encoded notions

Do we just live in the now—in the vacuity between those fleeting moments that hang together to form our individual timelines? Is all of humanity expressed in these infinitesimally short blips of time?

Humanity is that term so often used in stories about alien invasions and robotic uprisings. The visceral, physical, messy, organic nature of our very operation and interaction. Illogical choices. Love. Hate. Laughter. Reproduction. Sleep. All the things that keep us from solely wearing the label of Information Producers. The things that we feel associate more directly to that ever-elusive concept of life.

Mathematics, spaceflight, transistors, The Internet, cloning, prescription drugs, solvents, quantum mechanics, the electron microscope, and so many other wonderful things. All of this human achievement is so mysteriously devoid of any apparent humanity.

They say that you should live life as if every moment is your last, but if that were true, would any progress ever be made? With that kind of driving force in your life, you’d probably stop caring about the future and focus entirely on the present and personal gratification. So it seems to be a trade-off: progress vs. humanity. But, what if the argument is not as simple as I make it sound?

Researchers in a laboratory are not machines. They interact, they have lives, they even go out for lunch. Elements of humanity are like ghosts, filling the gaps between more notable events. But, over time the humanity averages out leading you to think that perhaps the local effects are seemingly negligible. The same premise applies in quantum mechanics vs. chemistry and in chemistry vs. biology. The little niggling details of the former can be smoothed over in analysis by the latter—most of the time. Other times, those niggling details can blow up and assume control of the situation entirely.

So, most of the time, the day-to-day human interaction balances out so that it really makes no effect on the global state of human achievement. But then there’s that day when an assortment of Ph.D.’s go out to a bar. Over a couple of drinks, they get to chatting about their respective fields and they come to some realization about how the world works that none would have seen on their own.

Humanity is not always a negligible factor—it’s coupled to everything we do. It is what we do, the progress we make is just a side-affect. If that’s true, then maybe we shouldn’t always be so explicitly focused on making progress. To plan for progress, you look to the future; if you always look forwards, you’ll miss the moments as they pass by—and those are the moments which matter the most on both a local and a global scale.