gwax's rumblings

When I see a num­ber or sequence, I have a ten­dency to decon­struct it into other num­bers or sequences; I do this with license plates, addresses, receipt stubs and all other man­ner of things. It is receipt stubs, specif­i­cally from restau­rants that I’d like to take as my dis­cus­sion nucleus today. Yesterday, for the first time, I got a steak and cheese from Theo’s Cheesesteak at the Rincon Center nearby and I hap­pened to be order num­ber 64. Upon see­ing 64, I inter­nally decon­structed it to 2⁶ and spent the sub­se­quent few moments think­ing gen­er­ally about pow­ers of two. Today, hav­ing enjoyed yesterday’s cheeses­teak, I decided to get another and went, again, to Theo’s where I, once again, hap­pened to be order num­ber 64. Performing the same decon­struc­tion to 2⁶ imme­di­ately reminded me that I had been given 64 yes­ter­day, allow­ing me to note that I had received the same num­ber from the same restau­rant, two days in a row. Coincidence: yes; syn­chronic­ity: I found it mean­ing­ful, so yes; evi­dence for numerol­ogy: oh come on, no.

This par­tic­u­lar syn­chronic­ity got me think­ing philo­soph­i­cally about the nature of sig­nif­i­cance and how we attach mean­ing to things. We humans are pat­tern find­ers, we do it very well and we tend to do it uncon­sciously. Patterns sim­plify the world and allow us to abstract things into eas­ier pieces. Since we use pat­terns to bet­ter under­stand tho world, we tend to do our best to fit things into pat­terns, even if it’s merely a coin­ci­den­tal pat­tern, which is fine because pat­terns do arise spon­ta­neously. People, in my expe­ri­ence, tend to con­flate the exis­tence of a pat­tern with the pres­ence of mean­ing. In the case of num­bers, I believe that the rel­a­tive ease of con­struct­ing arbi­trary pat­terns often leads peo­ple to attach mean­ing to things that are ran­dom in nature. I know that I’m guilty of attach­ing mean­ing where it isn’t due but, at least, I tend to be con­scious of and com­plicit in my misattributions.

The ques­tion now is whether or not I should get a cheeses­teak tomor­row, for pseu­do­science and all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under food & drink, musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.