Is Life Digital Or Analogue?

Note: the following article was originally written, for a personal blog I used to run, on 4 June 2008, and it has been brought up-to-date and edited for this site.

It was when I remembered, momentarily, that today had been a big day for me many years ago, that it got me thinking about life in general. (The event in question, the full details of which are sort of irrelevant to this post, was when I proposed to my first wife.)

Many people would call that day “auspicious” or “significant”, because the things we do actually do happen on one specific date – you don’t, for example, propose to somebody across a time span of several days, as “popping the question” takes a few seconds at most.

But was it really that particular day that was significant, as it only represented the culmination of many previous events, decisions, feelings, etc?

The decision to propose clearly took time – friendship and feelings had to develop, I had to weigh up whether this was the right person for me (I obviously thought it was at the time, but later on I found I had been badly mistaken, as I touch on here), and of course I had to pluck up the courage to ask (as no man likes to be rejected, however certain they may feel that the answer will be “yes”).

There is, needless to say, a lot more that went into that question than the few items I’ve listed here, but they’re enough to make my point, I think.

It appears to us that life is a series of “digital” events, i.e. things happen in discrete, almost on/off chunks – we did this, we said that, we went there, or in this example, I proposed on that day.

But maybe life is really “analogue”, i.e. a constantly changing series of circumstances and feelings, and the human brain only recalls what it considers to be “points of interest” along this never-ending line, creating the illusion of discrete events.

(If you think the term “never-ending” is overstating it, consider that while you do have a specific moment of conception, the sperm and egg that fused together to create what became you came from two other people, and so on, back through many generations. Likewise, when you die, you may lose consciousness, permanently, but the atoms that constitute your body continue on, in some form or another, since at one level, matter can neither be created nor destroyed.)

I obviously can’t really remember every single thought, action, and feeling that led up to my proposal, given that the event in question took place around 40 years ago, but they obviously happened somewhere along the way, over the course of several months.

And our language is full of metaphors that describe life in this way, such as life having “peaks and troughs”, “ups and downs”, “highs and lows”, or being like a “roller coaster”.

Maybe the roller coaster analogy is more appropriate than we might first think.

On the way up the inclines, especially the very first one, we are full of anticipation and excitement, it feels good, we have time to look around as the speed is slow and so we have the illusion of being in control.

But then once we hit the top and the descent begins, we realize we have no control at all, we get this nauseous feeling in the pit of our stomach, we’re part excited by it but also part terrified, everything’s a blur, and we may want to get off but can’t …

… but then we know that there will be another incline soon, and thus the cycle continues for several more iterations.

And as with life, the roller coaster ride does end, in one of two ways – you can jump off mid-ride (which would be fatal in many cases, of course, and in life, that is what we call suicide), or you can wait for the ride to stop (which is not something you can control, and which is often how death catches us).

Your recollections about this ride will very much depend on where you are at the time – on an up or on a down – and how that makes you feel, but you are clearly thinking and feeling throughout the entire ride.

Some times you may focus on the excitement and anticipation of going up, at others you may focus on the sickness and terror you feel when things are going downhill, while at others you may focus on those transitional moments between the ups and downs (or downs and ups), when you can sense that something big is about to change in your life.

But every single second of that ride is what makes you who you are, and I have no doubt that all of this is stored somewhere in the depths of our memory – the only question is, can we access that memory when we want to?