Life is GPS

I am heading out this morning for my first face-to-face meeting with Robert, a long time internet interlocutor.  His home town is what passes for ‘rural’ in Massachusetts. I expect to see lots of stone walls and wooden fences, perhaps some family farms, and more than a few roadside produce stands. Covered bridges, dirt roads, cows and horses, lions, tigers, and bears – not so much!

I need to travel about 50 miles Northwest of my Boston suburb and there are a myriad of routes I could follow. But I’m unfamiliar with the roads in Robert’s neighborhood, so the first thing I do, of course, is enter his address in my GPS.

For the next 90 minutes, every move I make, every turn I take, will be scripted. All I need to do is sit back and follow instructions. But sometimes that’s easier said than done.

I miss a turn, then there’s road work ahead that my GPS doesn’t know about and then several temporary detours. (Highway reconstruction is 24/365 in MA.) But all is not lost. Each time I fail to execute a directive, for whatever reason, GPS calculates a revised optimal route based on my new  ‘current location’. A new set of instructions follows. The ideal continually adjusts to the actual. Who could ask for anything more?

Whether you believe in God or Gaia, Fate, Destiny, or Chance, ‘we though many throughout the earth’ and possibly ‘across the universe’, all have a common destination and there exists a unique, optimal route for each of us to reach that destination from our disparate present locations.

Of course, we are free to follow that route…or not. We think we know better: “We’ll follow our own path, thank you…and make a few unscheduled stops along the way.” No problem! Or we try to follow the instructions to the letter but ‘error and infrastructure’ continually force us off route.

Western philosophy has been dominated by the free will/determinism dichotomy. We’re so used to this debate that we find it hard to imagine that other models might be possible. For example, few would argue that events occur randomly. A periodically persistent alternative, on the other hand, holds that there are a variety of pre-set paths available to us and that we are totally free to choose among them. This idea shows up in strange places; to name just a few:

• Parmenides of Elea (On Nature) - the father of Western phil. 

• Paul of Tarsus (Ephesians) – much of Pauline and Johannine literature harks back to the ideas of the pre-Socratics.

• Robert Frost (The Road not Taken) 

• Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness) – We are 100% free; freedom is our essence, but it can only be exercised within limits established by the material world. 

• Hugh Everett (Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) – Every ‘possible’ road is not only permitted…but taken! Robert Frost, meet Jean-Paul Sartre.

  
  

In On Nature, Parmenides (5th century BCE) wrote about “the much speaking path of the goddess that carries everywhere unscathed the man who knows.” Much speaking? Parmenides is anticipating James Joyce (Ulysses): “signatures of all things I am here to read.” 

Paul extends Parmenides’ concept of one optimal path to include multiple acceptable paths, “prepared by God so that we may step into them.” Frost follows Paul. Sartre goes further. We create our own paths, and everything is available to us, subject to the restrictions imposed by the material world.

Finally, Everett brings the snake full circle. He is the head of the ouroboros. According to Everett everything is not only permitted but realized: the universe follows all possible paths in parallel. Hence, his ‘many, many, many worlds’ - too many for many tastes.

“Along this route there are many signs that what-is (e.g. YHWH, Exodus 3: 14) is ungenerated and non-perishable.” The grid, aka the logos, is eternal. “Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, altogether, one, continuous.”  (Parmenides)                             

These cosmologies intersect in the technology of GPS. A web of highways and byways constitute our available paths and we build more as needed. We are totally free to pursue any route, but GPS will point out the optimal route…and keep pointing it out, even as that route changes along the way. 

The opening line of the Gospel of John nails it: “In the beginning (or at the foundation) is the logos.” The ‘grids’ of Parmenides, Paul, Frost, Sartre and Everett are all built on the pre-existent order of things, the logos that makes GPS possible. So welcome to the newest version of the world’s oldest technology! 

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Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government (1338–39) spreads across Siena’s city walls as a web of ordered streets and winding roads, an early vision of the civic ‘grid’ that anticipates how GPS embodies the eternal logos guiding us through chaos.