us a reason to fight on, in the daily battles that constitute our hyped lives.

We want to believe we mean something, that what we’ve been doing for the last three thousand years of social and evolutionary history has had an impact on the world we see around us. It has, undeniably, at least as far as we can see, but that is precisely the point – to what extent can we claim to perceive an absolute reality, if there is one? We’ve walked the earth for less than three million years as Homo sapiens sapiens, and yet we put almost religious faith in what little we have seen and heard and smelt and felt in our petty existence. Science tells us the earth is millions of years old, that humanity is but a stitch in the fabric of time, but we are still ready to think that our limited perception can perceive, or has a chance of perceiving, the universe and its remarkable laws in the fullest sense, in a future that is conveniently placed at the other end of an infinitely long path of progression.

They say that we will have peace, and empathy, and harmony, “in the long run”, but what length of time could possibly encapsulate the transformation of a species, even one as ambitious as a hairless bipedal ape with the extraordinary ability to sense and question its own existence, into something more than what evolution has proven itself capable of? We know deep inside that such a time period is a myth, that ultimately nature wires its creations to wither and die, that in a larger scheme of things no species must be allowed to dominate indefinitely over all others, that the day will come when we shall be little more than bones and dust and memories woven into the fabric of reality – and yet we continue to delude ourselves that our lives are important, that our dreams and our aspirations and our morals and our knowledge matter at all. In the last two hundred years rationality has come to become a religion in itself, the worship of power; what we do not realise, as we dissect nature into ever smaller pieces, is that it is a religion fated to destroy itself. As we discover new laws, make newer connections, we walk steadily towards the realisation that a time will come when life itself ceases to have meaning for us, because we cannot explain it, no matter how much we learn.

We may know where life sprung from, we may know exactly how powerful it is, we may even know where it is heading, but we will never know why it existed in the first place. Why does a coin fall to the ground when you drop it? Gravity, of course! And you may go on to explain exactly how gravity affects matter and energy, at the atomic level if you will. But then I ask you again: why doesn’t it fly upwards when you let go of it? Assume a reality in which gravity was inverted, in which a dropped coin would fly back towards your palm rather than away from it. Would we find that absurd, or would we try to explain it? Explain it, of course, and document elaborate theses on how this anti-gravity works. Could we explain why gravity didn’t exist?

Ultimately it boils down to this. We can discover the laws of the universe, but we cannot change them. Nor can we explain why they exist the way they are, or why they aren’t their exact opposites. When you begin to question the validity of a parameter in a model, when you begin to question the validity of having parameters at all, you realise how bound to your perceptions of reality you are, how desperately you try to explain your sensations by attributing them to external factors.

What is this world, to you? You sense objects, and life, and emotions, and you try to label them in nice little jars so you can lock them up in your cupboard for you to peruse at your convenience, but the fact is, the world does not exist without you. Without you, this world would mean nothing. There would be no continuation of life or death. Concepts, cycles, paradigms – the very fabric of reality would tear itself to shreds if you failed to perceive it. A blind man does not miss the things he never sees. He may yearn to see them, as he has heard and smelt and tasted them, but sight means literally nothing to him. Imagine someone with no senses at all, someone born with absolutely nothing – no sense of self, no perception of the outer world, no understanding of the world he exists in. In fact, to him, he himself does not exist at all.

If I didn’t see the car when it hit me at eighty kilometers an hour, it didn’t exist. If I missed the eight-thirty Kallakurichi bus because I was busy relishing a plate of porottas, the bus never existed. If I truly imagined that the world was actually a place with no life in it, it would become so. Personal delusion, then, does not exist. There is no “absolute reality”. There is no “rest of the world”. There is just me, or you – the pronoun doesn’t matter, really – and what we choose to perceive. When we hear that selfishness is wired into the way we are, and that individual selfishness coupled with perfect knowledge is the route to paradise, it means nothing unless we believe it. Perfect knowledge does not exist, not even theoretically, from a rational point of view.

What, then, is our place in this Orwellian dystopia we call our world? Why do anything at all, when we know that whatever we choose to believe defines reality, when we realise that objectivity is a slave of subjectivity, the very “myth” it seeks to dispel? When I realise that the world means nothing after I die, why on earth should I try to be a good person, to live harmoniously and sustainably? When there is no meaning to anything, why exist at all? An existential crisis is all we can achieve by these questions, you think.

But that is not true. When you really understand the meaninglessness of reality, when you acknowledge that it’s all just in your head, that there is no “larger picture”, it may initially distress you, but in the end it empowers you. I seek pleasure and reinforcement, and thus I choose to believe I exist, that what I do and say and feel does matter. Truth is a lump of clay; it is ours to shape, each of us. Our perceptions are all that matter – so the way forward is to enrich those perceptions. To live in the moment, without fear or hatred of the reality we might find. In the reality I have defined for myself, the reality in which I type these reflections, morality is something that matters. Morality, and justice, and equality. I do not know why I have chosen to perceive these things. Perhaps one day I will perceive a reality in which extinction is the only goal. But in this reality, I choose to believe in rationality, and in an absolute truth.

I acknowledge the ultimate futility of existence, and yet I simultaneously choose to believe it has meaning, because by definition, reality shapes itself according to me. I know and accept that the world may have been created last Thursday, but I also choose to believe that Occam’s razor must hold true in order to explain anything that I perceive. Truth, delusion – science, faith – rationality, ignorance – all the same thing. I believe what I do not because I think it leans towards an absolute truth, but because I want to. Life, death; existence, nonexistence; knowledge, belief. They have meaning, in the end. Not because they are objective, but because I want them to. In the same way, my values, decisions, thoughts, aspirations – they do mean something.

Something only I can know.