Ants on Moldy Cheese

About four years ago, my friend Joshua Herman introduced me to the idea that we only consider things that do not work as they should. Take computers for instance. A typical computer user with modest computing needs seldom considers the inner workings of a computer in the absence of some sort of technological bugaboo. In the presence of such a snag, however, such a user suddenly develops an unprecedented interest in memory, networking etc. On the other hand, consider gravity. We know of no reason why gravity should exist, but it operates so flawlessly and consistently that most of us waste relatively little time considering what its nature might be.

This idea isn't a hard and fast rule. My own mother expressed to me how intriguing she finds even technology that always works as it ought. That opens up just one class of exceptions to this idea. Things that consistently work as they should but came into being partly through someone's life. Still, its an idea that I find myself returning to periodically over the years.

In light of my recent experiences, the idea is prominent in my thoughts. The world that our conscious mind sees, interacts with, is the perceived world, not the 'real world'. For all we know, the world is simply a sufficiently competent set of computer generated stimuli. These thoughts are nothing new - anyone who has seen The Matrix has encountered them - but they inform the point I am trying to make. Having my experience altered by these recent cognitive malfunctions, in a sense, from my perspective, it is as if the entire world became broken.

For most of my life, I took for granted that the world worked in a sort of equilibrium. Bureaucracies manage, if somewhat incompetently, to regulate most human activity. The very existence of an economy that can achieve employment well over ninety percent is an astonishing fact that seemed unremarkable when, from my perspective, it had always been. When all of reality went haywire for me, however, I gained a new appreciation for just how precarious our situation on this planet is.

We are ants, crawling around a moldy piece of cheese that is orbiting a fireball in the middle of nowhere at a speed of 3.0x10^4m/s (relative to the fireball). There is nothing more than physics keeping our minds from decaying into thoughtless balls of mulch. Our memories, thoughts, identities, hold on by a thread, and even then, only temporarily. Still, as I recover, I am consistently amazed at how well things that I convinced myself while sick are impossible really do exist. When I became sufficiently weak that I could not take care of myself, I became convinced that no one would. I was unable to conceive of being able to take care of anyone, so it seemed impossible that anyone should be able to take care of me. Miraculously, however, that was not the case. Often, now, I find myself working to reestablish the sorts of faith in the world's workings that will allow me to get on with life. Perhaps I am more religious, in an abstract sense, than I care to admit.