Learn, unlearn, forget

The Man from Earth is a 2007 independent science-fiction film directed by Richard Schenkman and written by Jerome Bixby. In it, at his farewell gathering, Professor John Oldman reveals to his colleagues that he is actually more than 14,000 years old and has moved through the whole of human history.

John was born in the Stone Age, yet he was not aware of it until the nineteenth century, when archaeologists and anthropologists began to classify prehistory chronologically. “No matter how long a man lives, he can never be ahead of time. His knowledge is limited to that of the wisest man of his age.”

The passing of time implies a constant process of learning, unlearning and forgetting. This holds true for a 14,000-year-old human being like John just as it does for an 80-year-old. A human being outlives himself many times over, adapting through cycles of learning and unlearning, until he finally becomes obsolete, overtaken by the course of events.

What would happen if we were immortal? We would be condemned to an endless cycle of learning and unlearning. We would possess no more knowledge than the most knowing, nor would we be wiser than the wisest.

The dialogue that sparked these notes:

—A guy with your mind… you must have studied a lot.
—I have ten degrees, including all of yours.
—That makes me feel a little Lilliputian.
—That’s over a span of 170 years. I took my degree in biology at Oxford in 1840, so I’m a bit out of date. The same in other fields. I can’t keep up with everything that comes along. Nobody can, not even in their own specialty.
—So much for the myth of the all-knowing, superintelligent immortal.
—I see what you mean, John. No matter how long a man lives, he can’t be ahead of time. He can’t know more than the most knowing man of his day.
—Living 14,000 years didn’t make me a genius. I just had time.
—Time. We can’t see it, we can’t hear it, we can’t weigh it or measure it in a laboratory. It is a subjective sense of becoming what we are instead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The Hopi see time as a landscape existing before and behind us, and we move through it, slice by slice.
—Clocks measure time.
—No, clocks measure themselves. The objective referent of a clock is another clock.
—Interesting. But what has it got to do with John?
—He might be a man who lives outside of time as we know it.

The Man From Earth, 00:34:00