Anyway, here it is, and remember its about fate versus free will, and the Forces Beyond Our Control (which should totally be the name of a band, but, anyway.)
Somewhat fittingly, I once again rolled a die to decide from amongst all of the options. There are six of them, so it's practically perfect. So, we can see how my selection of this question to answer was governed by chance.
Of course the vast course of history is balancing on the blade of a knife, with any small change in the past altering the future radically. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost, et cetera, until the battle is lost which leads to the kingdom being lost, all for the want of a nail. Nothing about where we are now was inevitable, unless of course you believe in an entirely deterministic view of the universe, with no room for free will. Everything in this world would just be pool balls striking off of each other at precise angles; there's only one way it can turn out mathematically. Even random number generators don't yield precisely random numbers, and there are patterns behind them, which hackers can and will exploit when trying to hack a system based around random-number passcode security.
I did, however, read a story in a magazine once, I think it was mental_floss magazine, of which I have an issue in front of me right now, where it said that they discovered how to generate truly random numbers using quantum generation, which is not based off of any perceivable patterns. This is where I believe free will comes from, as even mentally we are controlled by chemicals in the brain. I think that the soul of sorts is quantum linked, somehow put inside our brains to give us a will over all of these chemicals. I read elsewhere, in Popular Science magazine I believe, or maybe Discover, that scientists are coming closer than ever to discovering the origins of human consciousness. I do not know what they will find at the core of our wills, but I think it might be this.
It could also be said that I believe in a fate of sorts, outside of that. When I was in Junior High, I was fascinated with chaos theory. Even in entropy, complete chaos, patterns emerge. This shows that the universe has at least some structure to it, encoded into the fabric of reality itself. In connecting this with the rest of the class, this might explain, on a level deeper than just a psychological one, why we are attracted to the monomyth of the archetypal hero's journey. The heroes here are guided by a fate of sorts, but fate is no more fateful than complete entropy. Somehow these patterns always come up.
Sorry about the kind of long response this week. I could write more, but none of it really has to deal directly with the subject of conversation. It's a dear topic to me, and witing the third essay really got my inkwell flowing.That thing I mentioned at the end, the third essay I did for the class, is a five-page essay which maybe I'll post it up here later. It's about thematic similarities between the Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou? which was based off of it.
Anyway. I deal with a lot of the mathematical themes discussed here in a lot of my fiction. Complex, for instance, has the idea of determinism vs. free will at its core. The science of Other//half is based entirely around the way the soul works on a quantum level here. Invictus, an episode of the Artefact, deals with a mathematical genius terrorist, driven by the idea of using free will to create entropy (in order to create quantum parallel realities,) who has our heroes hack a random number generator for him. In Artificial Winter, the cop show I'm developing, there's a villain who was a school teacher who went insane after studying statistical mechanics for too long.
Anyway, outside of those themes, in the essay I talked at some length about how order coming out of chaos creates archetypes for us on levels other than psychological. I do, however, have my own theory about the archetypal hero's journey on a psychological level. I think it goes back to the whole "bricks we use to build our lives" thing from earlier. We choose our own architecture, but our architecture always follows the same basic patterns, for we choose to remember the more significant events rather than the day-to-day minutiae. The hero's quest feels true to us because it speaks to us on how we live our own lives. Other things happened to the hero, of course, beside descending into the underworld and receiving council from a mysterious sage, but these things are among the most salient. We ignore all else, that which does not fit the narrative.
(This also is a major theme in Artificial Winter, which focuses a lot on a lot of not-very-cop stuff that the characters do, illustrating I guess how being all heroic is just another part of life for them. (Another big theme on the show is ultrarealism, showing the reality of being a police officer instead of the fantasy version presented in a lot of shows. Being so true to life really subverts a lot of what we expect from television, actually making the realism DOUBLE AROUND into the surreal. The difference between what we expect from television and real life is discussed heavily, in the least lamp-shady way possible because it's a theme rather than just a one-off thing. But anyway.))
Chaos and complexity theories are crazy. Also, game theory, though that one's slightly out of my depths. Statistics are fun. And you can never have too much logic. But anyway.
All in all, I guess this post was sort of like my fifteenth, where I connect my thoughts to my projects, only combined with just another essay post. Only that essay is actually another one of my projects, and I connect those ones to this one. Rad. I like that. I think I'll do that more sometime.
No comments:
Post a Comment