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I am large, I contain multitudes

I put on a pair of unmatched socks the other day; it was early in the morning and after my shower I only turned on the light in the hall. When I reached into the sock drawer in the still poorly lit bedroom I grabbed the first thing that my fingers found -that’s usually pretty safe, I think: I try to sort and match things when I take them from the drier to make things easier for myself. I live alone; there are no guard rails, so mistakes are uncommon, but they do occur.[i]

Still, it got me wondering about mistakes. I’m pretty sure we all make them: we accidently use the little coffee spoon to eat our breakfast cereal some mornings, or forget the password for an app on the phone and then get locked out of it because of internet security concerns. I sometimes even button up my shirt in a hurry only to discover I don’t have enough buttonholes left.

I mean we’re all homines errantes aren’t we? Okay, in deference to the other half of humanity, some of us are mulieres errantes (women who make mistakes); I haven’t studied Latin since high school so no doubt those Classical scholars who have deigned to read this are probably shaking their heads: I’ve likely got the Latin for the aphorisms wrong (yet another mistake, I suppose). But, as Walt Whitman wrote: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’. Of course, Seneca, a more practiced Classist than either of us, likely said it best: ‘Errare humanum est’… although he also added in a postscript: ‘Perseverare autem diabolicum’ (to persist in that error is diabolical). Humans, it seems, can’t win even at their own game.

All the same, I am troubled as much by the why of mistakes as the what. I mean, misspelling a word is one thing, but forgetting where you parked your car could be fatal on a cold, prairie winter night. I’m pretty sure that many of our mistakes would not augur well for the success of our species. So why did making errors get not get eliminated by natural selection?

Still, do subatomic particles -whatever they are- make mistakes? I mean they seem to be rather probabilistic at times -rather quantum mechanical I suppose- but hey, let those among them who are without issues cast the first leptons.

And how about neutrinos? Are they actually stable? I mean what’s all this about oscillating between different flavours, or something? Do the younger crowd sometimes lie about their tastes if they’re questioned on the streets they usually speed through heedless of the signs? Uhmm, not being at all au courant with the Standard Model (or any kind of thinking on the subject), I can only assume that they figure they don’t have to stop. And carrying the thought even further, are we not composed of, or at least influenced by, a lot of those tiny little Miss Goody Two-Shoes things?

Maybe it’s an unforgivable error to mix the premises of Logic with atomic theory when it comes to mistakes, but surely if P implies Q, and P is true, then so is Q: a modus ponens. Unfortunately, only a few things remain from my Philosophy courses in university, so those are now unreliable and like neutrinos, only weakly adherent to whatever neuronal rules continue to remain functional in my head. Still…

I suppose what I’m really asking is if our tiniest component parts are only loosely sworn to an ineluctable code of conduct, does that explain the behavior of us Big People as well? Is that why we are allowed to dabble in mistakes like them -well even if I never catch them at it… I mean where, and why, does it stop? Is it because we’re too clumsy  to manage most of our own atoms, or is this just a maturational stage we have to go through before we’re allowed to drive? I have so many questions…

Although I hesitate to draw again on whatever fast-decaying philosophical principles I once hid somewhere in a now calcified neurological circuit, I have to wonder if the dividing line is teleogy. Atoms, and probably even molecules, do not on their own, exhibit agency –purpose- whereas I, as an unwitting user of a whole big bunch of them, think I do. I mean it takes a village to raise a child; it requires context to nurture a mistake.

I don’t usually intend to err, but there again arises the shadow of purpose, doesn’t it? In this context, it seems to me that even asking why suggests there has been a deviation from an expected direction, a different result from what had been anticipated. Both anticipation and expectation are hallmarks of teleology.

The fact that we feel we can establish a binary of right and wrong, and that it can vary from society to society also suggests that there are no immutable laws handupable from below. We are not just big atoms; we have choices…

So what are we to make of mistakes? Is Biology actually reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry, or do we living things exist in a sort of liminal realm where mistakes sometimes help us to change our paths? In fact, maybe that is what evolution is all about.

Maybe we can actually wear our component parts as sort of ill-fitting undergarments that we can change if they begin to itch. Okay, maybe not change -more like wash, or something. That’s a bit of a reach, I suppose, but for an organism to adapt to any changing conditions to which it might be exposed, it has to explore whatever options are available. That’s probably why we didn’t go down with the dinosaurs; why we still don’t sport gills; why we now have opposable thumbs and cheeky arm muscles so we can fight stuff. Are those really mistakes?

I think it’d be incredibly boring to be nothing more than a bunch of similar molecules pretending they are getting along, or maybe a salt crystal, stuck with the same old like-minded neighbours with unfair rules about partner bonding, and forever dreaming for a bit of water so it could drift off and meet someone new.

I wonder, though, would that be a mistake…?

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/a-new-theory-suggests-mistakes-are-an-essential-part-of-being-alive

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