Of Squirrels and Philosophers

I've been especially busy the last few days since I've started preparing for Class War. Oh yeah, that's what they call the classification contest at the library conference. Cute, huh? This year's contest is actually Class War III. Mr. Phillips has competed in all of them so far. In the first Class War, his system came in third place. In Class War II, an improved (but still Lesser Perfect) system came in second. This year Mr. Phillips is determined to win first prize, armed with the GPS and a little help from you know who. Of course, I still think the man's totally out of his mind, thinking that I'm going to help him win this thing. I try to humor him, though. Even though I don't have any idea at all what I'm doing.

Today on my lunch break I was sitting in the park watching the squirrels. It occurred to me as I watched them that even animals must classify things, although their systems are much simpler than ours. I was thinking that those squirrels might have only two categories, "nut" and "not a nut". Must make life really simple. But then again, it might also make it really boring, at least for a human being. Maybe for a squirrel it's all right.

I suppose the complexity of life, or perhaps the ability to perceive complexity, is one of the things that makes life interesting. When you start to think about the whole of reality and the kaleidoscopic variety of things that compose it, it makes the world seem far richer than it might have seemed before. It also begins to seem a little overwhelming. It's like when you're the kid in the candy store, with enough money to buy one kind of candy, and you're suddenly confronted by more kinds of candy than you ever knew existed. It's thrilling and paralyzing at the same time. What do you choose? Or let's say you decide to try a different kind each week. Which one do you choose first? How do you know which one is your favorite until you've tried them all? Can you ever try them all? What if there are still other flavors that your local candy store doesn't carry? Maybe one of those is really your favorite? What if you never discover it?

I guess my point is that the sheer richness of the world is both a blessing and a curse. It's exciting to find oneself in such a teeming universe of multitudinous things, but it can also make one feel overwhelmed by options for potential experience and knowledge, and make one's actual experiences and knowledge seem a bit random. What you can do and see is always inadequate, a vanishingly small fraction of what there is. I'm beginning to think that philosophers and librarians are a bit alike in that they both seek somehow to comprehend the whole of reality, knowing that they can never actually know all there is to know (despite what children might believe about the librarian's omniscience), yet not content to limit themselves to one specialized subcategory of a subcategory of knowledge, the way today's university professors do. Philosophers (at least those who still seek to contemplate the whole of reality, rather than a sub-subcategory of it) and librarians (at least those who attempt to develop classification systems) would rather attempt to comprehend the whole thing, to try to figure out its dimensions and its structure, the relations among its various parts. Not that anyone--at least not anyone in his right mind--believes we can actually attain such knowledge completely. Omniscience is a divine quality, not a humanly possible one. Centuries ago, people used to think it was possible to master at least all human knowledge. Now we despair at even this task. But the philosopher and the librarian seek to comprehend the big picture, if not all the details, and perhaps metaphysics and classification are the closest we can ever approach to being real know-it-alls.

Conference Call

Now here's something weird. Mr. Phillips told me today that I am going to accompany him to a library conference next month. Hold on, that's not the weird part. He has entered us in a contest to be held as part of the conference... a classification system contest. It seems that Mr. Phillips has been entering this contest for the last couple of years and hasn't yet won, which of course he thinks is due to the fact that he has not yet perfected his Perfect Classification System (that was the Lesser Perfect one, after all). He hopes to have enough of the framework of the Greater Perfect System worked out in the next few weeks to be able to really wow them at the conference. Which, of course, means that I will have a ton of homework to do between now and then.

But don't worry, I intend to keep you posted every step of the way.

Complications

Classifying everything that exists is a lot more complicated than it seems. The branches of the tree get really intertwined. The thing I've come to realize is that things aren't always, or even very often, connected to other things by single, simple lines. They are often connected by many lines to many different things, in many different types of relationships. So it seems you can't really have a simple family tree. Take human relationships, for instance. I am descended from my mother and father, and their parents before them, and so on. But I am also connected to many other people, both through genetics and through social association, and I am connected to all these people in many different kinds of relationships, from friend to brother to coworker to random stranger passed on the street. Reality seems more like a big net than a tree, with the lines crossing every which way. This makes the whole project of classifying things infinitely more complex than it might seem at first glance. In a typical library classification system, each book has a definite place in the scheme, which corresponds to its physical location on the shelves. In a network (essentially, like the way the Internet is ordered), there are multiple links to and from any given entity, so its location in the scheme is relative rather than absolute. It's challenging enough, in this light, to trace all the relationships of just one thing, let alone everything that exists. I'm starting to wonder if maybe I've gotten in over my head.

Degrees of Separation

When trying to determine the relationship between any two entities in the GPS, one often runs into undecidable propositions. For example, try to figure out the relationship between the Holocaust and the Japanese monster movie Rodan. They can both be classed as things that happened on Earth in the 20th century, but is that all? How do you know if that's the only way their genealogies interconnect? For a classification system can also be looked at as a sort of genealogy of things, not necessarily in the literal sense of which things gave rise to others, but in a metaphysical sense, i.e. what categories and sub-categories of things exist, and how the different categories descend from each other in a giant tree. Just like in a family tree, you can determine how you're related to someone by tracing your respective lineages back far enough until you find a common ancestor. I read once that it's mathematically impossible for any two people on earth to be more distantly related than 50th cousin. Or it's sort of like how everyone in Hollywood can be located within six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. I haven't yet figured out how many degrees of separation are possible between any two entities, but it has to be a finite number, right? At any rate, even if the number is incomprehensibly large, it still boggles the mind to contemplate the fact that two disparate things like the mass murder of millions of people and a crazy Japanese monster movie coexist in the same universe. What is their common ancestor? How far is each of them from Kevin Bacon?

A Grand Scheme

If you're reading this, you must be a very faithful reader indeed, seeing that I haven't posted in just over two months. This is what happens when you become obsessed with inventing the perfect classification system. I didn't mean to abandon the blog. I neglected it for a few days once I became engrossed in my project, then pretty much forgot about it. Well, here we are again. There really isn't that much to fill you in on, except that I have developed some ideas of my own, and these ideas now seem a more interesting subject than my apprenticeship to Mr. Phillips per se. At least they are interesting to me, but I don't know how much of that is due to my obsession. But hey, it's my blog, so I can write about whatever I want, and nobody's making you read it, right?

For now I will just record this thought: Classifying things, I've come to realize, is more than just a way to attach labels to them. It's a way of understanding, or at least attempting to understand, what things are, and how different things relate to each other. In other words, it's sort of like a philosophical system, or at any rate it's an expression of a philosophical system. A classification system attempts to determine not only what a thing is, but also its place in the scheme of things. Although it may seem an arcane art, I think the reason classification has become so fascinating to me is that it makes everything in the universe, from the biggest to the smallest, to seem interconnected, all things part of one grand design. The classification system is merely a human attempt to interpret and describe that grand design, to embody it as faithfully as possible. And I've realized, too, that's why I fundamentally disagree with Mr. Phillips. I believe there is some grand structure, a scheme of things, whereas he seems to think either that there isn't, or that we can't know it, and that a classification scheme is just an artistic creation, like a symphony or a cathedral. I see it as more like a science, or at least a philosophy... in either case, it's a sincere attempt to arrive at the truth, which is to say the way things are. And the wondrous thing to me is that reality, in some mysterious way, seems to be something like a symphony or cathedral itself. Maybe it is quixotic to attempt to find out the outlines of this grand design, but to me that is the challenge and the allure of this project. Not that I believe that every little thing can be assigned a specific place in the scheme, by myself or any other mortal... but the belief that it does have a place in the overall structure, whether we can understand it or not--that it can be located somewhere in the grand scheme of things--this is what animates and underlies my quest.