Revelations
I ... I just finished reading a book, just now, [1:47am, 3/20/09] called "Blood Music" by Greg Bear. I feel like I want to cry ... but not out of sadness that the book is over, or out of happiness that, in a unique twist, everyone lives happily ever after.
My eyes are damp because of the possibilities ... Its hard to explain this to anyone who has never read the book, but imagine you are you, which isn't really hard to do, or is it???
Think of yourself from yesterday, or a week ago, even a year ago.
Now imagine that you could remain who you are today, and also be who you were yesterday, or a year ago.
Sounds philosophical, because we are who we are because of the actions that we have taken and the reactions that occur as a result.
Cause and effect, not that hard so far.
Stretch it further and imagine what you might be if you had changed one thing a day ago, a year ago, and had gone on to be a different person, you but not you and still you.
Semantics, no?
For the final push, imagine that you could simultaneously be who you are now and who you could have been at every turn in your life.
Think how full your life could be, if you could experience all the possibly outcomes that could ever have been.
And simultaneously, you could have interacted with everyone else [and I mean everyone] and all their alternate selves.
The ramifications are staggering to the mind.
And at the end of the story, that's exactly what happens to the characters, to the whole of humanity.
Is this a bad thing? Is this story toting the ramifications of a single collective consciousness, ala the Borg, a hive mind? No, at least that's my opinion.
The story itself revolves around an cell called a noocyte, artificially created in a lab by a man named Virgil Ulam, using part of his own dna to help develop it. This cell is intelligent, all of these noocytes are intelligent. All of them working together to observe and understand everything, the macro and the micro. These cells start out simple, but become complex within the original man who created them. He injects them into his body to save them and his work from being destroyed. They later escape into the world and as a strange biological plague, essentially infect the entire population of North America, Canada to Mexico. These cells don't take over the host bodies as much as they encode all the 'data' that is every person, and then transforms every living person, animal, insect, into more noocytes. The premise of the book being that nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten, and that the noocytes do just that. They break down the hosts into cells, and these cells cluster to form the person, but at the same time, they for every other possible outcome of that person. If this is hard enough to wrap your head around, it gets trickier. The book plays on the hypothesis that the universe does not have any laws, only hypotheses. That by observing the universe and formulating new hypotheses, the universe in turn changes to adjust to what is being observed. But as the hosts of these cells are broken down and turned into more of these cells, they start to observe things on a micro level. This would be fine and all, but when you have billions of trillions of cells, all intelligent, and all focusing their observations on the universe around us, the universe doesn't have the ability to 'adjust' to what is being observed. This in turn leads to the noocytes having to abandon our macro world for the quantum world, the world of the microscopic to the microscopic. But, and this is key, when such a large observational force disappears, the universe acts as like a rubberband, correcting itself in a shockwave effect. Ultimately the planet cannot continue to exist as it is, because of the noocytes. The book ends with the noocytes saving the remaining inhabitants of the planet.
And a thought just occurred to me, for anyone who has ever followed the anime series "Eureka 7", the premise of the series mimics many of the aspects of the book, but with more science fictional twists, plus the planet isn't destroyed in the process.
Again my damp eyes though, at the thought that I am who I am because of all the choices I've made in my life, and that I, like many others, am left with never truly knowing how my life might have been different if I had done even one thing differently. Our lives are infinitesimally small and fleeting; we believe that this is the only one we are given. I don't think I would ever want to live a different life than the one I know now, but I do wish that I could sit down with other me's and share stories of how our lives have been shaped by different causes and effects. I would welcome the chance to meet a me who decided to be a doctor, or who had been closer to my father than I have been my whole life, a me who chose to go somewhere other than UW Oshkosh, or who had been an athlete.
But would I fear losing me, my identity, in a sea of other me's, and that there is the rub, the heart of the struggle of one of the protagonists in the book, introduced half way through.
On a lucid side note, have you ever felt stagnant, like the world around you is changing, but you aren't changing with it. This is another insight examined in the book, that a system unchanged reaches entropy and cannot survive. I've felt this way for a long while now. I've lived in Oshkosh for 3 1/2 years.
I can feel a change coming. I wish I knew enough not to be worried about it.
My eyes are damp because of the possibilities ... Its hard to explain this to anyone who has never read the book, but imagine you are you, which isn't really hard to do, or is it???
Think of yourself from yesterday, or a week ago, even a year ago.
Now imagine that you could remain who you are today, and also be who you were yesterday, or a year ago.
Sounds philosophical, because we are who we are because of the actions that we have taken and the reactions that occur as a result.
Cause and effect, not that hard so far.
Stretch it further and imagine what you might be if you had changed one thing a day ago, a year ago, and had gone on to be a different person, you but not you and still you.
Semantics, no?
For the final push, imagine that you could simultaneously be who you are now and who you could have been at every turn in your life.
Think how full your life could be, if you could experience all the possibly outcomes that could ever have been.
And simultaneously, you could have interacted with everyone else [and I mean everyone] and all their alternate selves.
The ramifications are staggering to the mind.
And at the end of the story, that's exactly what happens to the characters, to the whole of humanity.
Is this a bad thing? Is this story toting the ramifications of a single collective consciousness, ala the Borg, a hive mind? No, at least that's my opinion.
The story itself revolves around an cell called a noocyte, artificially created in a lab by a man named Virgil Ulam, using part of his own dna to help develop it. This cell is intelligent, all of these noocytes are intelligent. All of them working together to observe and understand everything, the macro and the micro. These cells start out simple, but become complex within the original man who created them. He injects them into his body to save them and his work from being destroyed. They later escape into the world and as a strange biological plague, essentially infect the entire population of North America, Canada to Mexico. These cells don't take over the host bodies as much as they encode all the 'data' that is every person, and then transforms every living person, animal, insect, into more noocytes. The premise of the book being that nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten, and that the noocytes do just that. They break down the hosts into cells, and these cells cluster to form the person, but at the same time, they for every other possible outcome of that person. If this is hard enough to wrap your head around, it gets trickier. The book plays on the hypothesis that the universe does not have any laws, only hypotheses. That by observing the universe and formulating new hypotheses, the universe in turn changes to adjust to what is being observed. But as the hosts of these cells are broken down and turned into more of these cells, they start to observe things on a micro level. This would be fine and all, but when you have billions of trillions of cells, all intelligent, and all focusing their observations on the universe around us, the universe doesn't have the ability to 'adjust' to what is being observed. This in turn leads to the noocytes having to abandon our macro world for the quantum world, the world of the microscopic to the microscopic. But, and this is key, when such a large observational force disappears, the universe acts as like a rubberband, correcting itself in a shockwave effect. Ultimately the planet cannot continue to exist as it is, because of the noocytes. The book ends with the noocytes saving the remaining inhabitants of the planet.
And a thought just occurred to me, for anyone who has ever followed the anime series "Eureka 7", the premise of the series mimics many of the aspects of the book, but with more science fictional twists, plus the planet isn't destroyed in the process.
Again my damp eyes though, at the thought that I am who I am because of all the choices I've made in my life, and that I, like many others, am left with never truly knowing how my life might have been different if I had done even one thing differently. Our lives are infinitesimally small and fleeting; we believe that this is the only one we are given. I don't think I would ever want to live a different life than the one I know now, but I do wish that I could sit down with other me's and share stories of how our lives have been shaped by different causes and effects. I would welcome the chance to meet a me who decided to be a doctor, or who had been closer to my father than I have been my whole life, a me who chose to go somewhere other than UW Oshkosh, or who had been an athlete.
But would I fear losing me, my identity, in a sea of other me's, and that there is the rub, the heart of the struggle of one of the protagonists in the book, introduced half way through.
On a lucid side note, have you ever felt stagnant, like the world around you is changing, but you aren't changing with it. This is another insight examined in the book, that a system unchanged reaches entropy and cannot survive. I've felt this way for a long while now. I've lived in Oshkosh for 3 1/2 years.
I can feel a change coming. I wish I knew enough not to be worried about it.