Meaning in Chaos

If there's anything that's stuck with me and continues to drive me through studying Computer Science and Physics, it's this: there is power, and beauty, in abstraction. If you don't care about reading about physics or computers, you should keep reading anyway. It does get more personal.

An almost infinite sea of particles, randomly jumping from place to place, colliding and attracting and repelling. That's the world we live in. Everything follows an extremely complicated formula (the Schrodinger Wave Equation), which tracks probabilities; the world is, by law, unpredictable. If you look at a single electron, you cannot possibly know where it will be an instant later. It could be a millimeter away; it could (with some low, but nonzero, probability) be fifty thousand miles away. Taking the world as the sum of its parts, it's a chaotic, completely unfathomable mess.

But we don't see the world at that level. We don't see trillions and trillions of quarks and electrons; we see a chair, a person, a beautiful picture. We don't remember a barrage of photons hitting our eyes; we remember scenes, faces, expressions. And amazingly, even though the world really is governed by unpredictable and immensely complex laws, at this higher level view, it's meaningful, predictable, and often beautiful. If you look at a movie too closely, all you'll see are dots, completely devoid of meaning. But stepping back, choosing to ignore things "as they really are", you see something that can make you laugh, cry, empathize. This incomplete, semi-blurred picture of the world we see, is somehow more meaningful than the truth.

Now take the computer you're reading this on. Deep down, it runs by physical laws alone; it knows nothing about what it's doing. NAND gates are pieces of equipment which, by electric repulsion and attraction, produce a low voltage if two high voltages wires are fed into it, and a high voltage otherwise. This doesn't sound useful; till someone thought: "Take a high voltage to be 'true' and a low voltage to be 'false'." Suddenly it's logic: you feed in two things (A and B) which mean true or false, and out comes true if A and B are not both true: "Not AND". Combine them in different ways, and you get OR, AND, NOT, etc. Take "true" and "false" to represent 1's and 0's, and suddenly you have math. You can combine them to make something that adds two numbers, subtracts, multiplies, divides. You can combine those to make something that works like a calculator: takes a command, performs the right math, and outputs the response. You end up building an entire CPU (made up of nothing but these meaningless NAND gates), which takes a program and executes it.

Then go up on level, to the software; which, really, is just turning this huge collection of bits and wires on and off. Small, simple programs are made. Bigger ones are made by using the smaller ones. One huge program (Operating System) puts collections of 1's and 0's in "Files", puts the files in "Folders", etc. All of a sudden, you're looking at a screen, Skyping to a friend on another side of the planet, reading the news, listening to music. Billions of bits, 1's and 0's, wires flowing with an electric current which has no idea what it's doing, and you have something real and meaningful.

In a very real sense, we're no different. We're made of the same chaotic particles the rest of the world is. Although there is more to us, we are by nature physical creatures, governed by the same laws that govern the world around us. I've felt especially aware of this physicality recently, as I've started taking medication for panic attacks, which would hit me when I was trying to fall asleep. No stress, no depression, no fear or anxiety; just faulty wiring keeping my heart beating quickly and my mind from shutting off. For months I was in and out of the ER for physical symptoms with no cause; I felt like a fragile machine, and one day I was sure I would just stop running. The draining effect of that made me miss classes, do poorly on tests, and fail to reflect my true potential. Taking a pill, and having a series of chemical reactions actually make things better has been incredibly embarrassing and humbling. How much I love to flatter myself as something strong and consistent. How easy it is to forget that our souls, immortal, are for the time being living in finite, faulty machines.

But, like the chaotic world of particle physics, and the rapid electric pulses of wires and bits, this faulty, chemical-driven body, from a higher vantage point, can have purpose, beauty, and meaning. I am not the sum of my parts. The meaning of the individual dots on a painting are not in what they themselves mean (nothing), but that which they, taken as a whole, are created to reflect. The meaning of this blog entry is not in its individual letters, or the 0's and 1's which encode them, but in the message its symbols are taken to communicate. And my meaning is not in my physical framework, chaotic and weak, but in the conscious soul which underlies it, and the truths it was created to convey. Beauty is in the abstract whole of my chaotic parts.