suffering

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No one is to blame

Well, as often happens on the day immediately following a Monday, it is now Tuesday.  Congratulations.

I don’t know why I wrote “congratulations” there.  I felt as if I were saying that the fact that Tuesday has arrived was some manner of accomplishment and not merely the universe continuing to do what it does and work through its laws as always.

Maybe the thought was to congratulate those of you who consider it a positive thing to live another day for succeeding at doing so.  Maybe it’s a supportive statement to those who really don’t want to go on, but who continue to endure because they don’t want to bring pain to their loved ones.  Making it through another day for a person in that situation is no joke, and those people should be recognized.

It would be nice if they could be recognized in a non-judgmental way by those loved ones for whom the people in question endure.  Not that I expect that the loved ones of the suffering have any better calibration than the people who love them.  Nothing finite is without imperfections (and I’m agnostic about the situation with infinite things, but I have my doubts).

So, it is hard for a person with depression to endure, even when they’re doing it for their family and friends and are suffering because of it, and those depressed people are worthy of sympathy and non-judgmental support from their loved ones and the world in general.  But the people around them are worthy of sympathy, too, and should not be regarded judgmentally for not being able to recognize or even help their loved ones’ suffering.

Here’s where we come to the concept of blame, and how utterly unjustified it is, in every single case.  And to be clear, I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t hold people responsible for their actions in the sense that they are the proximate causes of those actions, and their behavior can be adjusted and improved.  But they are not the ultimate cause‒not of what they are, not of their strengths and weaknesses, not of their limits and their experiences and their sensory acuities and their social skills 

If you have car trouble and your cousin, with whom you are hanging out, doesn’t know the first thing about cars‒doesn’t own one, doesn’t drive, never has‒you may well be disappointed that this cousin can’t help you and doesn’t even recognize that there is a problem until and unless your car completely breaks down.  But you don’t get self-righteously angry at your cousin for that lack of knowledge and skill‒not if you’re even remotely reasonable.  You don’t fully understand what’s wrong with your car, yourself, and you certainly don’t know how to fix it.  And it’s your car.  How can you expect others to be both able and willing to fix your car for you?  They have their own vehicular maintenance issues.

I’m pushing the metaphor, I know.  But I think it’s a good one.  We can all, of course, try to be there for those we love, and to be worthy of having others be there for us, and sometimes that’ll work out and sometimes it won’t.  It can be quite natural to feel resentful and wounded by the people who fail to see your suffering, even though they care about you and are important to you.  But, as Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  So cut other people slack; and cut yourself some if you can, too.

You didn’t build the universe, or the world, or your nation, or your community.  Neither did anyone else, living or dead.  These things just happened, rarely with any kind of coherent, before-the-fact plan of any kind.  And on the rare occasion when people did try to plan things, those plans essentially always went aglee‒the stricter and more regimented and more dogmatic the plan, the greater the apparent tendency to veer wildly astray, as though there were some manner of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that applies at the scale of societies.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled and self-assembling system, and like frost on a window, different parts of it carry different orientations and patterns that are not the product of any of the individual constituent water molecules.  The molecules can only line up in the crystal where there is a spot and only in particular orientations, based entirely upon where it is in the system and what the surrounding dynamics are‒and what came before.

This may be the case for the entire universe, as well.  The underlying quantum fields may just all “crystallize” out in particular ways that are highly stochastic and ultimately local, with different kinds of complexity in different places.

Anyway, I’m veering off topic.  The point is, there’s no call for and no use in blaming people for not knowing about your suffering and how they might have done differently and it might have helped you.  And don’t blame yourself, either‒unless you invented the universe.  If you did, well, you’ got some ‘splaining to do.

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Most people are dead, and it will probably always be that way

I sometimes think about historically based films in which tragedies happen and deaths occur.  I know they’re highly fictionalized, but think of Braveheart and of Gladiator* and movies of that sort, where the loss of loved ones makes viewers sad but drives the protagonist to “great” deeds that change the course of local history‒or, well, that make the course of local history.  After all, one only knows history after it happens, and once it’s happened, one cannot change it.  One can be mistaken about it, one can misrecord it, one can lie about it, but one cannot actually change it.

Even if it were possible to time travel, going into the past to alter something, it wouldn’t change the history from which you came‒as even the Marvel movies have pointed out, you’d just have created a new future, a new history, local to you.  It wouldn’t change your previous one‒that would be paradoxical.

Yes, Back to the Future is bullshit.  This really shouldn’t surprise you.  It’s still a fun movie.

Anyway, that’s beside the point I planned to make.  I think of tragic deaths in historical dramas that we see and about which we feel heartbroken, or even about real historical horrors‒human made, like the vast slaughters of Genghis Khan’s hordes or natural, like earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis and the like‒and about all the deaths involved, and sometimes I think:  “They would all be dead now, anyway, no matter what.”

Not one single person who was born before 1900 is alive today, as far as I know.  If there is one, that human is an all-time record holder in longevity, and is unlikely to live much longer.  And I would probably bet my own life** on there being no one alive who was born before 1850.  Indeed, the majority of humans who have ever lived are dead.  It’s not as big a majority as it might be, given how long humanity has existed, but that’s only because of recent exponential population growth.

In principle, of course, with a fast enough exponential population growth, it would be possible for the majority of humans to be presently alive, even with current lifespans.  But that’s not sustainable in the real universe.  For it to be sustainable in the long run, eventually humans would have to expand their empire over matter and space at faster than the speed of light, and reach far beyond the cosmic horizon, which is impossible in principle, as far as we know.

I say “eventually”, but don’t let that mislead you.  It would happen with surprising speed.  There’s a well known fact that, given a typical doubling/generation time of about 20 minutes, and assuming enough resources, a single bacterium could multiply to a volume greater than that of the visible universe within a month.  I’ll try to check my math on that when I get to sit down with a pen and paper***, but whether the specific time of a month is not quite right, it’s in the right ballpark.

This is the sort of doubling that is thought to have happened‒at an even faster rate, of course‒during the “inflationary” stage of the universe, if inflation happened.  Of course, in a sense, if “dark energy” is really the cosmological constant, then we are still undergoing inflation even now, just with a slower doubling time.  That doesn’t help is with our exponentially growing human population, though; spacetime itself can expand at, functionally, faster than the speed of light****, but nothing travels through spacetime faster than light.

Anyway, we’re already slowing down our population growth rate, which is good, since Malthusian growth tends to be unpleasant for almost everyone.  Therefore, as time goes by, the fraction of all humans who are dead will probably more and more overtake the fraction who are living.  And all early deaths are, in hindsight, not too terribly early.

This is one reason I get slightly irritated by people who talk of “saving lives” or characterizing a person’s death, per se, as a tragedy.  If every death is a tragedy, then the anti-natalists are right, and each new life should be avoided.  But, of course, it’s not that death in and of itself is a tragedy‒or if it is, it’s an inevitable one that’s going to happen to us all, sooner rather than later.  Even a being that lived for thousands or billions or googols or googolplexes of years would come no closer to living eternally than does a mayfly.  This is a mathematical fact.

It’s suffering that is the tragedy, not death.  Death can be a decent shorthand, in certain circumstances, because‒as Carl Sagan pointed out‒if one is dead, there is very little one can do to be happy.  Then again, if one is dead, there is also very little that can happen to make one disappointed or sad or in pain or afraid.  And since these things are more common and sustainable, or at least more reliable, than joy is, life itself, as a shorthand, is at least as good an indicator of suffering as death is of loss of possible joy.

It’s possible, I think, to live without joy‒meaning that it can happen, not that it’s a state one can or should seek.  But I don’t know that it’s possible for any true living things, or at least any living things with any equivalent of a nervous system, to exist without suffering.

So, perhaps Dumbledore’s post-mortem***** admonition to Harry Potter could be truncated to “Do not pity the dead, Harry.  Pity the living.”  Full stop.

*Which should have been the title of the sequel to Jaws.

**That’s maybe not as impressive as it might seem, since much of the time I hate my life and myself.  But it’s the only life I have with which to bet.

***With a typical length of 1 micrometer (10-6 meters) and a doubling time of approximately 20 minutes (leading to 72 doublings a day), after only one day, a colony of bacteria would be roughly 4700 cubic meters in size, a cube more than 16 meters (just over 50 feet) on a side.  After 2 days, its volume would be about 2 x 1026 cubic meters, or a cube 280,000 kilometers long on a side.  That’s nearly the distance from the Earth to the Moon.  After the 2160 doublings involved in a month of doubling, that would yield a volume of 2 x 10632 cubic meters, or with a side length of about 5 x 10210 meters.  A light year is 10 trillion kilometers, or 10 quadrillion meters, which is “only” 1015 meters.  So that’s a cube with a side length of 5 x 10195 light years‒waaaaaay more than a googol light-years.  Indeed, if you subtracted a googol from that number, it would not change it to any degree measurable by any means known to humans (5 x 10195 minus 1 x 10100 is still, basically, 5 x 10195).  The visible universe is only about 92 billion light-years across, yielding a sphere with a volume of “only” 4 x 1080 cubic meters.  It’s not even close to the order of magnitude of a volume of 2 x 10632 cubic meters!  My estimate was far short of the mark.  But that only strengthens my point, doesn’t it?

****It doesn’t actually do so locally‒I suspect that is also impossible, since it would defy the speed of local causality.  It’s only the summation of all the local doublings spread across the entirety of space that can make distant points separate at faster than the speed of light.  Then again, can “traditional” inflation cause any kind of local superluminal expansion?  I don’t think so.  Could two points in space a Planck length apart separate at a local speed that exceeds c even during inflation?  I doubt it, though I’m not absolutely sure.  Of course, if space is mathematically continuous, then there are no two closest possible points, anyway.  Between any two points on the real number line, there exists an uncountable infinity of other points, no matter how arbitrarily close you make them.

*****Of course, if one can deliver admonitions, one is not really dead in any useful or meaningful sense.  But it’s fiction, and it’s magic within fiction, so leeway can be given.  We have no evidence nor have I encountered any even borderline convincing arguments for any “life after death” in the real world, unless you count things like multiverses or Poincaré recurrences or the like, and I don’t, since they really entail other versions of a person, not a continuity of personhood.