Finitude and Chance Pt. 2
Wednesday, November 20
From Simon de Beauvoir’s autobiography, All Said and Done.
If I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement—why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?… The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the birth of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it is chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.
Have you ever seen the videos that progressively zoom out — starting from subatomic particles and slowly progressing beyond cells, beyond humans, beyond cities, beyond the globe, until eventually, they show the viewer the entire observable universe in a single frame?
Those are somewhat successful at giving us a sense of our smallness and our finite. But even this would pale in comparison to a zoom-out, if such a thing were possible, showing us the entire possibility space for people we could have been, choices we could have made, and indeed ways the world could have looked.
It’s not just vanishingly unlikely that we have ended up making the particular choices we have — it’s also surprising that we are the specific people we are, and that we are the specific sort of hairless apes that we are, and that we live on the sort of planet that we do, and so on and so forth. Maybe we should even be surprised by our psychics, exactly as it is: three spatial dimensions, electromagnetism, and the works. We aren’t just vanishingly small in the world as it exists, but we’re vanishingly small in the space of all possibilities.
This doesn’t carry as much meaning as we sometimes may attribute to it, but it is remarkable nonetheless.