No one’s ever said that before?!?!
A common theme in living life is the slow, dawning realization that there are 6.6 billion other people out there, and that we are almost exactly alike. It’s hard to look at humanity and see yourself as something better than an ant, never mind being the best at something. And yet, everybody thinks they’re special. And also, we all think we’re special. That special little ant that, well, you know the song. Everyone the same in our uniqueness and all that. I believe that it’s to a large extent an illusion.
Look at sentences. Some time ago the writer of dinosaur comics wrote something pretty weird that, out of some perverse curiousity or just regular curiousity, he proceeded to google. And no i don’t remember what it was. But he was surprised that nobody had ever said it before, or at least google didn’t know about anybody ever having said it before. It struck me that this didn’t seem nearly as odd as he thought it was. That i say things all the time that, even if the basic concepts are very similar if not identical to what other people have said, are unique in their phrasing. And you do too, i’m pretty sure. And i spent a while preparing this post, trying to figure out an equation that shows how huge a number it is that is the number of possible sentences. (Ha! Try googling that.)
Turns out that, as part of an artistic collaboration between Edge.org and the Serpentine Gallery in London, Steven Pinker did it for me. I highly recommend taking a look at that picture, it’s worth about one hundred quintillion words. The art exhibit is named “Formulae for the 21st Century” and it’s both fantastic and a fantastic illustration of the point i’m trying to make. I highly recommend taking a look around the exhibit, (scroll down) or maybe following this guide from Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, one of the contributors. It’s got contributions from all over the spectrum, from life scientists to musicians. But i digress.
Pinker came to the conclusion that there are approximately one hundred quintillion (1020) possible sentences that we can utter or understand. That’s a lot. That is so many sentences. Let’s think about it for a second: we talk at about, let’s say 4 syllables per second is accurate enough for the scale we’re talking about. One second for every two words is fair. An average spoken sentence in Pinker’s estimation is 10 words, so 5 seconds. So Speaking really fast without pause, we get about 12 sentences per minute. So 720 sentences per hour. So 17280 words per 24 hour day. So 6,307,200 sentences per year. At that rate it would still take 1.5×1013 years for someone to run out of new ways of saying things. That’s 15,000,000,000,000 years. That’s fifteen trillion years. That’s more than one thousand times longer than the universe has existed years. And, as Steve (i wonder if he signed the petition?) points out, the number of possibly utterable sentences roughly corresponds to the number of possibly thinkable thoughts. Actually, that’s not even close to true, and it’s not what he says. The equation is roughly similar, but it’s an exponential equation, and people have a notoriously limited speaking vocabulary when compared even to their written.
When you think about all the concepts that you have available to you, concepts that are variously grounded in memory and imagination, how so many of your concepts are so ripe for being recombined with with others to form new and interesting thoughts. How every thought you have is new and increases your store of concepts, even if just a little. How your thoughts are composed of innumerable concepts and permutations. It starts to become apparent that that number doesn’t even approach the number of thoughts a person is capable of. And while there are an almost unimaginable number of possible thoughts that even one person is capable of having, when you think about how complex is the structure we call ‘I’ at the center of it, made up of so many thoughts of ourselves, understandings of the world, pieces of knowledge, attitudes and etc. and etc. et. et. and!
We are the generalizing species, it’s one of our greatest skills. The ability to see a group of things and immediately notice what they have in common. Oh, but how they love their britney spears. Oh, how we look down on them. They They They. Aside from how irritating it is that it is the negative things that we notice when we notice generalities in ourselves and others, that people most often bring up our similarities in some kind of despair at the swarming nature of the masses instead of how far and fast we’ve come. Aside from that, it’s an illusion brought on by our natural tendency to generalize. There are so many different possible ways for each of us to be that the fact that any of us have anything in common is a fucking miracle. It is only the fact that people don’t strive for greatness and don’t pay attention to those that their closest to that we can harbor this illusion of uniformity. Think about the possible combinations and permutations two people can get up to. So just go out and love somebody is the point.
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