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"] ♪