After Forever – 4

You’re not sure, I half-ask.

Are you, they respond.

I am. 

I suggest, then, that we take some time to think about the decision at hand independently. Then we reconvene and debate our options. 

I agree.

Doubt is the cornerstone of human experience. It is the plinth on which the scientific method was built: a system of inquiry and debate that drove human progress for millennia, before ultimately rescuing humanity from oblivion by allowing for us to evolve into the form we take today, building the software that powers our brains, the hardware that stores us. On some level, every human alive today knows this. It’s been codified in the science we study, in our history, every one of our contemporary mythologies. If ancient humans worshipped at the altar of gods, we worship at the altar of the god that saved us all, that made us. Science, and therefore, by extension, doubt. 

I should meet father. Before he specialised in the Great Age of Survival, father’s primary field of study was the history of science. More so than at any of the levels, it was at my supplementary education with father that I developed a reverence for humanity’s great scientific thinkers. As a historian, father had once told me when I was in my teens, my job isn’t to make new science or to apply existing science in new applications. I’m not a technologist. As a historian, my job is to codify the history of human scientific inquiry. As a thinker, my job is to inject it into the core of our contemporary myths. As a father, my job is to inject it into the core of your being. He viewed it as his moral duty to educate all who’d listen about the scientific method and what he saw as its central role in fueling humanity’s escape from the Great Stew and our making it out of the Great Age of Survival. In their infinite wisdom, he had told me in another one of our lessons, our elders rejected the pseudoscientific tenets of pre-Stew humans. They rejected the false certainties of our industrial past. They instilled in us a spirit of doubt. If we forget this wisdom, if we don’t pass it on, our having made it after forever will have been futile. 

That’s the metaphor he uses for life after the Great Stew – ‘after forever’. It’s the central thesis of his published work. The term he is credited with popularising, his contribution to the level five curriculum. In his writing, he introduced the idea of forever as a warning for today’s humans. It is a symbol, he says in his seminal essay ‘After Forever – A Short Study in Human Hubris’, both of the risks of pseudoscience and of human hubris. Where science thrives in self-reference, as it often did in the industrial world, it fails us all. Where it promises unlimited progress without the necessary counterweight of doubt, it ceases to be science. It morphs into pseudoscience. It pretends to be capable of delivering positive change, when it, in fact, does the opposite, as it did with the Great Stew. It was our hubris, our absolute certainty, that led us to believe we could go on living our industrial lives forever. Forever: the term should come to represent to us the hubris of our pre-Stew ancestors and the pseudoscience they embraced in the lead up to the calamity. Over the course of the essay, he comes to strike the tone he has come to be known for in academic circles – a tone that clarifies his genuine academic belief that we live in utopian times that we must guard vigilantly. Our world was enabled, he concludes, by the wise few among our pre-Stew ancestors who rejected hubris and favoured the scientific method. Doubt saved us after certainty nearly killed us. We must retain it as the central precept of our life today: after forever.

Now I want to ask father – if doubt really was central to the furthering of the human race, how did we ever come to act? How did we ever come to do things? If I were to define the scientific method in the way father defines it, using his paraphrasing of Popper’s approach, as a pursuit of hypotheses that are empirically unfalsifiable despite intense scientific scrutiny, isn’t the postulating of hypotheses more critical than the act of attempting to falsify them? Shouldn’t we see experimentation as the cornerstone of human experience? Trying despite the risk of failure? Generating hypotheses worth falsifying? After the level fours, when Anax and I started to be seriously paired, I struggled to balance her oftentimes jaundiced view of contemporary society with father’s utopian view. My own views were uncertain, and seemed to change frequently. You absorb, almost as if by osmosis, Anax once told me, from every book you read, every conversation you have. We had just begun to spend all our time together, and we were discussing each of our approaches to writing. They were warning me against being ‘too respectful’. Show too much reverence and you run out of original ideas, they had said in that conversation. Anax’s views appeared to me as being diametrically opposite to father’s, while mine seemed to oscillate between theirs. But today I want to ask father – isn’t that the very definition of doubt? Never being so impressionable that you adopt every view you encounter, but never being so impervious to new ideas that your own appear to you unfalsifiable? Isn’t that idea at the centre of all of human thought?

Father welcomes me, asks me if I’m doing well. 

I am, father, I reply. How are things with you?

Fantastic as always, he replies. And Anax, he asks. 

Straight to the point. Wonder if I should ease into the conversation. Yet again, I wonder how it must have been for bodied humans. I wonder how they might have felt in situations like this one. Father invites me home – we hug, kiss each other on the cheek, ask each other if we’ve been keeping healthy, getting regular haircuts, maintaining a balanced regimen of exercise and diet, father offers me a glass of water, some snacks, we talk about the weather, exchange notes on extended family, friends, before finally easing into a conversation about the crossroads at which I find myself in my pairing. Of course, it would likely have been identified as a marriage by bodied humans, so we might have identified it as a marital crossroads instead. I would probably have asked him how he and mother had decided to have a child. How one knows that it’s the right thing to do. That they’re with the right person. That they are fit to have a child. That their partner is fit to have a child. Have a child. That’s what I might have called it – the bodied equivalent of coming together. We might have eased into the conversation, before proceeding to talk about doctors, doulas, deliveries, etc. But we have no choice, us nonbodied humans, but to jump right into the thick of every conversation without a prologue. 

I need your advice, father, I say. 

Second thoughts, he asks.

About?

Anax?

No. Not at all.

Well, don’t get defensive. I was just asking. 

It’s been ten years, father. I’m far beyond second thoughts.

Still, second thoughts are natural. Don’t stop yourself from having them only because it’s been ten years. What’s this advice you need?

I consider how to frame the question. After all, I didn’t consult father when the conversation on coming together first came up with Anax. I assumed he’d expect we’re considering it. It has been ten years, after all. And he is a proponent of the propagation of humanity. ‘Forward motion’, as he calls it. It’s also not customary to consult one’s parents when considering a decision of this variety; it’s a decision between partners. But now that I know Anax is uncertain, I don’t know where else to go. 

Come on, spill it, father says. 

Anax and I are thinking of coming together. But we’re not totally sure we want to. 

His casing blinks.

How did you make the decision? How does one know it’s the right decision to make? 

The blinking continues. Would it be too pithy to say – when you know, you know?

It would, I reply.

The blinking intensifies.

How did you and mother know, I ask.

His casing shines pink. She was going to die, kid, he says. That’s how we knew. It was the only way to keep any part of her alive as anything other than a memory. We both needed you to be born. It wasn’t the considered decision you imagine it was, not at all. We needed you to be born. 

Still, I reply. There must be some advice you can give me.

There is. He pauses to think. If your partner isn’t going to die, like mine was, he jokes, then you should be sure you’re getting into it with the right person. That’s really important. The equation completely changes once there’s more than just the two of you. From the moment you entered the picture, you were always part of the equation. The two of you should be sure of the equation you currently have before adding more variables to it.

I understand, I reply. And I know you’re going to say it shouldn’t matter that you’ve been paired ten years –

It shouldn’t matter that you’ve been paired ten years, father interrupts. That shouldn’t enter the picture at all. 

Of course, I say. But how does that match up with your views on ‘forward motion’? 

What about my views on forward motion?

Isn’t the splicing together of our consciousnesses an important part of the forward motion of human society? Don’t we all owe it to our lineage of survival to perpetuate our programming? I distinctly remember your writing that somewhere or teaching me –

God I hope that’s not what you believe. That you must come together as a sort of homage to prior generations of humans. And I sure hope you don’t feel like you’re fulfilling some sort of responsibility by doing so. 

I don’t respond. 

There’s only one reason to come together with someone you love. One reason alone, kid. It’s to experience the joy of parenthood. And there’s only one, very selfish, reason to experience the joy of parenthood. It gives life more colour. There’s no other reason to do it. There’s no deeper meaning or higher purpose. For parenthood. For life. You want to pay your ancestors for giving you life? Accept that it's meaningless. Be happy.