You Are an Infinite Being. Embrace It!

Chapter 8.5: Bounded but infinite

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) (2.2) (2.3) | Chapter 3 (3.1) (3.2) (3.3) (3.4) (3.5) (3.6)
PART 2
Chapter 4 (4.1) (4.2) (4.3) (4.4) (4.5) | Chapter 5 (5.1) (5.2) (5.3) (5.4) (5.5) (5.6) (5.7) (5.8) (5.9)
Chapter 6 (6.1) (6.2) (6.3) (6.4) (6.5)
PART 3
Chapter 7 (7.1) (7.2) (7.3) (7.4) (7.5) (7.6)
Chapter 8 (8.1) (8.2) (8.3) (8.4) (8.5)
Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14
PART 4
Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 |
PART 5
Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Conclusion
Appendix | Works Cited

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Note: This is an installment of The Freedom Scale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right. See here for installments of The Distributed Nation: A Plan for Human Independence.

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8.5 — What Makes Us Us?

• Infinity

  • The boundaries of our infinity

Infinity

For every sound your ears are hearing,
A thousand thoughts can start appearing.
And each of us imagines different things,
From just a sound, your mind has wings!

—“Journey into Imagination with Figment”

The year was 1997 and I was sitting in a ratty old armchair in my studio apartment in the East Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Listening to the El Niño-driven rains beating in the street below, I began scrawling the first few words of a poem of sorts:

Big chair,
My house,
My street,
My neighborhood…

It wasn’t meant to be Shakespeare. All I was doing was attempting to fix my position in the universe, starting with my precise location and moving outward from there.

Hitting the high points of both geophysical and political designations, I went on to place myself in Los Angeles…in the LA Basin…on the Pacific tectonic plate…in the United States…in the western hemisphere…of planet Earth…in the inner planets…of our Solar system…in a spiral arm…of the Milky Way galaxy…in our local cluster of galaxies…in our galactic supercluster. That seemed far enough.

Of course, I am not the only one to have done this—many have no doubt thought about, and perhaps written down, similar progressions. Indeed, a friend recently called my attention to a video, designed by an astrophysicist, depicting a similar survey of the “bigness” of it all. This version begins with a young woman lying on the grass looking up at the sky. The “camera” then pulls back and takes us into the sky, and then into space, moving through increasing levels of astronomical locales (adding details I missed, like the Kuiper Belt and the inner and outer Oort Clouds).¹

Having reached the level of the whole universe, the progression then reverses, and zooms back down all the way to the young woman. It then begins a further regression, starting with her left eye and moving down through blood vessels, DNA, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles (with a lot more details in between). And then, of course, it reverses again and zooms back up to the young woman’s smiling face.

The purpose of this video is to blow your mind with the sheer vastness of existence, every bit as much as I was trying to blow my own mind sitting in that ratty old chair above the noisy streets of East Hollywood. But this time, sitting there watching that video, it dawned on me that as mind-boggling as the physical and spatial progression and regression are, equally overwhelming is the infinity that exists in that one woman lying there.

That one person—one of nearly eight billion—is a locus of infinite possibilities. There are almost no bounds to what she can imagine, what she can create, or the choices she can make, save for the limitations of the laws of physics themselves…and even those she can defy in her dreams.

Just like all of us, her consciousness rides atop a complex tapestry of biology and context. But she can ride that magic carpet almost anywhere. Her life can take any number of different directions, depending on a theoretically limitless range of actions she can take and choices she can make. Any one of her actions may be influenced by the boundless actions and choices of others, and her actions in turn ripple outwards into the world, part of an ever-changing, ever-growing gossamer web of combinations and interactions that is itself infinite in possibility.

In an episode of the original Star Trek series in the 1960s, creator Gene Roddenberry introduced the concept of IDIC—“infinite diversity in infinite combinations”—as a component of the Vulcan philosophy and belief system. “The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity,” says Dr. Miranda Jones…“And the ways our differences combine to create meaning and beauty,” replies Mr. Spock, completing her thought.