Incompleteness

Jokes, office afternoons, Etch-A-Sketch epistemology and a teenage earthquake in a suburban shopping center beside a landfill.

My favorite joke is about a guy hears a voice in his head, giving instructions. The guy listens and obeys, selling everything he owns, getting on a bus and following the voice to a roulette wheel in Las Vegas, where he loses it all on the first bet the voice commands. After a pause, the voice says Fuck!

A dear childhood friend told it to me when we were barely adults. After a drink or three, I can stretch it out for upwards of ten minutes.

If you do it right, the punchline hits like a car door on your fingers. But there’s something more to it, about inspiration and failure. There’s something about a drastic narrowing of focus - down to a single yes-or-no moment that suddenly opens up to utter bafflement.

Bad afternoons

Some afternoons are tough. At my flex-desk, a deadly height from the sidewalk yet seemingly buried below the dozens of floors of the surrounding glass buildings, everything I didn’t do in the day seems to stand out. And by the measure of all that once quickened my pulse, I appear to have failed.

In those hours, the things I’ve tried don’t seem to have worked out (see “Or Maybe It Just Wasn’t Good,” next week) - the novels, films and so on. Lunch doesn’t sit right in my stomach and my button-down shirt seems to pull at my skin. And the sensation of having been shunted down the ladder of my hopes can get oppressive.

But there’s a trapdoor to that drama. There’s a deep and logical path to reality. It’s that I’m just making all of this up. And it’s not nihilistic. It’s not. On the other side of that realization is a deeper, wilder truth.

A teenager in a parking lot

When I was fifteen, sitting in my mother’s car, something happened. It was February 1992, a very unhappy time. I was flunking almost out of high school.

A few weeks earlier, I’d had a bad blowup with my parents, and I’d demanded a ride to the Greyhound station so I could start my life anew. Instead, I was grounded except for school, no TV, no CD player. This was before the internet, not that the internet would have helped.

During this grounding, I went with my mother from Massachusetts to Long Island for a few days over winter break to visit my cousins. One afternoon, we were in a shopping center in Oceanside, because what else was there to do?

I stayed in the car while my mother shopped. The shopping center was familiar - a few blocks from my grandmother’s condo. She’d died when I was twelve or so, after a few bad years of dementia and a bad year in a nursing home. The shopping center was catty corner from a giant landfill mound. As a kid, the mound filled the thick summer air with garbage smell and the constant squawk of seagulls. It has since been retired, with sod over the top and PVC pipes plugged in to let the methane out.

I remember the moment well. I could even point out the parking spot - by the former Gold Coast Vendors’ Market, where I used to buy old MAD Magazines and baseball cards when we visited my grandmother two years before, sitting in the first car I’d drive, two years later.

The particular rules of a particular game

At the time, I was a feral and obstinate teenager. I had a plan to spend the summer sleeping in the woods and subsisting on convenience-store sandwiches.

Coaches, teachers, peers and parents were all coming at me with advice, criticism, pointed encouragement. A friend wrote me a fairly sincere poem to the effect that I should do my homework. Every waking moment, I was engaged in an argument with people who arguably had my best interests at heart. And they had good arguments.

A good argument is to do your homework so you can get good grades, get into a good college, and choose a fulfilling career that pays well. But that argument only works if you assume there is such a thing as a fulfilling career. It only works if you assume you need money to be happy.

But the truth or falsehood of those assumptions wasn’t what struck me. It was the structure - that anything is only ever true within a given context. And that context depends on what you choose to assume - for instance that a fulfilling, well-paying career exists, and that you want one.

This extends beyond just arguments to do this or that. Even the modern, rational view of the world depends on us choosing to assume the validity of scientific experiments, and the methods by which people have arrived at the most plausible theoretical implications. Once inside of a set of assumptions, sense can be made.

You could always, however, choose to assume something else. There is no ultimate ground beyond what you choose.

So how do you choose? Now as a former athlete in a highly competitive Catholic high school, I had the sense that a lot of those choices were coerced. There was upfront pressure, withheld approval, class rankings and the threat of eternal damnation.

A spark in a void

So if any sense of reality could only exist within a framework of assumptions, then what would happen if you didn’t assume anything at all, then what?

What was left after was immediate, sensory experience. That, and the thinking. It’s unavoidable that memories and associations lap against the experience, to explain it, to offer some sense that it’s not fatally dangerous. And those are just thoughts.

In the passenger seat of that Isuzu Trooper, something scary opened up. If one withdrew from all the assumptions one had about what was happening, then another possibility remained: A supposedly gargantuan and ancient universe could just as easily be a momentary flicker of consciousness in a void, frantically hypothesizing galaxies of matter and energy with an elaborate history to shield itself from its own transitory, insubstantial reality.

It fit the facts equally well.

The sense that the passenger seat in a grim February retail marshland parking lot - with some imaginary frills - may well be all there is to eternity. It’s one of those places I never entirely left.

And so a philosophical adventure begun in stubborn annoyance ended in absolute terror. Then my mother came back from the TJ Maxx.

Background

I realize this insight isn’t unique to me. It shows up in things like a Boltzmann brain or Godel’s (no idea how to do an umlaut on Substack) incompleteness theorem.

It was Godel who brought me back to this moment. I was reading about the incompleteness theorem and in a history of astronomy, and it was like running into an old friend from a bad situation. It was a reminder of a bad time, and of something that still matters despite the years, despite quite a lot.

Basically, Godel says that you can make a mathematical system that makes sense and is airtight. But it will never be complete. Its rules, its parts and its operation will depend on a set of assumptions from outside of itself.

Those assumptions may be scientific observation or holy writ, but you have to start somewhere, specifically somewhere else. As soon as the system tries to stand on its own, its hollowness shows. It reveals itself as a shadow of the thing it’s meant to explain or navigate. You can call a shadow a lot of things, but you’d never call a shadow complete.

And still, people pour sweat and tears into putting the right shadow in charge of their lives, and maybe more sweat and tears into putting the right shadow in charge of the lives of others. And still, every day people are betrayed by their shadows.

Call to inaction

That gloomy afternoon, not knowing anything about Godel, in a Nassau County shopping center, this freed me up, even if it didn’t cheer me up. After, I went back to nearly flunking out of high school.

People mock philosophy, and it’s fair to ask: What does this kind of insight do?

It makes absolute reality a bit laughable.