If humans are nature’s way of knowing herself, then her moments of clarity must be very rare. Through the eons, intelligent spieces are few and the fossil record holds no traces of previous technological civilisations but the ones left by humans. For something like 99.9 % of the history of life on earth, humans did not exist. Given our current itch to destroy ourselves, we probably won’t be around for long either. So what is life without sentient beings capable of mapping its own past and origins? Is the rise and fall of this capability just like an odd flash in the dark?
I come to think of Leonard Shelby, the protagonist from Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough film “Memento”. Leonard lost his ability to make new memories, and his life was turned into fragments with everything constantly slipping away from the present. The passing of time was suddenly obscured from him. He had to piece together his life by taking notes and pictures of everything, approaching every new moment like an investigator would a crime scene. This is in a sense what the human enterprise is like. We are mapping the strange world around us like a person that just woke up, with no memories of what came before. The view from inside a human being is lonely and scary – we desperately crave a god’s eye view of everything, but still the world turns black when we close our eyes. The question is put most simply in Memento, when Leonard is thinking to himself:
“I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there. [closing his eyes] Do I believe the world’s still there? Is it still out there…?“
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