When the Roman army broke through Syracuse,
a soldier leading a charge with his sword raised was blocked by an old man squatting on the ground.
The soldier roared: “Get out of my way, you old fool!”
The old man, without even lifting his head, said: “Don’t disturb my circles!”
Archimedes, died in 212 BC.
(I)
Recently Mia and I have been playing a name-guessing game on walks.
One side thinks of a name, the other asks questions,
and the questions only get “yes” or “no” answers,
back and forth until we guess it or give up.
When I guessed that Mia was thinking of Archimedes,
besides Aha moment and F = ρ_water · g · V_displaced appearing in my mind,
the story at the very beginning of this article also surfaced.
Just like the classic opening of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,”
the opening narration of “Attack on Titan” is also savored by fans:
On that day,
mankind finally remembered
the terror of being dominated by them,
and the humiliation of being caged.
Mathematics itself, like such words,
even after going through several crises,
became a source of human wisdom under the helm of giants like Fermat, Newton, and Gauss.
(II)
Even elementary-school-level math
can give you the urge to look up at the sky.
Starting from integers and decimals,
to negatives and fractions,
to irrationals and complex numbers — the process of understanding —
I was like a child placed under the starry sky for the first time,
looking at the sky full of stars left by predecessors,
twinkling so much I couldn’t say a word.
At that time, riding in the car my uncle drove,
he was the most “science-minded” person I knew at the time.
I told him my new discovery:
“Pi is an irrational number, which means our exploration of Pi is endless, which also means Pi could contain the entire world!”
Looking back carefully later,
the random chaos contained in a single number like Pi,
is the essence of the world as I know it.
(III)
In ‘04 I was reading “Children’s Literature,”
which serialized a novella by Li Zhiwei called 《Legend of the Holy Domain》,
with a plot eerily synchronous with 《The Thirteenth Floor》 that came later.
The gist is that the protagonist creates a computer world,
but later discovers that reality is also just another created virtual world.
This kind of nested doll story, simply put,
can be escaped by the “I think therefore I am” reasoning,
but at the time the impact on me was no less than the rebirth feeling I had after first watching “The Truman Show.”
From then until now,
I’ve been pondering this question:
“Who am I?”
Back then during stay-at-school training, a few of us good buddies would squeeze into one dorm to sleep.
During night talks, I discussed worldviews with FHN.
After I said “the world might be created,”
he sat up in bed and slapped it: “Yes! I think so too!”
Later all of us in the computer room found the wonderful story of the observer principle in “Ever17.”
In middle school, I deeply admired the teacher who taught me physics, Mr. Wan,
who at the time was the most “science-minded” person I knew.
One afternoon, after discussing problems with him, in our philosophical chat,
following my logic I said something that I have chewed over for over a decade since:
Life has no actual meaning.
Why? Let’s try proof by contradiction.
First assume life has meaning.Is this meaning attached to the soul (consciousness)?
No, because I only need to deny the soul and it ceases to exist.Then is this meaning attached to the physical world (matter)?
No, I believe in science, I don’t believe in the afterlife.
The universe will be destroyed, all matter will perish.So, in terms of actual meaning,
life has no actual meaning.
Mr. Wan, who could guide me on physics competition problems,
was speechless at this “chuunibyou” speech.
He waved his hand and let me go continue my own personal thinking.
(IV)
So my confusion got even bigger.
If life has no meaning, why should people live?
But I was infatuated by the spectacular sight of writhing earthworms on roadsides after the rain,
gripped by the heartstrings of two hearts colliding in love,
immersed in the flow state inside the coding-thought palace of game-development.
The world must have a reason for me to live brilliantly on.
So I sought many thought experiments.
In 《Five Years After Graduation - Memories》 I briefly mentioned the “Ship of Theseus.”
What I mentioned earlier was basically the Matrix-style “brain in a vat.”
What I still firmly believed in my heart was a “Tenet”-style fatalism.
Some people die at twenty, but aren’t buried until eighty.
This is a classic line from a chicken-soup story in “Reader” magazine,
but in my eyes it contains a scientific “fatalism” meaning:
only when looking back at age eighty,
do you know this person already died at twenty.
When you grow old and look back over your life, you’ll realize:
When you went abroad to study,
when you chose your first career,
when you settled on a partner and fell in love,
when you got married — these are actually all earth-shaking changes of fate.Only at the time, standing at the three-way crossroads,
seeing the winds and clouds of a thousand masts,
the day you made your choice — in your diary,
it was rather dull and ordinary,
at the time you thought it was just an ordinary day in life.
Even though the ancients said over and over:
“Man can conquer nature,” “The road is under your feet,” “Things are done by man” —
but seen from the future’s perspective,
the African butterfly must flap its wings,
Zhang Beihai’s button-press must slow down by a few seconds,
and Zhang Hua, Li Ping, and I must all have bright futures.
(V)
Among the three views, the worldview
is about my perception of the world.
This line from economics
might also hold up as a universal view:
Of the past ten years, this is the worst one.
Of the next ten years, this is the best one.
The assertion that “life has no actual meaning”
left a deep impact on my view of life.
But in my worldview,
I wrote down this sentence for myself:
Think idealistically, live materialistically.
This is also the origin of my blog site’s name “Floating Cloud Computing,” and my online name “Floating Clouds Are Always Dreams”:
all things in the world are like clouds in the sky,
both concrete and hollow,
both practical — condensing rain to nourish the earth —
and ethereal — letting people enjoy their unpredictable changes.
Perhaps in the long river of homo sapiens history,
there was one mischievous cloud
that one evening drifted over the land,
blocking the line of sight of a homo sapiens who was looking up at the stars,
delaying that look-at-the-stars curiosity about the world
by a few hundred years.
(end)