So, proto-humans started off with basic counting, often based on the digits they had free to count with (fingers – where we get our Base-10 system today – if we’d normally had 6 fingers, we’d probably use a Base-12), but soon they needed to do basic arithmetic, adding and subtracing come pretty naturally, but the concept of removing more things than are present doesn’t make much sense unless you have abstract concepts like ‘owing’ someone. It even took a long time to get to using a Zero – since you would never say you have ‘Zero’ apples, you would just say you don’t have any (no need for a number for that). But once humans embraced Zero and Negative Numbers, it began dawning on them that this ‘Arithmetic’ had in inherent unsettling impossible: what is the highest number, and if you can always add one to it, then where does it end? This is unsettling because humans are linear and finite. We have a steady progression towards a known end. Zeno nad others really brought the terror of this home with wonderful paradoxes of time, length, and motion. If you can divide every second in half, and that in half, and that, and that….then there are an infinity of divisions from one second to the next, so it should take infinitie time for each second to pass, and thus no time should every actually pass (and yet it does…).

Humans really find the infinite – which seems very likely to be an inherent aspect of our universe, and it’s rules of operation – to be terrifying. It’s really the postmodern problem’s root: maybe nothing matters, because it is possible that nothing matters, because ‘mattering’ could just be a delusion of complexity from a bunch of cells organized through the rules held in some DNA, but these cells are each marvels of molecular complexity, and the rules of every molecular interaction are guided by quantum mechanics, which itself relies heavily on the infinite-ness of even the behavior of the particles of a single atom. Trying to understand the nature of a single atom could drive you insane with it’s apparent complexity, so saying we ‘know’ the efferent condition we might call a ‘personality’ seems ludicrous. So humility seems like the order of the day. But humans, like all animals, would rather feel better than worse, so our base programming says any means of rejecting this terror will be welcomed, and there you can slip in fixes. Religion or Spirituality offer a rejection of it based on something seemingly absurd: blind belief in something unknowable as the means to reject something else equally unknowable. The easier route for most is simply distraction: to be allowed to mostly forget that they ever heard that terrifying thing. This may come in the form of drugs, consumerism, social hierarchy games such as gaining status in the form of wealth, success, popularity, or virtuosity.

But the infinite is always waiting there. Staring back at you. Taunting you that it may not even be real, and yet it is grinding your easy enjoyment of this existence to a halt, and making you envy a now-lost part of you: that you could just go blissfully about your day. The best you can do is be distracted from the terror for a long enough time to decide to try doing something, in the hope that doing things might actually matter – but soon you will be back, and for another moment you will contemplate how vast and terrifying it all may be.

So, let’s all just move on from terror-induced paralysis, and elect to believe doing stuff matters. This is no different than religion in it’s clear choice of belief in the face of these unknowable options – but religion is a rejection, saying that the other is NOT true, while this is embracing that both are equally possible, and working from that state of humility.

Go get some.