I Am a Strange Loop

The first inclination of a modern physicist who heard this story might be reductionistic, in the sense of pooh-poohing the large simmballs as mere epiphenomena, meaning that although they are undeniably there, they are not essential to an understanding of the system, since they are composed of simms. Everything that happens in the careenium is explainable in terms of simms alone. And there’s no doubt that this is true. A volcano, too, is undeniably there, but who needs to talk about mountains and subterranean pressures and eruptions and lava and such things? We can dispense with such epiphenomenal concepts altogether by shifting to the deeper level of atoms or elementary particles. The bottom line, at least for our physicist, is that epiphenomena are just convenient shorthands that summarize a large number of deeper, lower-level phenomena; they are never essential to any explanation. Reductionism ho!

The only problem is the enormous escalation in complexity when we drop all macroscopic terms and ways of looking at things. If we refuse to use any language that involves epiphenomena, then we are condemned to seeing only untold myriads of particles, and that is certainly not a very welcoming thought. Moreover, when one perceives only myriads of particles, there are no natural sharp borders in the world. One cannot draw a line around the volcano and declare, “Only particles in this zone are involved”, because particles won’t respect any such macroscopic line — no more than ants respect the property lines carefully surveyed and precisely drawn by human beings. No fixed portion of the universe can be tightly fenced off from interacting with the rest — not even approximately. To a reductionist, the idea of carving the universe up into zones with inviolable macroscopic spatiotemporal boundary lines makes no sense.

Here is a striking example of the senselessness of local spatiotemporal boundaries. In November of 1993, I read several newspaper articles about a comet that was “slowly” making its way towards Jupiter. It was still some eight months from t-zero but astrophysicists had already predicted to the minute, if not to the second, when it would strike Jupiter, and where. This fact about some invisible comet that was billions of miles away from earth had already had enormous impacts on the surface of our planet, where teams of scientists were already calculating its Jovian arrival time, where newspapers and magazines were already printing front-page stories about it, and where millions of people like me were already reading about it. Some of these people were possibly missing planes because of being engrossed in the story, or possibly striking up a new friendship with someone because of a common interest in it, or possibly arriving at a traffic light one second later than otherwise because of having reread one phrase in the article, and so on. As t-zero approached and finally the comet hit Jupiter’s far side exactly as predicted, denizens of the Earth paid enormous attention to this remote cosmic event. There is no doubt that many months before the comet hit Jupiter, certain fender-benders took place on our planet that wouldn’t have taken place if the comet hadn’t been coming, certain babies were conceived that wouldn’t have been conceived otherwise, certain flies were swatted, certain coffee cups were chipped, and so on. All of this crazy stuff happening on our tiny planet was due to a comet coasting through silent space billions of miles away and nearly half a million minutes in advance of its encounter with the huge planet.

The point is that one gets into very hot water if one goes the fully reductionistic route; not only do all the objects in “the system” become microscopic and uncountably numerous, but also the system itself grows beyond bounds in space and time and becomes, in the end, the entire universe taken over all of time. There is no comprehensibility left, since everything is shattered into a trillion trillion trillion invisible pieces that are scattered hither and yon. Reductionism is merciless.

Taking a Higher-level View of the Careenium

If, on the other hand, there is a perceptible and comprehensible “logic” to events at the level of epiphenomena, then we humans are eager to jump to that level. In fact, we have no choice. And so we do talk of volcanoes and eruptions and lava and so forth. Likewise, we talk of bitten fingernails and rye bread and wry smiles and Jewish senses of humor rather than of cells and proteins, let alone of atoms and photons. After all, we ourselves are pretty big epiphenomena, and as I’ve already observed many times in this book, this fact dooms us to talking about the world in terms of other epiphenomena at about our size level (e.g., our mothers and fathers, our cats and cars and cakes, our sailboats and saxophones and sassafras trees).