I remember happy but desperately clingy signatures such as, “let’s keep in touch,” “call me this summer,” and “I’ll always remember…” But there was one theme, interspersed throughout many of these from-the-hip memorials and epitaphs, which shocked me. For whatever reason, this idea was quite popular for yearbook signatures that year, and it populates many pages of my yearbook. It was the loving, yet damning, request to “never change” and “stay who you are.” Never change, I wondered? Why on earth would I never change? What could possibly be so precious about my 18-year-old self that I ought to solidify it into an eternal self-ness? This threw me into deep thought on what it is that we all think we are, and why we fear change. This is a thought process which I’m not entirely sure I’ve recovered from. Can I say that I know what I am? Can we know what we are? Or does it only matter what we do? I’m not even sure if these questions are significantly different, yet it speaks to a question which hits on so many aspects of life. What is my identity? Or in other words, are we what we are, or are we what we do?
Being the nerd that I am, my quest started with science. Sir Isaac Newton provided the world with, among many other things, the laws of motion. He, along with certain other brilliant minds of the 17th Century, opened up the way for computational mathematics to make sense of the world around us to an extent never before imagined, and to help understand what was accepted as the true and absolute nature of motion and the interaction of objects in motion. Stay with me here.
The laws of motion, which Mr. Newton developed, included a law which stated that an object at rest or motion will remain in that rest/motion unless acted upon by an outside force. This law inherently stated that if one could know all information about the two objects in contact, and all is knowable, then one could predict exactly what outcome their meeting would create. At the heart of these laws lies a seemingly simple but absolute assumption, that by knowing the quantifiable information we can predict outcomes with certainty, and, furthermore, that all things are both essentially knowable and quantifiable. While this idea was near-revolutionary at the time of its creation, it soon became common sense as an approach to other scientific questions, and eventually, it crept into realms never before approached by the “hard sciences”.
Newton was a founding mind of what we now call Classical Mechanics. He not only stated that truth could be found empirically by an appeal to data, but provided a method for it. He invented Calculus. Another eminent scientist, Pierre-Simon Laplace, following in the footsteps of Newton, pointedly making the claim, “that an Omniscient Calculator, provided with the exact knowledge of the state of the universe at present, would be able to predict the entire future.” This approach to science and movement allowed much of the technological advances of the 20th century to happen. However, the effect of Newton’s ideas soon reached far beyond traditional physical science, and into the realm of psychological science
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