My New Approaches:
In the study of chaos, people are discovering all the time that patterns exist in the (supposed) chaos, if only you look hard enough. Nobody likes dealing with chaos because it’s so unpredictable. Historically, people have tried to control chaos by imposing their own order upon it. That just plain doesn’t work, and is such a fundamentally flawed approach from a scientific standpoint that I’m not even going to discuss it further. Other people have taken the approach of understanding the chaos that exists, and have made great advances in understanding all kinds of things that way. In modern times, people have discovered mathematical formulas that can be used to predict things like migratory patterns of birds, traffic patterns in Tokyo, orbits of stars, and the activities of sub-atomic particles—all with the same formula! (I don’t remember if that’s exactly right, but that’s the basic idea.)
Obviously, what I’m trying to do must be possible in principle, at least. Just as obviously, if you assemble all the chaos that exists in the universe, it would just make one gigantic pattern anyway. I see patterns nobody else can see everywhere I look. I don’t know how I do what I do, or maybe I should say that I don’t know why nobody else can do it. Let me tell you about mint chocolate chip ice cream…
Finally, I can say that I came up with one of my first methodical approaches when I was about 7 or 8. I liked to play pretend when I was a kid (still do actually, that’s why I work in theatre). I could watch TV and understand that the people on TV were just pretending too. At the same time, however, they did such a believable job of it (to my 8-year-old mind, anyway), that I could forget that they were just pretending while I was watching them. And I started to wonder: these people are just doing what they’re doing and they don’t know that I’m watching them. Does that mean someone else is watching me?
Further permutations of that original philosophical question arose over the years. People on TV can watch TV, so the people who don’t know I’m watching them are watching someone else who doesn’t know they’re being watched. Does that mean that somebody else is watching the people who are watching me? Where does it end? As it so happened, as I would read years later in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had that same basic idea. (And in a much less film-entertainment-based way, a lot of Eastern religions believe something along those lines.)
Also, the people in the TV shows are just pretending, but they’re doing such a good job of it that I can’t tell. What if I’m pretending but am doing such a good job that I can’t tell? (Hey, I was only 8, I didn’t quite fully understand the TV industry at the time.)
Most TV shows don’t begin with the birth of the main character, but at some point during his life. If I’m a character in a TV show, when did the show start, and what happened before that? TV characters can remember things that happened to them before the show started, so have I only existed for part of my life and I just remember the rest of it now, even though it never happened? Even if the show did begin when I was born, did the rest of the world exist before that? Does the rest of the world even exist now, if it isn’t in the show? Or for that matter, has the show even started, or do I not exist yet and what I’m doing now will just be something I’ll remember in the future? It took me until I was about 15 or 16 to carry my reasoning that far. There have been a number of Twilight Zone episodes that have asked similar questions.
My very first conscious methodical approach I think I concocted when I was about 5. Maybe I was watching The Wizard of Oz or something, and Dorothy’s parents say something like, “There’s no such thing as the land of Oz.” And what happens? In the very next scene Dorothy gets whisked away to the land of Oz. It happens all the time in stories, people say “There’s no such thing as ghosts/ monsters/ aliens/ elves/ goblins/ trolls/ dragons/ fairies/ Mr. Snuffleupagus/ Freddy Krueger/ whatever, and then whatever they’re disbelieving shows up right at that very moment. So I figured I could save myself from that happening if I just believed in everything! To this day, I still can’t completely convince myself that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
So now that I think of it, I basically began life believing that anything could be real, but wondering how to prove that anything was real. No wonder I can best describe my life as one giant science experiment!
As you can see, my logic may seem harebrained at times and convoluted at others. But as long as I can come up with an explanation that makes perfect sense by the end and that I can demonstrate based on science and everyday life, it doesn’t really matter how I came up with it, does it?
Most importantly, my methodology could work for anyone who wanted to use it. If all I wanted was to tell you about the answer I found, this book would be over already. I already told you the answer in the introduction, but it’s so simple it doesn’t even seem possible, does it? That’s because the most important part of understanding the answer is how you go about searching for it.
That’s what the rest of the book is about.