Expunge me, Expunge me Not

 2250 words, 10 minute read

When I arrived at college to begin my freshman year, I was handed the university’s ‘orientation guide’. It included a code of conduct (yes, they still had such things back in them thar days), a long ladder of increasingly Draconian consequences for increasingly serious infractions;

The final rung: Be expunged!

As the manual explained (and I paraphrase): “All trace of you ever having attended this university will be permanently expunged from the record. It will be as if you had never been.” Kilroy was not here!

Prior to college, I had done a bit ‘upstate’, i.e. 6 years in parochial school. At each grade level, the first full day of classes included a lengthy and graphic description of Hell that awaited us if we ate meat on a Friday. (We learned to love peanut butter and, being from Boston, Marshmallow Fluff rather than jelly.)

But even the religious sisters who taught us could not imagine a punishment as severe as expungement. Imagine being so bad that God decides to erase you from the record, retroactively. Adam and Eve were not expunged; nor was Lot’s wife. Even back in the day we were told of God’s love and mercy but apparently that lesson never breached the ivy infested walls of academia.

But college got me thinking (it’s supposed to do that, right?): What if the university’s disciplinary code leaked outside its haunted halls and came to infect the entire cosmos? Crossing the street after some unusually mean and thoughtless act, you suddenly disappear; God has tired of your repeated malfeasance: you’ve been expunged!

***

The Book of Job, which includes some of the oldest text found anywhere in the Bible, presents a verbatim transcript of a mock legal proceeding modeled on jurisprudence as practiced throughout the Near East in the 2^nd millennium BCE. Welcome to Job v. God.

Who does this? Who takes the creator of heaven and earth to court…and why? Job does! He seeks to compel God (1) to disclose the detailed terms and conditions that govern creation (gnosis) and (2) to submit to the same ethical imperatives as the rest of us (dikay).

The Book of Job asks one question: Do ethical standards apply to God or is he exempt? Is God free to determine arbitrarily what is Good? Is he compelled even to acknowledge the normative power of universal Values?

The ‘whole world’ is watching, and Job opens (3: 3 – 5): “May the day disappear, the day I was born, and the night that announced, ‘A  man has been conceived’…let darkness expunge it.”

Job is playing for all the marbles. There will be no settlement, no plea bargain here. Job makes it clear to the ‘cosmic court’ that he is prepared to put at risk not just life but existence per se.

‘Find in my favor…or expunge me! I do not choose to be, or ever to have been, part of a world where God does not exemplify universally acknowledged ethical values.’ A gutsy challenge from one who is dust and ashes. (42: 6)

Job sneers at capital punishment; death is nothing to be feared. It leaves existence (having been) intact. Since everything will one day cease to be, there is no existential difference between what is, what was, and what will be. Job puts up not just his miserable present and hopeless future but his glorious, prosperous, and honored past as well. He is all in from the get-go.

Good thing too because Job v. God is about to relegate Marbury, Madison, and OJ Simpson to bit roles in moot court.

***

What does it mean to be expunged? Not only were you never conceived, the chains of dominoes you set in motion never fell. You made the sound of one hand clapping; you were a tree falling in an empty forest.

Your existential footprint is obliterated. Not only does the evil that you’ve done vanish from the world but your good deeds as well. No old ladies helped across the street. No spouse adored; no children born and raised. No taxes paid, no donations to the United Way. For better and for worse, you simply never happened.

Everything you touch, everyone you meet, is irrevocably altered by their interaction with you, no matter how trivial or perfunctory. Without you, everything around you is changed (It’s a Wonderful Life); and in almost no time (Six Degrees of Separation) the effect of your absence has radiated into every nook and cranny of the anthroposphere.

Your actions are free, undetermined and unconditioned. But your physical being is the product of forces set in motion 14 billion years ago, and we know that we all share an LCA (last common ancestor) who lived just a few millennia ago.

To the extent that your physical being is an effect, prior states of affairs would need to be altered to preclude that effect (i.e. you). You cannot preclude a particular effect (e.g. you) without altering its causal chain…in both directions!

But even this is too linear. Causal chains intersect. As your expungement works its way forward and backwards along your causal chain, that chain intersects with other chains, setting off a tsunami of required adjustments in every direction.

Every quantum of being is modified if even one quantum is modified. Everything changes everything else! Adjusting for rate limitations on the propagation of influences, the effect of any local modification would be immediate and universal. And if a single quantum of being were to be expunged, the cosmic fabric would unravel and the universe as we know it would cease to exist, now or ever.

***

What then of Free Will? Will operates in the interstices of the fabric. It is epigenetic. It introduces novelty. It is to causality as mitochondria is to DNA.

Will is not determined, or even influenced, by causal chains. Will is the one and only source of novelty in the world, but determinations of will cannot be inconsistent with their relevant causal chains. Sartre called this condition Facticity: I am free to do whatever I wish but even so, unaided I cannot jump 10 feet in the air. That would not be consistent with causality.

Free will means that whatever can happen may happen; determinism means that whatever may happen must happen. So when I exercise free will I impact the causal chain going forward but my actions have no retroactive impact because whatever I do is by definition compatible with whatever came before. Volition impacts the future without impacting the past.

But not every event is determined or free. In fact, most events are neither. In Quantum Mechanics (QM), when the wave function decoheres (collapses), the result is neither determined nor volitional. Each specific result is uncaused (random) but the patterns formed by multiple results will be  consistent with a pre-determined probability distribution.

I’m at a craps table in the Bellagio. I place a quarter ($25) on the pass line. I’m hoping for a 7 or an 11. I roll the dice and the dealer calls out, “Snake eyes, line away!” I lost but the outcome was neither determined nor intentional; it was a function of probability. Events can occur according to causality, free will, or probability.

According to renowned physicist Richard Feynman, when an event occurs at the QM level, the outcome includes all possible outcomes weighted according to their probability of occurrence. It is this broad spectrum ‘outcome’ that enters into the causal chain, regardless of event specifics.

It’s exactly the same at Bellagio…except there probability unfolds over time. I bet a quarter and rolled craps: $25 lost. On the next throw, the dice comes up ‘winner winner chicken dinner’: $25 gained. If I roll the dice ‘enough times’, it will turn out that I have lost an average of about 50 cents (2% - the house margin) on each bet. Of course it won’t feel that way after I’ve lost 4 $25 bets in a row.

***

At last, it’s time for our serpentine wanderings (above) to bear fruit.

Apples: There is no conflict between Classical and Quantum Mechanics. Classical systems behave just like Quantum systems…spread over time. Schoedinger’s wave function, Bellagio’s odds, and Feynman’s Sum over Histories turn out to be different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. The universe is one!

Oranges: There is no such thing as Cause and Effect. We assumed Causality at the outset of this journey, but that concept turns out to be oxymoronic (reductio ad absurdum).

Any independent modification of any event in the cosmic field must immediately modify all events (from Big Bang to Heat Death) to maintain the consistency and solidarity of the cosmos.

Absent the unconditioned exercise of free will, the entire spatiotemporal field, i.e. the Universe, self-adjusts to each perturbation. In the absence of novelty (free will), the cosmos seeks consistency at all costs.

Causality assumes the existence of spatiotemporal locality (here and now) and directionality (vectors): A → B. In fact, there are no vectors and nothing is local! (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

Nothing causes anything else; rather every event is a holistic response of the entire universe to itself. That response is instantaneous, but it manifests as a wave propagating at 300,000 km per second. The universe is one!

We’re not unfamiliar with this phenomenon. Since 1964 (Bell’s Theorem) we have known that ‘entangled’ particles constitute a system that evolves instantaneously without violating the light speed barrier.

But without linear causality, how do we explain the appearance of continuity among events? Turns out, conservation and correlation do the work of causation with none of the heart burn. Every event conserves as much of its inherited world as possible, consistent with its own subjective aim.

I am reminded of my second job moonlighting as a neurosurgeon. Note to self: “When operating on a brain tumor, remove all infected, but no uninfected, tissue.” Or to repurpose a contemporary advertising slogan,

“Only pay for what you need!”

Avocadoes: Nothing can ever be expunged. What! We just spent 10 minutes exploring a phenomenon that doesn’t exist? Seriously? Yes!

However justified the Dean of Students may be, she cannot expunge me. I exist and I cannot be made not to exist. Death is not inconsistent with existence. It’s part and parcel of it. To be expunged, on the other hand, is inconsistent with ever having been.

Avocadoes is a corollary of the Grandfather Paradox. If I expunge you, you have never been; but if you have never been, what am I expunging? ‘Do unto others…the bell tolls for you’, etc.

But what of the entirety? Parts cannot be expunged but what of the whole? Bertrand Russell held that the set of all events could not, itself, be an event but merely a collection, an inert receptacle. The only way to expunge the whole is to expunge, individually, each of its parts, but we have already determined that it is not possible to expunge any event. So the whole is safe!

Whitehead, on the other hand, held that the set of all events is itself an event. The cosmic event is entangled with each of its component events. Whitehead turns Russell on his head but with the same result: no event, specific or cosmic, can be expunged because every event is inextricably entangled with every other event.

The whole is inextricably entangled with each of its parts. It can no more be expunged than any of its members.

You are safe, you exist, your existence is atemporal and therefore eternal, even though you are not immortal. You are…period! Now you just have to find a way to live with yourself. 

Pseudo-Job: “God, treat me justly or expunge me!” Pseudo-God: “To do so, I’d have to uncreate the entire Universe, and frankly, you’re not worth it!”

God’s reasoning here is stunning. God does not cite Job’s virtues or his many good works. Instead, he crows about Leviathan, a monster! “Of all that’s under heaven, he is mine. I cannot keep silent about him, his incomparable valor…Even the gods live in fear of his majesty. They’re in terror of the ruin he wrecks…Over beasts of all kinds he is king.” (41: 4 – 26)

Leviathan is God’s pride and joy, not homo sapiens and certainly not pesky Job! So next time your little one asks, “Daddy, are there monsters under my bed?” Reassure her: “Yes there are, thank God!” Job is expendable, de trop; Leviathan is not…and therefore we are forever safe from expungement. Our existence is eternal…guaranteed. Is that fruit enough for you?