God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn

Author:Meghan O'Gieblyn [O'Gieblyn, Meghan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

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Over the following days of the conference, I continued to experience echoes, strange coincidences, like the one that led me to the cemetery where Bohr and Kierkegaard were buried. I would read something in one of the books I’d brought with me—a new theory, a thinker whose name I’d never encountered—and then someone at the conference would mention the same name or the same idea only hours later. I could not help feeling that such coincidences were imbued with meaning—signs from the universe—though I knew this was unlikely, particularly when considered from a statistical standpoint. (How many words, images, and names did I encounter in a given day? It never occurred to me to consider all the ones that were not repeated.) Our brains have evolved to detect patterns and attribute significance to events that are entirely random, imagining signal where there is mostly noise. This tendency is probably hypertrophied in writers, who are constantly seeing the world in terms of narrative. In fact, for a while, encountering this very sentiment in books became yet another doubling in my life. “When I am absorbed in writing a novel, reality starts twisting to reflect and inform everything I’ve been thinking about in my work,” Ottessa Moshfegh notes in an essay. Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary in 1933, expressed essentially the same thing: “What an odd coincidence! that real life should provide precisely the situation I am writing about!” The novelist Kate Zambreno claims that when she is working, she often sees the same names and the same books everywhere: “I begin to make connections with everything—I see literature everywhere, a vast referentiality.”

Of course, this “vast referentiality” is in other contexts a sign of madness. In her biography of the mathematician John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar writes that Nash’s “longstanding conviction that the world was rational,” which had led him to study mathematics, slid almost imperceptibly into schizophrenia, wherein he began finding hidden messages in the New York Times and deep cosmic significance in the number of red neckties he spotted on the MIT campus. His desire to find the underlying structure of the world through geometry and mathematics evolved, Nasar observes, “into a caricature of itself, turning into an unshakable belief that everything had meaning, everything had a reason, nothing was random or coincidental.”

It was difficult to avoid attributing the reappearance of these patterns in my life—and the temptation to believe they were signs—to the fact that I’d returned to these cosmological questions I’d long ago vowed to avoid. Revisiting Bostrom’s theory for the presentation had reopened a number of questions I’d never fully resolved, and they came to me, unbidden, during the panels I attended and on my walks to and from the hotel. Since I’d first encountered the simulation hypothesis a decade earlier, the notion that the universe was informational had gained more mainstream clout. I had never found the idea of the informational universe very convincing, but it occurred to me now that Bostrom’s hypothesis could, at least in theory, explain some of the gaps.

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