In spite of it certainty, death also offers a lot of mystery for us to ponder. Many brightest scholars of our time dedicate their energy to explore and speculate, which for us mere laymen, their thoughts are so amusing, or confusing for more precise. For me, there was time when I was curious enough to speculate when would be my turn. My friends asked me why I am toying with the idea of my own death. Death is always inappropriate issue to discuss at our dinner table. I can appreciate their uneasiness and their concern about the health of my consciousness. But they are wrong. I never play with the idea of death nor death itself, my own nor somebody else’s. I was just toying with my own curiosity.
There are many people who said that death is by no mean an ending. Death is just another phase of our journey to other realm. I try to reduce my own anxieties caused by my imminent death and by my awareness that both of it occurrence and what will happen afterward simply beyond my understanding, beyond any mean of verifications. Consequently, hearing that death is just a continuation of life was, somehow, comforting.
As my friend said, Death is certain, period. But I still wonder why something so certain brings us a lot of mystery, exposes us to tears and useless consolations. If something so certain, like our own death, leads us to numerous speculations, which occurrences fall totally to randomness, then is it possible that something uncertain will console us better?
Let us bring our discussion away from death to something more cheerful in our life, birth. I believe that birth almost always bring joys. I can imagine delightful face of a Mom when she touches her baby for the first time, and a happy father telling of his friends about the new born. I also notice my own feeling whenever I saw a baby. They never failed to make me smile and performed silly acts just to attract their attention.
I have spent more than three decades of my time on earth, experienced many joys, happiness, sorrows, miseries and most of other feelings possibly occurred to common person. Sometime I was filled with contentment from my amazing achievements in life, proud of it and tried to find out why I performed so well in life. I attributed my achievements to my perseverance, my mental attitude to defer current satisfaction for future success, my good educations, my ability to work smarter and harder than any of my colleagues. Now, you maybe feel that I was telling you a joke. I must admit that my achievements are exaggerated and I can not claim that my life so successful. But what can I do, I am merely human.
Somehow, no matter how small my successes mean to you, I keep wondering if any of my previous professional actions responsible to landed me here in my current job, in my office at one of luxurious mall in the city of angels, Bangkok. I am also not able to ease my curiosity whether any of my previous and current actions will responsible to destine me for my next job higher in the corporate ladder, or maybe somewhere else with things totally different with my expectations.
Do we really succumb to random cause and random result? Maybe. But it is also possible that we perceived randomness to rule due to our inability to pinpoint any causal relationship between two events or our inherent defects to understand phenomena. I still do not want to eliminate the possibility that total randomness is not exist.
I just finished reading Fooled By Randomness, a book by a writer whose name is not too easy for me to remember, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I know the book did not make me cry, it is not that kind of book. But it moved me to address the possibility that our destiny is lurking in randomness of events. He pointed that if you hope to win lotto, you need to buy the ticket. But if you really win the bet, you can not attribute the cause of your winning to the action of buying the bet. Why? Because, so many people out there bought the ticket also and hope as much as you to God to win but they failed.
It is hard to accept that the progress we achieved in our life and the full potential of our future totally caused by unverifiable actions which occurrence depend to randomness. History is full of our ancestor efforts to defy randomness, to make pact with gods, to increase our chance that events unfold in our favors. It is humankind who sing and dance to ask rain to fall on their land, who create wonderful tombs and delicate system of burial procession to be accepted in the underworld.
Mythology known to mankind around the world also full of story of our efforts to defy randomness, to resist the feeling that we are not in control of events inflicted upon us. Sure that we are not always in control of events, but we accepted that something somehow is in control. Human are capable to accept the idea that gods or God or anything omnipotent and almighty rules over universe. Even a pure anarchist and atheist still need their life in order to be bearable.
In the battle of our conscience against randomness, we made several progresses. Thanks to the cumulative knowledge and the technological achievents of humankind. As per today, we have fully mapped our own genes, the building blocks of our existence which responsible to determine our resemblance as human and our differences with other creatures sharing planet Earth with us.
By mapping our genes, we hope to be able to learn and understand how our genes constructing our existence. The possibility of such understanding excites and scares us to death in the same time. We hope we can find cure for diseases of our time and enhance our capabilities, physically and mentally, by altering some genes responsible for those favorable traits. We can enhance our immune system, our physical fitness, our brain performance to think and to remember. Some of us even imagine that someday we will find genes responsible of our youthfulness and decaying process. Finally, we will have our destiny, at least part of it, in our control.
Further development in genes research reveals that our genes are not wholly responsible for our traits. The chemical components surrounding the genes truly complicate our effort to dechiper our genetic code. We need to postpone our celebration to defy randomness of our genetic formation a bit longer. It is just too complicated for us to know for sure which one which.
Scientists also achieve considerably in the other field of science, exploration of our universe. Just three decades ago, Neil Armstrong walked in the moon’s surface and shared the joy of his small step in the moon with us, proclaimed it as a giant step of humankind. Today, our frontier is no longer the moon. It is beyond our solar system, beyond our Milky Way, we go further to the edge of our universe and to the very beginning of it existence, the Big Bang. The ground zero when time and space begin their separate but inter-mingle journey together through infinity. What is there waiting for us to gain? Is this journey to the edge of universe just to fulfill our curiosity? I don’t mind the scientists toying with the unknown out there, maybe they will meet other creatures sharing this universe with us or find other planet suitable for us to inhabit.
It is a bit peculiar for me to know that to understand things in the very grand scale, as our universe seconds from the Big Bang, we need to understand things in their smallest existence possible, in its atomic scale. Since Democritus said something about the smallest particle of matters he called atom some 24 centuries ago, humankind move forward astonishingly in this field. Now, quantum mechanics contributes to our understanding why pure energy as released in the Big Bang gave birth to matters.
However, our explorations to the very first moment of universe creation bring us more questions than answers. What is before Big Bang? In theory, before Big Bang there is nothing. Time and space as we know do not exist, which without it matters are losing its conditionality to become matters. The most disturbing question maybe why such no time-space condition ceased to exist in the first place, creating a mind-boggling explosion and give birth to time, space, matters and anti-matters? Is it possible that the creation of our universe, the very beginning of our existence, caused by nothing but random events in singularity?
Albert Einstein, a giant of our time, famously rejected the idea that randomness rules by saying that God does not play dice. I can tell you that this is a very brave statement from Mr. Einstein. It is his hesitation to acknowledge that there is possibility of God playing no role at all in the creation of universe and the moments before.
I think I can understand why Mr. Einstein and many of us do not easily accept the idea that our existence merely pure chance arising from random causality. Although we may not have common reason for our defiance. My personal view might not be important for you, but I need to share it anyway. So let me next time share it with you.
Bangkok, 4 February 2010
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