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July 08, 2005

war with the world

I watched War of the Worlds with Chopper, my brother-in-law this afternoon. Afterwards we repaired to a nearby pub for a little repast. Our conversation meandered from somebody's simplistic misinterpretation of quantum physics into a discussion of free will vis a vis man's ability, through self analysis, to make choices which cause him to change.

I asked if, at the point of change, a person's own perception of himself was relevant. After all, if he were on the cusp of a change, he cannot look at the old version and the new version of himself simultaneously. The moment itself must surely be one of essential un-self-consciousness. Those are the moments when we cannot watch ourselves, but instead must simply be.

But Chopper was angling at something a little different, something a little more practical than the theoretical space between the frames, the space between universes, so to speak. Can a man, by conscious observation of his own behavior patterns, make choices such that he gradually becomes a different person?

In this life we move through a virtual soup of choices. The vastly overwhelming majority of choices are insignificant, at least to all appearances. When we set down the salt shaker after dashing salt onto our food, we don't obsess about which side of the plate to set the shaker on, or whether the salt shaker ought to be rotated a few degrees one way or another. We could focus on such things, but we don't.

So much of life is accomplished on autopilot. We have habits which run the show for the most part, and we preside over our set of habits, and interpose our will only when significant matters come up; e.g. I usually drive down fourth street, but my friend needs a ride to work, so today I shall choose to drive down fifth street instead.

And we even have a choice about how often we want to make choices. We opt for stretches of choiceless time; the movie Chopper and I had watched is an example of opting for a two hour stretch of not making choices. But we cold have easily turned the movie watching into a choice-ful experience. For instance, suppose we had decided we would watch roughly half the movie. Once roughly half the movie was over, we'd have started glancing at our watches, and each time we glanced at our watches we'd have made a choice: leave or watch for a few more minutes?

We migrated to the Starbucks nearby to continue the discussion, and on the way, I thought of the horrible events this morning in London. And I realized that it often happens that the flow of current events overtake and dominate our conversations to the point that everything we think of to say is a reaction to the world. It becomes the will of the world vs. our own choice. Never mind if our reactions to the world are vehement and clear-spoken. The world started the conversation, and while we should never tune it out completely, we should not let it be our only conversation either.

Chopper's wife, my sister, called my cell phone to say that Chopper must come home but that I may certainly come over too. But their home is on the opposite side of town, and I have alot of thinking to do, so I chose to decline the invitation. As we walked to our cars, I spoke about the two poles of existence which seem the most unproductive: at the one extreme there is escapism, wherein the will is submerged by distractions like television, movies, games, books and other things. The other pole is frenetic overchoosing, the worried state in which all choices seem equally important, and equally opaque.

And Chopper said, "It's somewhere in the middle." He had been reading, he explained, that the predictability of a pattern grows less as the complexity of the information grows greater. But in very simple patterns, prediction is trivial. "If I were to repeat the same word to you over and over," he said, "it would be very easy for you to predict what I was about to say next." At the other extreme is complete randomness, which is utterly unpredictable.

This universe, and we ourselves are neither completely random, nor are we trivially simple. We and our world are somewhere between the two. And as I contemplated this on my drive home, a Psalm came into my head: "Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies." Suddenly the Psalm became a cryptogram unravelling. A table is simple, predictable, safe. Enemies are complex, volitile, dangerous and difficult to predict. God, in preparing an ordered space for us in the midst of chaos, has deftly wrapped these two diametric forces into a single, paradoxical whole: a universe which is not so simple that we do not have room to make choices, nor so complex that we cannot observe it and make some predictions. He provided paths in which we might cross the blind spots of self change, but at the same time made a world in which we might actually observe ourselves and others in order to make informed choices.

If even the very chaos of our world serves His purpose, is it any wonder that Paul wrote to the saints in Rome, "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."

Posted by joel at July 8, 2005 12:24 AM

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Posted by: uncle jim at July 9, 2005 05:44 PM

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