You Are Not Reading This

I went to see the movie Inception with Geo tonight. If you feel like having your mind blown, or you’re just sick of having some speck of grasp on reality, definitely see it. The premise of the movie is that a bunch of dudes (and the wonderful Ellen Page) construct dreams, and then enter them and go messing around in them. Mind trip.

So I came home thinking about paradoxes. You know, “a true statement or group of statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition” (thanks, Wikipedia!) For instance, if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you’d never be born which would then mean that you could never go back in time because you’ve killed your grandfather and you don’t exist. But if you didn’t exist, you wouldn’t go back in time to kill your grandfather, and you would still be born.

Yeah, I’m deep like that.

Okay, so I’m thinking about all this after the movie. I’ve got all these circular logic thoughts running a marathon in my brain, and just when I start to get to the point where I’ve almost lost my mind and have started considering that I am, in fact, living in a dream within a dream, and I’ve briefly grasped the concept of infinite space and time, Geo starts talking to me about skiing movies. And he asks who I want to invite skiing with us next year.

I almost screamed “Next year?! How do you know that next year isn’t actually tomorrow!? If we make plans to go skiing, what happens if we DON’T go skiing? What will happen to the world then?!” and other toooootally normal questions.

Let’s get something straight here. I’m no mathematician. I never exactly thrived in Science, either. I like literature and ideas rather than finite truths. I’m not that big on “The Right Answer” (as my high school math tests will prove). And every once in awhile, I possess the ability to blow my own mind because of this. I don’t mean that I get all existential and go pondering the meaning of life, but I do appreciate a really awesome moment of “Um, wait. Let me get this straight…” and then spend a handful of minutes considering things like the Butterfly Effect. The problem is actually saying these things out loud to people. Especially people smarter than me. I’d hate to explain my idea of, say, how big the universe is to some brainiac who‘s studied Astronomy since he was wearing Jetsons underoos. I prefer meddling around in my own head and trying to figure out my own meaning of what I know and believe.

What do I know and believe? I know that I know nothing, and I believe I’m correct.