I have noticed that my last few posts are the kind that when people read them, they are going to say to themselves, “That Andy is a weird guy”. I figured I’d continue on with this tradition.
1. Highways
I have always wanted to study traffic. I know there is a technical name for this, which I believe is traffic flow or traffic systems. I like thinking metacognitively about traffic. So not just, “I am in this traffic jam” but “Why did this traffic jam occur? How could it be solved?” Here is a fascinating example called a shockwave:
I think studying this flow is fascinating because it makes traffic seem like a living, breathing organism. Maybe it is. There was a story I read in my 6th grade English class that has stuck with me over the years. It was written from the perspective of an alien looking down upon Earth from outer space. He didn’t see any humans. All that he saw were these metal animals with 2 pairs of eyes (2 red, 2 white). He pondered about what organs were inside of these bodies that made them move the way they did. How could he know that a car was only an inanimate frame that held a living object inside?
Maybe the alien isn’t so far off in his analogy. Cars, and the traffic/highway system as a whole, could be a metaphor for the human body. The cars are like individual cells and the highways are like the vast network of capillaries in our body. They move things efficiently and smoothly across the planet, just as in our bodies. So in essence, we are making the planet more efficient. We are turning it into a bigger organism. So maybe all that concrete being slapped down over Mother Earth ain’t such a bad thing after all (more on this in a second).
It is also amazing to think about how little these highways have been around for. They really didn’t spring up until the 1950s. In the timespan of human existence, let alone universal existence, 60 years isn’t even enough time for the brain to signal the eye to blink. Think about how much humans have changed the planet in that time. It’s not just highways. Think of the endless stretches of power lines that you see everywhere. Ever stop to think how crazy it is that nearly 99% of all cities in America probably have these things? And that all of these were not in existence and had to be built at some point? Also think about the secret underground sewers, pipes and ducts that we have beneath our feet. It is like an invisible organism is whirring right below our feet. And again, it is staggering to think about the scale of this infrastructure. I always try to imagine the time before these things were around, then as if seemingly by magic they spring out of the ground.
I’m not saying all this is a bad thing by any means. As a matter of fact, I think there is more collusion between humans and the Earth than most people think. Some people see things like highways as an attack on Mother Earth. They see a concrete road as “unnatural”, whereas trees and rivers are “natural”. Humans are a natural part of the biosphere, not a virus; therefore, anything humans create is implicitly au natural. George Carlin had a comedy routine based around this idea. Although he takes the stance that human beings are a cancer to the planet, he makes a point about natural vs. unnatural. Here is an excerpt below:
“If it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the Earth plus plastic! The Earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth. The Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question, ‘Why are we here?’ ‘Plastic! Assholes.’”
2. Highways, Part 2
Another thing I think about on the highway. This is a thought experiment I have done with myself ever since middle school. Whenever I am out on the highway, I always look at the endless stretches of cars and just marvel. In each of these cars is a human being like me. Their life is equally as complex and deep as mine. I try to imagine all the things I have been through (good and bad) in my life, and I then imagine that this person shares these things too. What is their life like? What have they been through? Then multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of people you see flying by you on the highway. The idea almost suffocates me. My life alone seems so infinite, but when you add in other people’s lives the effect is overwhelming.
3. A memory
When I was younger, there was a specific moment where I told myself, “I am going to remember this moment for the rest of my life”. It was warm outside, probably summer. I was sitting in a doctor’s office in Troy, Michigan with my mom. A heavy rain had just subsided, leaving puddles strewn across the black top parking lot outside the window. I looked through the white blinds covering the window and saw the sun magnificently reflecting off of these puddles. The sun had a fiery gold color to it, causing these puddles to radiate the same exact color. This gold color weaving with the blacktop made for a beautiful sight. “Try and remember this moment forever” I told myself. And ever since I have.
What is weirder is that I can remember the first moment when I remembered this moment. It was months after. I was sitting with my family in an upscale pizza joint called Shield’s Restaurant. The lighting was rather dank. The long benches were covered in a red, cushiony, fake leather. I was about to eat my pizza when I remembered the moment in the doctor’s office. “Oh yeah,” I thought to myself, “I wanted to remember that moment forever. I think I will.” In the process, this moment became stuck in my memory too.
Weird.
4. The creativity argument
In the introduction to “Nature”, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarks:
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? We have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
The answer is that it is impossible. I do not believe true creativity exists. True creativity is an abstract ideal similar to absolute zero or the speed of light: it can be approached but never fully attained. It only makes sense. We cannot help being influenced. Whether it’s conscious or not, our ideas are molded by the minds of others and by our surroundings. As the saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of giants. All the new ideas or inventions we create are just combinations of the ones that have come before us.
Even things that seem like complete deviations are still not perfectly creative. After all, to make a deviation you must have something to deviate from. Minimalism emerged as completely new music genre, but only because it was a reaction to serial music. Without serial music, there would have been nothing for minimalism to react to. As much as they would hate to admit it, the founders of punk rock music built upon the shoulders of prog rock music.
So everything that has led up until this point is a combination of things from the past. In that case, what is at the beginning of this causal line? Let’s take an example. The genre of hip-hop was created using a mash of jazz, disco, and funk music. Jazz music was created using a mash of African drumming, Cuban rhythms, and impressionist classical music. Impressionist classical music came from romantic classical music (it was actually a reaction to this) and various music from all over the world (like Javanese gamelan). So keep tracing this line backwards in time and where do you end up? With the guy who invented music. But how did he invent music? Did he combine speech patterns with the regular rhythm of his heart beat? Or was he inspired to mimic the sounds of nature? If you keep going back from here, I am convinced that you will eventually meet the beginning of time. At this point, there must be one of two explanations. One is that time began with a single event (could this be the one moment of true creativity?) that caused a chain reaction that led us up to this point. Once the first domino started falling, the rest fell in sequence. One idea branched out into many.
Another explanation is that the entirety of the universe was self-contained in the first place. Everything that existed, or would exist at any given point in the future, was present at this exact moment. In essence, everything was created all at once. It was already pre-encoded into the fabric of existence. As time passed, the ideas just expanded outwards in an infinite number of directions. The ideas got stretched out and became separated from each other. For us now, it is just a matter of finding all the disparate pieces and putting them back together again. After all, Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “A man is a god in ruins”.
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