How to Live .org

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

I can't think of anyone that I'd want to permanently trade places with (in the sense of actually becoming them), but there are a lot of people I'd like to be for a day. Most of the people on my list would be friends and relatives, but I'd also include some strangers. Once such person is Terence Tao. Terence won the gold medal at the International Math Olympiad at age 13, the youngest winner ever. He got his PhD from Princeton at 20. He has won the Clay Research Award, a MacArthur Genius Award, and the Fields Medal (math's equivalent of the Nobel Prize). With technical brilliance and deep insight, he solves problems others consider intractable, problems the human brain wasn't designed to solve. (Quick example: He and Ben Green proved that there are an infinite number of arbitrarily long strings of prime numbers that are a constant distance apart.) And he's only 29, so his biggest breakthroughs are yet to come. But my reason for selecting him isn't simply because he's one of the smartest people on the planet. He has privileged access to a type of knowledge about our world that few others have. It has often been said that God is a mathematician. Of course, it's usually mathematicians who are saying this; I suppose engineers say God is an engineer, artists say God is an artist, etc. But math does seem to offer a window into an aspect of reality we don't usually see, one that's fundamental, beautiful, and timeless. I admire those who can genuinely appreciate the secrets it holds, and I especially admire those who can unlock these secrets.

2 Comments:

  • I always wondered what it would be like to be someone else for a day, but my real question is - when you become them, do you keep your own mind, share your mind with their's, or completely become them? Would they just be a puppet like John Malkovich?

    On the flip side, if you consider a concept like they talk about in Butterfly Effect - once you get into their mind you would have two sets of memories and that would massively overwhelm you. But it'd be cool, still.

    And if you did become them, would they become you or would you cease to exist? Perhaps it's too early in the morning to start getting deep about it, but I started going places with this!

    Thanks for your blog, it's given me some hope.

    By Anonymous Tim, at 8:57 AM  

  • Thanks for the insightful comments. One of the goals of my blog is to try to let people know what it's like to be me, but language isn't a good tool for communicating subjective experience, and that approach is further limited by my (in)ability to use language optimally. It would be much more illuminating to be able to "become" someone, Malkovich-like (and I think people would be much more empathetic if they could really see things from the point of view of others). I doubt that will ever be possible, and there are problems with the concept of identity (as you point out), but maybe some future scientist will find a way to approximate the experience... perhaps by cutting the corpus collosum of two willing participants (maybe lovers who want to "become one") and temporarily reconnecting each person's left side to the other person's right side. Something to think about...

    By Blogger howtolive.org, at 5:08 PM  

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