uniqueness-template

Overheard in the school halls: “Poor guy, he wants to teach us everything, but can’t due to time constraints.”

Well that seems logical. One would think that it would take quite a long time to learn “everything”. A person would probably die before they had a chance to learn everything. Therefore, because of time constraints, no person could ever teach a person everything–the person would die before the lesson was finished. By extension, if it is impossible for anyone to ever learn everything due to time constraints, not a single person can ever attain the qualifications to be able to teach everything.

But that begs the question: aside from the time issue, would it be possible to learn everything?

At first glance, it appears that if you removed the time constraint of the average lifetime of a human, the knowledge of everything would be within grasp.

However, now we run into the problem of comprehension. Comprehension levels vary greatly in humans. It takes some people longer than others to grasp some concepts, while others can never grasp them at all. For some people geometry is as hard to grasp as quantum physics is for others. So I think it would be safe to say that even if the average person lived forever, it would be unlikely that they could learn everything.

But since we threw out the time constraints for everyone I don’t think that it is unreasonable to say that from now until the end of time there could be at least one person with the capacity to understand everything. So let us use this person as our subject.

Now we run into the problem of “forever”. If our super-genius lives forever, he or she will observe the development and perhaps the death of our solar system/galaxy/universe. What happens next? Nothing? If so, and if this person was not done learning about the universe, then he or she didn’t learn everything. However, if after our universe ends and a new universe is formed with new laws of physics, then our genius has to start learning all over again.

But let’s say that our subject, the immortal genius, learned everything that a person can learn about the universe up until the moment it ceased to exist. Does she know everything?

I say the answer is no. How can she know what my favorite song is unless I told her? How could she know for whom I had a secret crush in the 8th grade?

That brings us to the “no man is an island” problem. Even if our subject learned everything there was to learn about the universe, she still will not know “everything” unless she communicates with every person who ever existed and learns everything they know.

We are now getting dangerously close to describing the characteristics of the mythical being known to many people simply as “God”.

So if this teacher (referenced at the start of this entry) really thinks he could teach everything if it were not for the time constraints, then he must have a god complex and should seek professional help.

Happiness is vastly overrated.

In fact, there are people who realized that true happiness could never be achieved. Hence the phrase, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

As I sit here in front of the cold glow of this monitor, listening to “Ambivalance” by Embellish, I fear that the “good times” are behind me and things can never be as good as I have already experienced.

But then I think that even if my life will be as short as my father’s, I still have 23 years to pursue happiness.

Now only if I can figure out how to do it.