The God with a Sense of Humour
Last week was awful. My girlfriend, Athena, disappeared.
We met on an MSc course in economics. I used to help her with the maths. She really didn't have a clue about the theoretical part of the course, despite a strange, naive understanding - if that's the right word - of how economies work. I kept on nagging her to do some serious work on her basic skills, but she just laughed at me. Infuriating, but seductive!
Then a thought occurred to me. One of the alluring things about her were the stories she used to tell about her previous life. I assumed they were fabrications, but she assured me that they were all true. But ... perhaps they really were true? This would explain her disappearance.
She said she had come from the year 2056 and had spent the last year familiarizing herself with the present era. She enrolled as a student in a university and shacked up with me - all part of her research into the weird world of early 21st century academia, she told me. This was a joke I went along with: it was part of her charm. She was mysterious and sexy, and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
She said she couldn't remember the details of her future life, just vague impressions. One of these was what she called the God with a sense of humour hypothesis - she thought this summed up the gist of the fundamental idea which was the basis of all of science in 2056. Apparently, this was the only hypothesis which fitted all the known facts, particularly the apparent arbitrary oddness of the laws of nature.
In about 2036 two scientific principles migrated into mainstream culture with far-reaching effects. The first was the idea of an absolute limit to the complexity of ideas that the human brain could deal with. The second was the principle that exact laws of nature were unobtainable in the sense that they necessarily needed ideas more complex than this limit.
There was also a problem with fake expertise, and its far more sinister offshoot, fake artificial expertise. This came to prominence after the 2008 financial crisis when financial ideas became so unwieldy that they drifted free of their foundations. There was a similar, but far more serious, crisis in medicine soon after. This problem, and the two principles from science, led to what was known as - and Athena thought she had this phrase exactly - the art of enlightenment. Striving for perfect knowledge was a waste of time, so, instead, the aim should be creating practical knowledge, or works of art to help make sense of the world in as easy, pleasant, and effective a manner as possible.
This led to some dramatic changes. Instead of blaming children who found their schoolwork too difficult, extensive research was undertaken to reduce cognitive strain, or to make subjects simpler and more aesthetically appealing. Similar efforts were made with more advanced ideas: for example, general relativity was transformed into a user-friendly bit of software that even children could understand. The new version was formally equivalent to the original, but far more accessible.
The God with a sense of humour hypothesis was part of this process. The idea of a God laughing at us seemed more accessible and so better than the old laws of nature. Instead of grappling with mathematics, physicists devoted themselves to trying to understand God's sense of humour. Stand-up comedians started to compete with differential equations, and the comics tended to win because of the insight they provided into God's sense of humour.
This change had several far-reaching effects. Universities stopped providing degree courses for the masses because the content of old-style degree courses was just too easy and commonplace. A lot of it, like general relativity, had entered mainstream culture, and some of it was accessed on a just-in-time basis when needed.
Progress at the frontier of most disciplines accelerated sharply when these changes happened. The fact that the basics are so much easier meant that there were many more people working at the cutting edge, and the fact that they got there quicker meant that there was more time to work on problems. The old idea that experts spend ten years acquiring their expertise is still true, but the amount of useful expertise you could acquire in your ten years was much, much more. Cancers, heart disease, and unplanned death in general, are now largely conquered.
Ah, there’s my wife Athena over there. My memories of our meeting are very hazy. I think I must have started writing this account shortly after meeting her because it makes little sense to me now. Athena tells me she went back in time and rescued me from an earlier era when human knowledge was difficult to absorb, and they had special institutions to indoctrinate the young.
Athena said that the deal when she arranged her trip to the past was that her minders would come and take her back after a year or two. There were worries that someone like me might persuade her to stay, but she'd asked them to force her back, against her will if necessary. Fortunately, she must have persuaded them to go back for me.