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  • 3.1415926535897...9...

  • ...5?

  • Whatever. Start the episode.

  • ♪ [instrumental -- "Procession of the Nobles" by Rimsky-Korsakov] ♪

  • [movie audio:] "12:45. Restate my assumptions."

  • "1) Mathematics is the language of nature."

  • "2) Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers."

  • "3) If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge."

  • [Kyle audio:] This man with unkempt hair and sunken eyes is a reclusive New York mathematician

  • named Max Cohen, and he restates these assumptions ad nauseum.

  • And as unhinged as the character may seem, his assumptions appear reasonable.

  • Of course math is natural, and of course everything around us can be represented by numbers.

  • Everything -- our economy, our politics, our health -- depends on their reliability.

  • Quality is subjective, but quantity?

  • That's truth.

  • So, Max Cohen, who's closer than anyone on Earth to understanding that truth, must feel pretty secure.

  • Right?

  • Well...

  • [movie audio: smashing, screaming, high-pitched screeching]

  • And, yes, I know I didn't release this video on Pi Day,

  • but since I can't time-travel to...

  • ...Deal with it?

  • "Pi" is the debut film by Darren Aronofsky.

  • Aronofsky's body of work sprang from this source. Max, like so many other Aronofsky characters,

  • is in search of some form of transcendence -- some great, impossible feat.

  • Something that takes them beyond human experience and into the sublime.

  • And it always, always, always, always, always... goes badly.

  • Oh, yeah, um... Spoilers?

  • It's not like it's the most famous scene in the movie or anything.

  • Pi's aesthetics owe plenty to surrealist masterpieces, like "Un Chien Andalou."

  • Of course, in the mid-'90s, with grunge and MTV breaking molds,

  • early surrealists were in vogue.

  • The movie made famous use of SnorriCam, AKA the universal signifier of getting plastered,

  • plus high-contrast photography, which eliminates all grays,

  • giving it a scratchy, grainy look, which uneases.

  • And the result of all these creative choices is that "Pi" is a subjective film.

  • Everything the camera does is tied to Max.

  • Sometimes literally.

  • We are inside Max's head. We, too, seek truth as he seeks truth.

  • And with his home computer, he *finds* truth -- in the form of a 216-digit number.

  • And others want that truth. From Wall Street...to the synagogue.

  • [movie audio:] "The High Priest had one ritual to perform in the Holy of Holies. He had to intone a single word."

  • "That word..."

  • "...was the true name of God."

  • "So?"

  • "The true name, which only the Cohanim knew...was 216 letters long."

  • [Kyle audio:] So, has Max found God?

  • 'Cause if so...

  • God hurts.

  • [movie audio: screaming, wailing, drilling]

  • But why?

  • If we're all supposed to be closer to God, then why would proximity to Him hurt?

  • Common religious films talk about revelation as being this great loving force which overwhelms and uplifts.

  • But for Aronofsky, God is pain.

  • And, yes, this is a movie less about math than it is about religion.

  • Aronofsky's had a lifelong fascination with Abrahamic religion. It's even present in "Noah," as panned as it was.

  • But his interpretation of scripture is rather... esoteric, to put it lightly.

  • So...

  • What does Aronofsky believe?

  • [movie audio:] "You ever hear of Kabbalah?"

  • "No."

  • "Jewish mysticism."

  • So, a very quick rundown of esoteric Jewish theology.

  • Judaism teaches that there was a direct connection with God that was present at Creation

  • and was lost with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

  • At the Tower of Babel, we lost that connection further -- when God confused the language of the tower's architects.

  • This is why Judaism and its offshoots stress the importance of the Holy Word.

  • It's why, at Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, children are instructed to learn passages from the Torah in the original Hebrew

  • and not the vernacular.

  • And why many observant Jews refuse to write the full name of God -- to avoid taking the

  • holy name in vain.

  • God is present, but They are also absent.

  • As twentieth-century Kabbalah scolar Gershom Scholem wrote, "Once the fear of sullying God's sublimity..."

  • "...with earthly images becomes a paramount concern, less and less can be said of God."

  • "The price of God's purity is the loss of His living reality."

  • "To preserve the purity of the concept of God without loss of His living reality --"

  • "that is the never-ending task of theology."

  • God, in this view, isn't the old bearded man reaching down to touch Adam's finger.

  • God is Schrödinger's cat. God is the tree falling in the forest.

  • God is what Kant might call the "noumenon," something which, by definition, one can't experience

  • through phenomena.

  • Through the senses.

  • God *is* That Which Cannot Be Proven -- because if you could prove Them, then, by definition,

  • They would no longer be God.

  • That's the frustrating thing about theism, that necessary comfortability with the lack of answers.

  • I'm sure plenty of doubters have thrown their hands up in frustration the umpteenth time their questions

  • have been brushed off with, "...Eh. Mysterious ways."

  • I mean, yeesh, no wonder that guy put a drill to his head.

  • [movie audio: drilling sounds]

  • Of course, you can sit back smugly and say, "The answer's obvious. We can't explain God..."

  • "...because there is no God."

  • And that's a perfectly logical conclusion. I'm a nonbeliever, myself.

  • But Aronofsky...doesn't like easy answers.

  • He's taken that core theological question and reframed it...

  • ...as a secular question.

  • [movie audio:] "12:45. Restate my assumptions."

  • [Kyle audio:] One plus one equals two.

  • Even a child knows this.

  • To have an ant, and to add another ant, will produce two ants.

  • But first, don't I have to apply the value of "1" to this ant?

  • When I could easily call it 6 legs, 3 body segments, millions of cells, billions of molecules?

  • Shouldn't I first call the ant "one" before I can call these ants "two"?

  • Or is the "oneness" of the ant inherent to it?

  • Is the "twoness" of both ants inherent to them?

  • It's a long debate in advanced mathematics: Is math "created" or "discovered"?

  • Whether or not math is a feature of the universe or a tool created by humans in order to understand it.

  • I'm not even close to a mathematician, so I won't embarass myself trying to untangle that question.

  • Here are links to better, smarter YouTubers than me talking about it, so, go ahead, follow them.

  • But even in an everyday understanding of math, we know that these ten digits...

  • ...can't possibly express every quantity we know to exist.

  • It's why we have the concepts of infinity, why we have variables, why we have a special symbol for the

  • impossible but useful square root of negative one.

  • And why we used this innocuous Greek letter to represent a ratio we can't express

  • in a finite amount of digits.

  • Just because our system of quantification won't allow it.

  • But, still, we know math works -- simply because it works.

  • For example, Darren Aronofsky famously made this movie on a microbudget of about sixty thousand dollars.

  • He got that money by crowdsourcing individual hundred-dollar donations from friends and family.

  • So, that would be from...six hundred or so investors.

  • He promised these investors that he would pay them back a hundred and fifty dollars if the movie made money.

  • So, in order to pay his investors back, he would have to have made at least...

  • Ninety thousand dollars.

  • Which he did.

  • According to Box Office Mojo, he made 3.2 million.

  • And his investors were probably...very happy.

  • Restate our assumptions.

  • Sixty thousand divided by a hundred equals six hundred.

  • Six hundred times a hundred and fifty equals ninety thousand.

  • Ninety thousand...greater than...sixty thousand.

  • One plus one equals two.

  • And we know these to be true without ever having to interrogate the idea of "hundred," "thousand,"

  • multiplication, division... Math.

  • We just know that it's true because it is true.

  • The idea that there is an order to the universe that will keep its order regardless

  • of whether or not we are there to see it?

  • Isn't that faith?

  • [movie audio:] "Even though we're not sophisticated enough to be aware of it, there is a pattern."

  • "An order."

  • "Maybe that pattern is like the pattern in the stock market."

  • "The Torah."

  • "This 216 number--"

  • "T-T-T-Th-This is insanity, Max!"

  • "Or maybe it's genius!"

  • With "Pi," Aronofsky's proven the true place of theistic wisdom in an atheistic world.

  • Revitalizing religion with some of its mystery.

  • And revealing its true purpose.

  • Because the big questions, the ones that really matter to human life, are never as simple as, "Is there a God?"

  • or, "Where do we come from?" or, "Why is this happening?"

  • Those are simple questions. With logical, if unfulfilling, answers.

  • Maybe there's a better question.

  • And that better question might be the only one worth knowing.

  • "What does it mean to know?"

  • What do we gain by knowing?

  • Will we know when we know?

  • Given the limitations of experience, is knowing even a possibility?

  • Will we never know?

  • How do we know if we'll never know?

  • Know know, know-know-know, know know know?

  • Know-know, know-know know, know know know.

  • Know, know, know, know, know, no, know,

  • know, know-know, know, know, know, no.

  • Yeah.

  • I know.

  • ♪ [Hard 'n Phirm - "Pi"] ♪

3.1415926535897...9...

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