There’s a reason why The Inferno is the only part of
Dante’s Divine Comedy that’s widely read outside of a hard core of
Italian literature and history enthusiasts. The endless torment of Hell
provides endless opportunities for drama and pathos. Eternal suffering is easy
to imagine. The beatific vision, on the other hand, boggles the mind.
I thought about this as I watched the finale of The Good
Place recently. It’s trivially simple to imagine what the Bad Place might
be like. Imagine a menu of the worst things, and then imagine being served
something from that menu each day for eternity. Easy. The script writes itself.
Now imagine what the Good Place should be. Paradise would be free of problems,
give you all the time you desire with the ones you love, and offer all the
goods and fruits of life. And then what? Is it possible to imagine being
satisfied with that for eternity?
Whether it’s possible or not, the writers of the show made
an effort (I assume) and left the writers’ room empty-handed. The solution was
to offer a way out of the place everyone’s trying to get to. The only cure they
could think of for the grind of existence was to stop existing.
Are you familiar with the concept of a Boltzmann Brain? I’m
not a physicist, but I think I understand enough of the relevant physics
involved, and it goes something like this. Suppose the universe doesn’t
contract upon itself to a finite end or rip itself apart from dark energy or
inflation in a future epoch. If the fate of the universe is flat, eventually it
will run out of fuel, the black holes will consume most matter, and eventually
even they will evaporate. This is what heat death looks like. But in this
corpse of a universe there will still be a soup of virtual particles flashing
in and out of existence in the quantum fabric of space. Their fluctuations are
governed by statistical mechanics and nearly always cancel each other out
without a trace on the macroscopic scale. But in a heat dead universe there’s
plenty of time. Eventually, many googols of years from now, enough fluctuations
might just happen in just the right way for a brain to pop into existence,
believe itself alive for an instant, and decay back to the vacuum.
The point isn’t to examine the question of whether Boltzmann
Brains really exist or not. Most experts agree that they don’t, but that
conclusion is driven more by aesthetics than by math (a dodgy proposition in
the sphere of cosmology). I bring this up to ask what existence would be like
for a Boltzmann Brain. Very likely it would be a Lovecraftian horror. Out of
nothing an intact mind appears for a moment, is subjected to an insane
cacophony of random experience and just like that ceases to exist. To say the least,
one can imagine a better way to live.
Fortunately our lives have more meaning, seem more real, and
are less of a freak show than that bit of mystery science theater. It’s useful
to consider, though, what is it that makes the reality of human existence as we
understand it less pitiable than the fate of the Boltzmann Brain. Terrible
things may happen in our lives, but living a human life in itself isn’t a
terrifying thing. That’s the assumption anyway.
It made me wonder, though, thinking over The Good Place
and The Divine Comedy, if that assumption might not be as flawless as we
think. If it’s so easy to understand eternal torment but eternal paradise is
unimaginable, what does that say about what we are?
It’s useful to look at the question from the standpoint of
evolution. Since the beginning of life on Earth all living things have been
governed by a set of basic rules and regulations that picked winners to amplify
and losers to scrap each relentless cycle through the generations. Everything
that helped a creature find food and a comfortable environment, escape
predators and disease, and find a mate and raise successful offspring got
passed on. Everything else was either taken along for the ride or jettisoned.
Not much gets to ride for free in the indifferent slipstream of biology.
Whatever else might have been going on in shaping what
humans are and what we mean in the broader sense of the universe, that’s the
nuts and bolts of how it happened. Biologically speaking we aren’t made to be
happy. We’re made to grow, to hunt, to eat, to fuck, to help our children do
the same. It’s important to be happy enough that hurling yourself off a
conveniently-located cliff doesn’t seem appealing, but any happiness beyond
that is unnecessary. If your goal is to find bliss you’ll find that your DNA
disagrees. You were born to fail at this task.
I’m not saying anything new in the scheme of things. I think
this line of reasoning has much in common with Buddha’s thoughts regarding
human suffering and the Christian tradition’s teaching that the things of this
world are not capable of bringing complete fulfilment. I’d never put it
together quite like this before, though, and I found the musings oddly
liberating.
When the inevitable problems of life rise my first feeling
is often frustration. “If I could only solve each of these problems,” I think
to myself, “then happiness should follow naturally.” Except that’s not how it
works. It was never supposed to work that way. The problems I face, while they
often do call for and need a solution, are not what stands between me and
happiness. The way my brain is fundamentally built puts it in the way.
This is something deeper than realizing that accumulating
money or fame or material goods does not lead to happiness. I don’t think I
need any particular disillusionment from those ideas. Even the truly wholesome
things in life don’t in themselves pave a road to paradise. They’re still worth
pursuing and desiring, but pursuit and desire are not enough.
Like most things I write this is a half-baked, half-finished
piece of “wisdom” (such as it is). What else is needed to get to that “enough?”
I’m not sure exactly. Acknowledging the circuitry built in to bypass happiness seems
like a good place to start. I’ve been interested in mindfulness, meditation,
and the simple observation of nature and music for some time. That seems like a
decent place to cultivate a sense of gratitude for this life, as difficult as
it often is. And gratitude seems like a good enough place to start toward
bliss.
As far as the actual solution to paradise goes, it’s
entirely possible the whole process is an exercise in not applicable. One of my bosses once said, when his daughter asked what he
thought happens when we die, “Well, I think it’s kind of like turning off a
car. Okay, you’re done.”
Assuming there’s more to existence to either cleanse
humanity of this absurd life or to amplify its absurdity, and assuming the
religions that teach and preach of Heaven are describing something that’s
really there, I imagine the solution is something like this. I can’t conceive
of anything that could make me satisfied for eternity, with all the moments of
my life so far approaching zero as time elapsed approaches infinity. But I can imagine
there always being something that would make me interested in seeing the next
day. We were built for the present moment, not eternity. Best to focus on that,
then.
