Some fine thoughts about growing up by Harl over at Canthook. (Also, he has a pin-up picture of the recently departed Betty Page; something that’s always welcome in my book.)
I’m not going to make any real sense of them here or now (not sure I could), but I have some thoughts kicking around in my head about choices as we grow up; alternate potential history paths; and the telescoping of our range of potential options as we choose and age. Harl’s post touches on some of that. “As we age, we make choices. We close doors. We eliminate options. It’s called growing up[.]”
I haven’t been thinking about it in a normative sense, really. That is to say, I haven’t been depressed about my choices — in fact, I think I’ve made some good choices in my life that have really done some good things for me — but, rather, I have been watching my kids grow and think about how wide open it all is when we are born. Then we and those around us make choices every step of the way, as we must, and those potential realities become narrower. But, they also become more likely. Initially, the slightest breeze can blow you to one course or another. Later on, it probably takes a gale force wind to knock you off course.
With these sorts of thoughts bouncing around, I read Neal Stephenson’s latest story, “Anathem.” One of the notions considered in the story — and any butchery of this concept should be attributed to my lack of understanding, not the book — is that each potential choice or result where more than one was possible results in a new cosmos where each choice materialized. Our understanding of quantum physics, and the many worlds interpretation, apparently suggests that this is more than just “what if” fantasy.
One interesting (to me) thing that comes out of this sort of thinking is that, even if there is a God, there are certain principles that even He probably could not get around while creating a world — for example that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line or that the pythagorean theorem is going to govern the relative lengths of the legs of a right triangle. In other words, some things are going to be “universal” through all possible worlds.
Like I said, these things are sort of a mish-mash of the kinds of things bouncing around in my head; probably showing how untidy my mind is more than enlightening anyone about anything in particular. But, Harl’s post prompted me into riff mode.
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