A physicist contemplates ethics and death
1.
They lay companionably side by side in the oversized bed, sunk into hollows shaped by long occupancy.
They held hands in the dark. It was not yet midnight. Drawn blinds obscured the yellow-orange street-light. They were both on their backs, staring up at the blackness, the ceiling vanished in the gloom.
“One day it will be just one of us lying here alone,” he said, “with a vacancy where you or I used to lie.”
She made a little sound of exasperation: “I never think about that.”
“I doubt it will be many years now.”
“Probably the other will die after a few weeks,” she said, “It often happens that way.”
“Yes, through grief, stress and loneliness: the collapse of the immune system. It's not a pleasant way to go.”
“Oh.”
2.
The rain came in this afternoon, as predicted. Looking out the kitchen window he sees the trees as through a misty veil, as if a painter stroked a watery brush down a backdrop.
Nothing he is seeing is mysterious to him. Given boundary conditions here and the laws of physics, he thinks, this is just how matter behaves. Really, there are no surprises. Perhaps that was Keats’ complaint.
3.
For years he has been trying to understand the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu's prescription for right-living. Harmony through conscious alignment with the Way.
The Way - that tantalising reification of something obscure yet important.
He thinks of the stories we tell ourselves, tell our self - that devious phantasm of our cortex. Narratives of possible futures mediating Id and Superego. Temptations vie with duties, competing to lure the Ego.
He rejects free will of course. Physics, in refuting it, makes the issue problematic, not axiomatic.
He’s pleased about that.
4.
To be sophisticated as regards a well-lived life (and Lao Tzu is surely up there, with his minimal metaphysical baggage) surely we're buttressing the better angels of our nature in that endless dispute?
Think of it as a gift from our present to our future life.
5.
He lies in the darkness; she's asleep. He hears the soft harmony of her breathing.
There is no time-past and time-future. Everything just exists. Architected, though, with that titanic entropy-gradient - the one that orients the future from the past. That thirteen-billion-year car-crash dividing prediction from memory. (But is the past really so fixed? He knows that physics isn’t so sure).
He thinks: our subconscious, our collective unconsciousness, wants us to thrive in this universe. Don't ask for some big, deep reason: there isn't one. It comes with the design. Our DNA coded us a big brain: it didn't know how to do the mission. We're not insects.
Lao Tzu's message is the most prosocial, the least magical and the surest blueprint for some harmonious, galactic future our true selves desire. But Philosophical Taoism can't get real purchase in a class society, it needs egalitarianism.
Two and a half thousand years. No-one properly comprehends Lao Tzu’s great work. Its time has not yet come; not till humankind is refashioned to the collective Sage.
6.
He will never be able to explain this to her.
He hopes she goes first. That it is painless... and sudden... and unforeseen.
Let him be the one to shoulder the aftermath.
He needs to believe it all makes sense.
Perhaps it does.
