Exhalation

by Ted Chiang

We spoke for more than an hour, and my fascination and respect bloomed like a flower warmed by the dawn,

“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,”

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not.

Unfortunately, such reasoning is faulty; every form of behavior is compatible with determinism.

Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

As someone whose identity was built on organic memory, I’m threatened by the prospect of removing subjectivity from our recall of events.

Astronomers call that the cosmic microwave background. It’s the residual radiation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe fourteen billion years ago. But you can also think of it as a barely audible reverberation of that original “om.” That syllable was so resonant that the night sky will keep vibrating for as long as the universe exists.

Because I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

Even if humanity is not the reason for which the universe was made, I still wish to understand the way it operates. We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how.