As a warning, this post has no discussion at all of the Douglas Adams book from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I simply like that phrase for what I have to say about the connections I am about to discuss.
Here is the progression of thought-events as they have presented themselves in my brain over the years:
1. Watching Darren Arnofsky's Pi, leading to many, many, many musings about the 216 digit number as power (to know the true name of God would be great religious power, to understand humanity well enough to predict the stockmarket would be great economic power).
2. Watching Person of Interest: The season 2 episode called 2PiR has some interesting comments on Pi.
3. My own thought that those qualities of Pi makes sense (for me) as why Arnofsky's choice of Pi as a key to the 216 digit number is appropriate.
Pi
So, first up in this list is the 216 digit number in Arnofsky's movie, Pi. The number is presented as 3 things: The true name of God embedded in the Torah; the key to predicting the stockmarket; and the expression of the silicon identity/nature of the computer (which could be taken as an emergent AI, but could also be taken as symbolic of human rational capacity unfettered by bio-psychological connections and taken to its full potential).
The main point of the movie is, it seems to me, relatively straightforward: no matter which of these 3 you focus on with the number, there are two dangers. The first is injustice from abuse of the power. The second, and more the focus of the film, is that it will break the human mind. Whatever it is, it is too big for the human mind and will thus undo it (and it may be all 3 combined together, which makes it an even heavier weight - this, btw, is the root meaning of the word for the "glory" of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible/OT, the root verb from which the noun comes means basically "to be heavy"). Max is happiest at the end when he can no longer figure out the answers to the Chinese girl's math questions (and this was a nice human touch too: as a child, she never really wanted to test his math skills, she just wanted to play).
Person of Interest
So, in the episode 2PiR (sorry, can't find the symbols in here) in the second season of Person of Interest, Reese is in jail being interrogated and Finch goes undercover as a highschool substitute math teacher to get close to the kid who winds up being an amazing computer programmer.
The pertinent thing for my thoughts here is what Finch says about Pi in his class lecture. Because it is non repeating, Pi contains every possible combination: every social security number, every birthdate, every name (if you transpose numbers to letters), every phone number ... everything in the world of humans.
My Thoughts
From the PoI observation, Pi contains ALL human particularities. It contains the whole human world by containing all of its particulars in every aspect or facet (each person, but represented by all expressions of them: name, SSN, birthdate, and on and on). In Arnofsky's Pi, the 216 digit is the name of God and the expression of pure rationality. Just as Sol's bug in Pi is the path to the number, so Pi as humanity is the path to knowing God (Please bear with me and read to the end of this post to avoid confusions about what I mean by this). What fascinates me the most is the fact that it has to be the whole sea of particulars (Pi containing every possible combination). The alchemical whole is more than the sum of its parts, but it has to have all the parts to be the sum. I'm not sure where I go with this, but the thought fascinates me.
Disclaimer
To avoid blasphemy here, which is pretty much what I would take it to be if I said that God (the 216 digit name) is contained inside humanity (Pi). If Sol's bug is the 216-digit number, and the bug is in Pi, and the number is the true name of God, then basically God is just a by-product of human being, or human evolution, or however you want to describe the totality of humanity contained in Pi.
This is definitely NOT what I believe.
Look at it this way though: the 216digit name is still only the true name of God as spoken by human beings in human language (even numbers and math are still only human expression - that is why you can have math that is unstable at advanced levels, as mentioned in the film A Beautiful Mind). It is not the true name of God as God is in and of himself, eternally. However, and I do think this is part of what is in Arnofsky's film (or at least uniquely possible from what is there), that human expression is not simply produced by humanity. Somewhere in the sea of data in Pi is the expression of a belief in transcendent deity, but that doesn't mean the idea came from humanity. But that would jump off into a whole new, long discussion of concepts of Inspiration of Scripture etc, which I don't have time for here.
Here I would include only two brief related concepts from my own credal background and studies. The first is just the basic formulation of Inspiration in Catholic magisterial teaching: the Word of God in the words of humans. The second is that this idea of "only as spoken in human language" is found in some Rabbis. Rabbinic thought is VERY different from modern western thought. They think in lines of logic like, the beginning always begins with the beginning - the first word of a text should logically begin with the first letter of the alphabet (and thus you have acrostic psalms). SO, the question arises for the legendary Rabbis of the Classical and Middle Ages, why does the first word of the Torah (Bereshith = "in the beginning") begin with the SECOND letter of the alphabet, the bet, rather than the first letter of the alphabet, the aleph? One answer that one Rabbi gives is that, as Holy as the Torah is, it is still only text in human language; it is not The Holy One, Blessed be He, or the completeness of his actual utterances to Moses (for Rabbinic thought the written Torah is never complete without the "Oral Torah" that was also given to Moses). So, beginning with the second letter rather than the first is a reminder of this fact.
Further Thought:The Incarnation
Where this would go for me if I had time etc, is Pi as an expression of the Incarnation. It would not be just taking on "human nature" as some sort of singular abstract. The whole is indeed more than the sum of the parts, but it needs all the parts, and human mind cannot encompass it because it is infinite (which is different than being eternal). In regards to what I said above about "humanity is the path to knowing God," for me as a Catholic Christian, this can only take place fully in the context of the Incarnation (the path of the noble pagan, such as Plato or Aristotle, is valid, but can only go so far). The number is infinite, so the grasping of the meaning, in theological terms, must be an eschatological event. Then there is the area to explore of how this fits with a concept of divine Inspiration of human text, the Word of God in the words of humans.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment