Immortality and the Problem of Time

immortality and the problem of time:

time means change. a least bit of matter changes its state constantly. and what is immortality but the preservation of self? if we assumed that a least bit of matter kept changing, never to return to its original state, then that would mean immortality is impossible. we would all have died a long time ago, what we were originally lost forever.

do people really change? it is an oft asked question. you might assume that if the answer is no, then that would mean there is an immortal self, always the same. surely if people really change, that would imply the death of the original person?

but if we assume a least bit of matter may revisit its original state, then immortality is a possible case. the quest for immortality would therefore be to develop a program where every now and then each least bit of matter is returned to its original state.

the other question is about growth. there is no such thing as real growth. there are a finite number of least bits of matter so growth cannot be physical. growth is about learning.

lastly, what if an overzealous program of restoring what was originally resulted in eternal return, that is, a total reset to first time that resulted in an eternal repeat of events? how to protect the linear flow of time? if everything becomes a repeat, at least, there are certain events we would prefer to repeat and not the horrible experiences of the past which should remain once through events.

CLEARCHARGE

Animus, Change and Affect

animus, change and affect:

let us begin with an aside, as to the schizophrenic patient who "hears voices", when he has calmed down, been released from mental hospital, it would seem that medical science, in the form of a patient psychiatrist, who it seems, always loves to ask the question, "do you still hear voices?" at every meeting, explains that the "wiring" in your brain has misfired or such, and that these are, in fact, hallucinations, not that you actually hear anyone else really talking to you. well, in retrospect, this just smacks of a form of solipsism, it is put that you couldn't possibly be talking to anyone else, it's all in your own mind, well, by induction, how could i possibly be talking to him, or her? what if the psychiatrist is just a "hallucination"?

i have posited, repetitively, i'm afraid, about the fundamental fixed, motionless solidity of reality, least bits of matter, which i will refer to as a "bit" henceforth, and so on. the sense of time is derived from the changes of state that bits "experience". change is fundamental, time could be described as an "experience". again, as i have repetitively stated before, "time" can thus flow in many directions at the bit level, "forwards", "backwards", "left", "right", etc., a bit can "re-experience" a previous state, e.g. a visual bit has been red before, it isn't now, but it will be again, just blink.

but to call it "matter", i have realized, is to convey as sense of "non-person". what if, so to speak, everything is "alive", has an "animus" or personality? do we all like each other? do we not copy those whom we do and refuse to mimic those we do not? when my neighbour was likeable, i copied him, when he wasn't, i didn't. so thus, sometimes, when a neighbouring bit of the same type is agreeable, its "affect" on the bit's change of state is powerful, when it is alien, or hostile even, its affect is not and the bit doesn't follow its neighbour's change of state. that is to say, bits possess a type of personal reaction to their neighbours.

CLEARCHARGE

Inducing Change

inducing change:

the least bit of matter, as discussed before, indivisible, packed together with its neighbouring contiguous least bits of matter, going through uniform, discrete changes in state. at the fundamental level time is discrete. real space is composed of least bits of matter chained together, forever fixed in position.

of course, there are different divisions of matter. you could almost consider each in their own dimension, so to speak, even though different types are actually mixed together, space is variegated. and i suppose like affects like, generally speaking.

change in state of a least bit of matter may affect change in state of neighbouring least bits of matter to a greater or lesser extent, though perhaps not at all in some cases. it may effect similarity. it may be a forceful steer, not inducing a similar series of changes in state, but definitely altering what theoretically would have happened otherwise if it were not present. some states may be so powerful, so energetic, if you like, that they induce a whole ripple effect of change.

states can, if you like, vibrate in space, as if they were a fluid moving object, or gently flow around, unless disturbed or dissipated.

a least bit of matter may revert to a past state. if you like, time is going forwards and backwards all over the place all the time, at the fundamental level. it may be that the reversion happens on its own, so to speak, in some cases.

sometimes, something new, or relatively new, is required in order to disrupt a stasis, so to speak, that exists in space. it is breaking free a prisoner of time, if you like.

the strength of affect may be related to how different the states are becoming and how fast the changes are happening.

of course, posit that some least bits of matter may never change state at all. they serve as a time anchor, if you like.

CLEARCHARGE

Time Discrete or Continuous?

time discrete or continuous:

time is reflected by changes in state in least bits of matter. if time is discrete, any change in the state of a least bit of matter is a discrete change. a least bit of matter "jumps" from one state to to another.

the concept of continuous time is far harder to think about, and perhaps therefore is false. in this concept there are infinitesimal time intervals for each state and therefore as the time interval tends toward zero, this means, in a sense, that a least bit of matter never has a "still" or definable state, does it not? which is not easy to imagine.

now, even if time is discrete, it may seem "continuous", because the time interval of each state is very little.

CLEARCHARGE

On Size and Weighting the Issue

on size and weighting the issue:

the key issue in the future is whether anything continues or not so that what is not apparent might not happen at all. this is to say that that that is not well remembered may not even exist metaphysically and so that there is no need to dwell on it. what is past may recur only slightly in the future as a shaded repeat like an alternative timeline.

who is she? what will she do next? what is real and what is apparent is that she continues to say the least.

the size of the problem illustrated by the past for decades yet is what concerns mental convolutions. that is to say that i can yet still remember, whether fortuitously or not. lack of sufficient memory blocks further thought sometimes and only fragments of voices or mood of the past may remain.

weight that large then and the alternative nothing. am i prepared still?

clearly the size of mental capacity is what concern. what of my physical dexterity and emotional tolerance? who i am is clear to me. very much is the case that i do not dwell on the future but mayhap my present is certainly not wondrous to think of.

CLEARCHARGE

Theory Has Constraints

theory has constraints:

post partum in excelsis, motive interest can be explained by short term demand which naturally expires, in short success or solution might be adequately provable by equation or formula over time.

in the event that nothing can explain duration, only that the past prevails and becomes more significant over time, not that time explains everything but which that happened.

to sense what is not observable exactly is a criteria of existence and what is it all about anyway?

Se + Li + So + Re < WHOLE

CLEARCHARGE

A Person and the Other

a person and the other:

the line of futile questioning goes something like this, why do i exist, of course, there is no explanation for why you or reality exists, you simply must accept that it does, that you exist, that other people exist, there is no why. for when does it make sense to ask why? the usual answer to why, actually, is that something came before, that before C and D came A and B. to think of all that exists in real space may boggle the mind, for you only knew so much at the beginning of time, barely yourself, actually.

in my case, as it began at time zero, a mist covered landscape, stones, trees, blue sky, dim light, walking forwards, in a dress, thinking, the sound of my name, this is my story. to deal with the personal in science seems almost a contradiction in terms, the bias in 20th Century AD science is that all is impersonal and that the same applies everywhere, only quantum mechanics seems to accept that the personal matters. in considering real space, composed of chains of least bits of matter, it would be simplistic to quickly divide up the total map of reality into personal zones, everyone in their own personal bubble space, space could look like a chained mass of soap bubbles, each soap bubble representing a person.

now very much hangs on the question, what is a person? now, i could see a lot at the beginning, i thought thoughts in my head, and what i saw was connected to my head. of course, i cannot see to infinity, at some point my vision ends. assume particle traffic between points in my own personal bubble space is high, internal communication is high. so what limits could there be between two people? the range of personal light? the range of personal think matter?

why are there many people? well, why are there many least bits of matter?

i admit i cannot remember thinking about other people at the beginning, at time zero. i held only myself in mind. that the population seemed ever higher with time was true, beyond what most people could think about. that other people are different in some ways seems true, if only in that they could not be the same as you yourself.

CLEARCHARGE

Here Was I

here was i:

here was i in a muddle. not more than 10 seconds ago the thought lost. by no means cursed with poor memory but still agitated by this loss, a loss that made me feel i was losing my mind and not just a fragment of mental tissue, i felt done under, under the way i should be on, under a cloud of discontent and misfortune.

the struggle to remember has waylaid me often, a simple game of hopscotch showed me the way, a way that has found me often in tenuous circumstances, the mainstream of life and its glories bypassing me in a stroke it would seem.

the course of time is like a tide struggling against the headwind of the past. when the new is lost, what time period would it seem?

perhaps the struggle only engenders thoughts about the difficulty in mind and is not particularly helpful. the way ahead is fortuitously guided, like it or not, by the warnings of past mistakes, perhaps better in some cases by the glories of the past won.

CLEARCHARGE

The Repeat in Time

the repeat in time:

here we assume again that a repeat in state of least bit of matter in space happens. this in itself is not a huge theoretical leap of faith, the world seems stable, the same colours, the same variety of things, etc.

it has been put that perhaps time is an infinite loop, that everything returns to what it was at time zero, called "eternal return". first of all, i doubt that anyone thinks this desirable, to imagine that we are all doomed to repeat every one of our mistakes, never to improve upon the past, this would be a horrible fate. second of all, could a repeat of the entire pattern of every least bit of matter in real space happen?

there are two theoretical concepts around the idea of infinity that we have to deal with. could there be, for some least bits of matter, an infinite number of states, like as are there, an infinite number of shades of blue or red? does each state of a least bit of matter last for a fixed interval, or period, each time? for example, if you like, theoretically, does Least Bit of Matter at Coordinates 0,0,0 always hold its State 14B for 0.005338 seconds, no matter what is going on beside it with its neighbours? put this way, it seems unlikely, does it not?

the question of this interval for which each least bit of matter has a certain state is rather crucial. surely its strength of affect over its neighbouring least bits of matter depends on this, the longer the interval, the greater the affect? and if we assume that the interval is variable surely a whole repeat pattern of every least bit of matter in space, over a greater interval in, if you like, Universal Time, is impossible for a period of, say, one hour?

CLEARCHARGE

Power over Time

power over time:

and in the beginning there was that that was original, and really, these are probably the most common things in the world that we take for granted, the trees, the sky, and the human, etc.

and soon enough for all the original people who existed from time zero, once it had been noticed that time passed, there came the question of immortality, whether anything would perish in the future. now there is the argument that anything that truly exists in real space cannot cease to exist, that something will always fill its space, but the question is whether through time, something will change so much never to return to its original state that it could be considered as having "died". thus the question, "Am I original?"

the point about things being "original" is that these things were not "created", they always were, always existed. but creation soon followed, and some things began on day one. on day one, people did things, people discovered things, and what that means is that people therefore "created" things. now it's obvious to us in the present day that people can share things, that reality is interconnected in real space, signals are passed through real space all the time. data flows back and forth. we have scientific models of electromagnetic radiation and electric current, whatever the explanation, that communication is possible is generally accepted.

what that meant in the early days of time is that if someone did something or saw something, that meant that someone else somewhere else in real space might be able to do or see the same thing. this is what real "creation" boils down to. if one person was originally human, someone else might be able to be human too.

there is the present science/religion dichotomy but i would suggest that both represent extreme opinions about reality such that they can only contradict each other. science does not contain much room for god and much religion perhaps rather exaggerates the power of god or gods.

a part of the problem with the word "god" is that it has always been an emotional word. it naturally implies great power. it is innate in the impact of the word itself. when people first heard and thought about the word "god", it implied things like omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, to borrow from religion.

whether we would consider people as gods or not, given the natural implications of this word, nevertheless, everyone has "created" something since time zero or indeed been the original source of something. the first human is the "god" of human, the first person to see a house is the "god" of houses, the first person to see and eat an apple is the "god" of apples, and so on. even if we do not accept the existence of gods, nevertheless there is always someone who is the original person who did something or saw something or is something.

my concept is that everyone has some degree of power and everyone was a first about something. does this mean that some people have huge powers compared to others that would qualify them as "gods" in the traditional sense? and power over what? it needs to be realized a person in real space is a large concern. how much power can anyone have over other people elsewhere in real space?

and what of modern science and technology? a lot of science seems to assume that somehow science and its laws always rather existed and that people only discovered or accepted them. posit that great scientists were actually gods that created science! great inventors were gods of technology!

let us now examine how god or gods are represented in religion. clearly there are two camps, monotheism and polytheism, either one god only or many gods. the bias in my argument thus far is obviously towards polytheism, the idea of many gods, in fact, that everyone is a god of something, perhaps even. everyone has been the first to do something, see something or be something even. i would not reject all religious stories as false, some must contain an element of truth, but that they are often distorted, embellished and partly made up. what i am saying is that some of the gods in religion, be it Greek or Indian or Norse or whatever are based on real people, but they are certainly not the same as that depicted in the myths and legends.

CLEARCHARGE

The Unique Memory Trace

the unique memory trace:

when the thinker is active, the mind at its most conscious, it is easy to forget what you were thinking only a short time ago. when thoughts race through the mind hopping from one subject to the next, we find short term memory limited. it is not uncommon to forget thoughts from only ten seconds ago. on the other hand, we have clear memories of some things that happened years, even decades ago. we remember the mood and atmosphere of the time, what we were thinking, what we were doing then.

for time is not a linear, one dimensional journey where the future must be different from the past, rather, much of time is made up of cycles, things that repeat. we wake up, do what we do in our waking lives, go to sleep, dream and wake up again. we have habits. but are these memorable things? what do we remember?

when we think about the past few years, it is rather the things that were new at the time that we remember clearly, that stand out. it is the new flavour at the time, so to speak, that we remember, be it a mood, certain thoughts, or what we did. whatever it was, it left a unique trace in the memory. so therefore our memory is biased towards the new thing of the time. what is old and oft repeated holds no strong association to any time.

CLEARCHARGE

What of Memory If There Is Change?

what of memory if there is change:

it is a characteristic problem in dreams that everything changes so fast that you lose things. i have a recurrent kind of nightmare where for example i am about to travel in a plane, but i've lost my passport or something else i had earlier. the world of dreams is very unstable. however, in contrast, the world of waking life seems very stable and almost permanent, but is it?

the very essence of time is that things change. you may argue that time is most real in dreams, where everything changes fast. and if things change can anything last? can you have reliable mental memory or material records that we trust will not become corrupted in time?

if i wrote something in a book in a dream, i would not be surprised if either the entry changed soon after or even if the entry or book disappeared later never to be seen again. however, in waking life, there was a time when i would be surprised if a book changed magically overnight and a passage disappeared, because i thought the world was more stable than it is. but that's time, if something were truly to stay the same, then time could not be real.

now all this is worrying, i fear my memory is at best only a partially true record of the past, where there are cases where vivid memories have been conflated and i think events happened at the same time but didn't, where some details are now false and never happened, where if the past had certain flavours to it, the flavours of my memories are now mutated, and so on. and why is this so? because time slowly destroys memory through change.

i admit to a minor crisis, where my memory does not quite agree with material records, paper and electronic. logically it's easy to say, well, either your memory is wrong or the records are, or perhaps even both, but they can't both be right at the same time. the confusion is real and disturbing. if my memory is that wrong, i'm in big trouble. if paper or electronic records have mutated to something inaccurate, then they are unreliable and lying to me.

and you then think, if only there weren't so much change, nobody can remember it all! and if material records are subject to inevitable change as well, naturally, and are therefore unreliable, what then? from experience, living randomly and impulsively leads to fragments of memory which are hard to piece together a few years later. one of the biggest problems is conflation of bright memories, and where you assume that other events, less well remembered, happened then or there as well, when they didn't. this is pretty much the case a few years afterwards. however i think that very many years later, your memory is cleaned out somewhat and what's left tends to be true and the confusion is gone, even if only because lots of other memories have been lost.

on reflection it seems that anyone who does a lot is simply not going to remember much. if you really wanted to keep memory organized you would have to devise some kind of repetitive schedule at the very least, like fish on Fridays, then you could say, well, it was a Friday, so then i probably had fish.

CLEARCHARGE

The Destiny of the Head Stone

the destiny of the head stone:

one of the first questions the head stone ever had was where am i? for there was something to see, even in the beginning, which makes sense because otherwise it surely would have been blind. and the magical light in the cone-shaped field in front of it was deceptive for it implied movement. later, it concluded finally that where it was, really, bore no relation to what it saw. images may seem to move, but the head stone was truly forever immovable, like a piece of jade embedded in the rock of space.

another question in the beginning was, of course, were there others like it? as time became apparent would it meet them, be able to see some representation of another person? or at least know something of what lay far beyond it in space? how to communicate with someone else through the senses? the first moments of time were deceptively quiet and solitary.

be that as it may, it was destined to be born into the later world, really a vigorous exercise of the senses, even if such life is mostly a visual experience, a son et lumière for the mind. and like all shows, its life in this world had to come to an end. time is elastic, the return to what life was before was inevitable.

and it would think back on its period in the world, its life there, what it was to think for a time that it was someone living in a universe with billions of people on a planet called Earth.

CLEARCHARGE

The Extremes of Thought

the extremes of thought:

"you know i can't say it's true for everyone, but i think it tends to be that when people think, they think in extremes, in superlatives, or that something applies to everything. it's like they add words like "all" or "infinite" or "maximum", something like that. an example, the word "god", i mean that gives the impression of a person who is all powerful, all seeing, knows everything, infinite magical powers, present everywhere and so on. or when people make generalizations about nationalities, or gender, etc., it's like, without actually saying it, they're still implying it's true about everyone. it's like a common fallacy of thought."

"well, "god" is an extreme example, it's just that the word has that impact, you know? it just suggests all that naturally. but maybe that's why people don't believe in god, put like that, it's hard to imagine anyone really being that powerful. i mean what if a lesser version of a god existed, like just people who were powerful in ancient times, you know, who did things that determine what the present is today, like inventors or creators, but then again, maybe you wouldn't call them gods, i don't know. i mean it occurred to me, i had this idea that maybe someone drew a picture of a cat in ancient times and then cats appeared after that, you know something more prosaic like that. but anyway, i think the truth is that it's hard to think of exceptions or that something is only partially true, simple thought tends to initially assume the statement is generally true, that it's qualified by the word "all"."

"like space, for me, it's hard to imagine that real space, this reality, is infinite in size. i mean theoretically, the universe, which would be virtual if the external world were an illusion, could be infinite but that's only because the space of the universe is not real space. it's far easier for me to imagine and believe that the size of reality is finite. i mean maybe my own personal bubble in space, if you like, is part of the outer limit of real space and i sense there is nothing beyond that, who knows? but there are far more questions about time."

"here we go. time is change. real space is made up of discrete particles of matter and these change. that's what time is."

"or least bits of matter. even mental things are matter. everything in real space is matter."

"so it's sort of like philosophical idealism for you but mental is material, is a form of matter, in your concept. the problem for you is that the state of the language at present assumes materialism, "matter" generally means something else, something that exists in an external world, and therefore as it is, mental is not "material", is not "matter", to a lot of people, if that makes any sense."

"it's just that it's far simpler to call everything that exists truly in real space, matter."

"anyway, at least some of these least bits of matter change and in all time is a set of states that these can have, right?"

"yes, you can't assume that everything changes. the question is whether an individual least bit of matter's set of states is infinite or finite, i mean, even if change is discrete, theoretically you wonder still if the set were infinite."

"that's confusing because if the set were infinite, it would suggest that time would be continuous, because if change were continuous, obviously the set would be infinite, but maybe not the other way round, an infinite set does not necessarily mean that time is continuous. but i agree theoretically even if change were discrete, the set might still be infinite. but emotionally speaking, would i prefer to live in infinite change or finite? i mean first, you think, finite, well maybe that's not so good, i'm being limited, but then you think infinite, well, that includes all bad things as well, so rationally maybe it's not such a good idea? i think the length of time a state could last also changes. obviously, like, we can vary the length of time between blinks, for example, while still looking at the same thing, something like that."

"it's like a grand tapestry of life where everything that could happen is depicted in one huge picture, that's what finite is."

"and the whole question of immortality and death, though. again we can't help but think in extremes, what is immortality? perfect health, infinite time, free from illness and physical damage, fine food, beautiful gardens, wonderful life, etc. again, it makes it hard to believe in. and death, my thinking gets very confused. first what would it be in a metaphysical sense? when something ends? well what is time if not everything ending and becoming something else? and if you tried to stay the same forever, wouldn't that be the death of time? isn't there a contradiction there? time is a killer, it kills off the past? i mean what could real immortality, that is the opposite of death, what could it be?"

"but time repeats, at the micro level, and maybe even as a whole, at what you could call the end of time. this time now, unless it's a complete repeat already, like it's actually the year 40 trillion or something and we've already done like 300 repeats of this life but we still think the date is 13 billion or even Year 442 going into Year 443, it's a time of great change in general. actually hopefully it's just a once through event, i really don't want to repeat this lifetime."

"yes. maybe time is very "thin" now and this is not to be repeated, like once on earth is enough, never mind having to repeat this lifetime over and over again. but we think finite, and then little, but even if time were finite in a metaphysical sense the numbers are still huge. but back to thinking in general, we tend to think the word "all" about statements, but time and space make a difference, like maybe something is only true sometimes and not others and maybe something is only true somewhere else."

"like maybe it's true for someone else, somewhere else, but it's not true for me. also what about overestimation, something's true but it's not really that important?"

"well that's a problem of the mind, we can only focus on a few things or even one thing at a time consciously and everything we think, it blows up in our minds, so we overestimate it's importance. it's like, something was a huge deal when i was sixteen, but now i think, what was i thinking? and the mind is a fickle thing, because in actuality, we forget, we can't keep things in our conscious mind, but that's just time for you."

CLEARCHARGE

A Sense of Progress in Time

a sense of progress in time:

"you might think, or rather like to think, that the world is stable, that history proves that progress is true, that time moves in a linear fashion, much like the timeline on a historical chart, but you might be wrong. there is that one idea of time which we entertain that time really is linear, the arrow of time and all that."

"but if that isn't the case, what is? the future seems different from the past. we learn from our mistakes, and so on."

"the essence of the theory that time is linear which infects everyone is that the future really is different from the past, in short that time is endless change different from the past, to infinity perhaps, or even that there is some catastrophic end to time, that everything must freeze or something like that, whereas that can't be the case. imagine a world like that, maybe i see red and blue today, but from tomorrow i will never see those two colours again, i will see completely different new colours, and the same again the next day, the past is irretrievable and life is violent change all the time."

"so what you're saying is because we experience the same things again, that we can take it for granted that some things are constants, that actually that the past repeats itself? we actually go back in time for a repeat?"

"exactly. which is a relief, don't you think? but it's not a repeat as a whole, i mean, imagine your own space in your own world, wherever that is, as mapped out with something like Cartesian coordinates, one axis goes out forwards from your body, one axis left and right, one up and down, sitting down to your computer, assuming you sit in exactly the same position and look at the same pixel of the taskbar on the computer screen in front of you at two different times, you may see the same shade of blue of the pixel for those exact coordinates, but of course everything else is different, your thoughts at the times, maybe your legs are crossed differently, etc. the point is we get localized repeats but as a whole, as in eternal return, perhaps never."

"your theory is that what seems like physical motion is an illusion, that actually everything is fixed in space and that each thing that makes up the stuff of reality can repeat?"

"yes, imagine if we were blind. motion wouldn't seem so real then, would it? so if time at the level of each discrete particle that makes up the stuff of reality, or least bit of matter, if you like, is merely a collection of changes in state, the question is whether this is finite or not. of course, if it were infinite, it would suggest that time would be continuous, would it not? however i posit that time is discrete. the question is how finite is the number of states that could exist?"

"so a simple discrete particle may only have a dozen or so states and it would look like it was leaping back and forth between them? there's the state at the start of time and it's like it's moving away from that and then coming back and then away again or something like that. but if the number of states is finite we'd end up repeating later sections of time as a whole surely, if not the start of time itself?"

"i guess so. though perhaps the time each state lasts could be variable. i think what gives progress meaning is the sense that things are getting better or rather even, that bad things have stopped. i came up with some of these ideas years ago, for example, in the 1990's but it is only recently that i've written about them, so it's like an idea popped into my head in say 1993 and then faded and came back in further thought again and again over the years but it's only now that this idea and others fully matured and manifested in this blog post."

"i used to believe a lot of things that now seem just wrong. so progress, in the positive sense, is that an idea becomes bigger and bigger until it manifests in a greater way. progress in the negative sense, it's that we stop believing in falsity. i can't stop thinking, are we more or less susceptible to false beliefs? it's so easy to be crazy. and it's frightening when we suspect we are. like relationships with people, what if we're completely mistaken about someone and their emotions or intentions?"

"it happens, but it's easy to make too much of it, i think. i am me and you are you, and we're all alone in a sense. connection brings a sense of immediacy that perhaps isn't that real. of course we have real neighbours in space and that doesn't change. it's all well and good to think about time, but space may be more important."

"like who your real neighbours are and what are they like? i mean, it's fine perhaps some of us live in a Matrix-like world that is Earth and maybe we "meet" real people in it, but what if the two people who do so are like 4 billion light years away from each other in reality? how does that work? it may seem like someone i meet is 4 feet away from me, but actually is light years away in real space and is just a hologram, in effect, to me. a real long distance relationship."

"you wonder how that works, is speech rendered accurately as to sound, or is there some guesswork in the system at either end?"

"and people are shocking. like you have in your own mind what people are like, but maybe that's just the people actually near you and people far away you meet are different, not what you're used to."

"the thing is, hoping to know everything about reality is like hoping to know all other people, it's not going to happen. the other thing against materialism, apart from the external world being an illusion, is that it makes everything seem non-personal. when i think of space i think of areas of personal spaces, beyond my neighbour is perhaps someone else who i only connect with through my neighbour."

"like what is the maximum degree of separation in reality? it could be over a thousand degrees! and what if two people a thousand degrees of separation apart got married in the matrix of Earth? wouldn't everyone in between know about it? or maybe the connection between them is secure?"

"but the signal, assume it's good, they might never know, perhaps. and maybe we're not aware of the communication traffic going on through us. but you never know, they might be a famous couple in the news."

"well it's always seemed like we weren't that alone here, maybe we live in a densely populated zone or we're somewhere in the middle of space. i imagine someone at the very end of space might think either that he or she were completely alone and living in solipsism or that there were only a few other people that existed."

"or that we are in a lonely area of space but that connection is great."

CLEARCHARGE

Infinity and the Big Picture

infinity and the big picture:

infinity is a mathematical concept but personally would you want it? or would you prefer to repeat a limited number of things? what if it meant everything bad could happen as well as the nice things? put like that, most would opt for a finite number of nice things to do, would they not?

now theoretically the number of shades of colours could be infinite. however they would still fall under the basic classifications, red, blue, yellow, green and so on. so how are we to regard infinity? that detail or the shade in this case is infinite but the big picture of basic classifications is limited?

we could reduce the spectrum of human life to very few activities. in broad strokes, we sleep, we eat, we move, we walk, we sit and we think and so on. is it not the degree in the detail that gives the illusion perhaps that there are potentially an infinite number of things to do?

let us consider the graphics of the old Commodore 64 computer, 320 x 200 pixels, with 16 colours. what could we see in one minute? here it is clear that the number is a lot but is still limited. does this example reflect on the whole of reality too? that there may be so many things that could happen because of the intricate detail possible that the number seems infinite but is not?

think about the start of time this way, at time zero, we had zero. as time progressed we built and discovered and made things and learned so we gained. perhaps when we have more than enough we simply stop and history comes to an end?

what if the big picture could be expressed as a picture of a group of stick men and women with a few houses behind them and a few thought and speech bubbles? are we really any more than that as human beings?

emotionally speaking, we are creatures driven by want. what happens when we finally get all that we wanted?

CLEARCHARGE

The Question of Time Infinity

the question of time infinity:

time is of change in the matter that makes up this reality. if we assume change is eternal, then yes, we could expect linear time to be infinite, that another second will follow on from this second, another year from this year, and so on.

but of change in matter, in the total of different states matter could have, what if this number for each least bit of matter is finite? also, assuming that matter could change back to a former state, that repetition occurs, that in a sense time could go backwards, so to speak.

the other assumption, of course, is that matter changes, never to fall back to what it once was, that each state is different to all those of the past, that change is a long road to infinity. now this does not seem likely given how stable this reality is. red is still red, blue is still blue. if this assumption were true would we not always see new colours that we had never seen before?

if we accept that time could go backwards, that repetition occurs in states, we arrive at the theoretical possibility that repetition for the whole of reality could occur, that eventually, we will be locked into a grand infinite cycle of change, where we repeat everything, forever. this is like the theory of eternal return or recurrence, but here we could assume that the start of time does not repeat, but everything after a certain point. this is unless some least bits of matter could have an infinite number of states.

let us imagine a very little reality composed of 4 least bits of matter joined together. change is such that matter does revert to past states and let's say there are only 4 finite possible states for each of these 4 least bits of matter. therefore there are only 4 quadrupled equals 256 maximum possible combinations of states at any one time, and here we can easily imagine repetition for the whole of this reality to happen.

now let me say i do not understand the metaphysics of change and how neighbouring matter affect each other. and perhaps the period of time each state lasts has an infinite range and so perfect repetition, so to speak, is not the case.

CLEARCHARGE

Errors and Progress

errors and progress:

"i think generally history is put across as this catalogue of progress, as a grand accretion of knowledge, but there's something lacking, a recognition of error, or even that we could be wrong somewhat. it's all a little one sided."

"you think historians won't admit to mistakes made? it's all a glorification of the past?"

"something more insidious than that. it's like we make errors in our thinking, and we follow on from that, we build the craziness up until it almost consumes us, for decades or hundreds of years even, and then finally we recognize we were wrong and then it's wiped out, and we don't really talk about it again. it's not like it's a cover up. it's just this vacant time that's been lost."

"right, what were we thinking? so life is like the game of snakes and ladders? we make mistakes and back we go?"

"exactly. it's like, the truth is immortality. the very thought that you could be fundamentally crazy about reality or something in life is really frightening at some point for everyone, i think. and all the time you were crazy you were on the path to mortality. but i mean, even the thought that you might never know the truth about something important is pretty disturbing to anyone, right? and no one wants to really die, right? all this time spent being crazy isn't just not desirable, it's dangerous. it's hazardous to your health."

"but someone might say, we may never know the truth, that we cannot know anything for certain?"

"yes, and i think that's reasonable, but my theory is the truth fits better than a falsity. it's like it's ultimately easier to think about the truth than something that's false is the best i can put it."

"that makes sense. the truth works."

"like i have problems with belief about modern science. because i don't believe that people are powerless beings in a universe with fixed unchanging physical laws as it's put, that these scientific laws exist without the human element, so to speak, forever unchanging. i believe people are creative, sometimes very powerful beings. i wouldn't be shocked if it were put that great scientists were actually gods who created science not men who merely discovered it, that they had theories which they made real. they actually changed the way things work."

"so the world is more mental than physical. it's malleable by thought."

"yes. and that's why thought errors are dangerous."

"and Isaac Newton is the god of mechanics?"

"right, something like that. where science can't resolve something only says to me that something is false in the argument. it's like someone who has teleported knows the whole mechanical motion argument is false, but that's what the world seems. actually, nothing really moves as it seems, it's only the image that makes it seem so. that's the only explanation that works."

"i suppose it's one thing to teleport all the time in your dreams, i mean you move from one place to another in an instant, but another, quite shocking, to do it while you're awake. but how could it work, if physical laws have no original basis, that they were, in a sense, created later?"

"if it were true, you would have to imagine an earlier world, where things like these physical laws simply didn't hold, where objects behaved differently."

"so it's like the popular notion that magic existed hundreds of years ago to be replaced by modern science, that the world was a very different place a long time ago?"

"like that. the essence is that science really didn't exist hundreds of years ago."

"what else?"

"so i've thought about time and how a movie projector is supposed to work, and it's along the lines of best fit. the argument is that time and change are discrete, like the frames of the film passing through the movie projector at 24 frames per second. just as you couldn't show a infinite number of frames in the projector, time cannot be continuous, it cannot have infinitesimal change, change is discrete. it merely seems continuous like a movie does."

"but if change is discrete, are the states of real matter finite therefore?"

"well if they are finite, i guess that means repetition seems inevitable, but there is still the question of time how long states last and does that vary? but i guess it's still too early to tell. but discrete change doesn't necessarily mean there are finite states, does it?"

"i guess there still could be an infinite number of states. i'm going on like infinite is a good thing, aren't i?"

"yeah. nobody wants everything to happen, right?"

CLEARCHARGE

Concept of the 3D Mechanical Motion World

concept of the 3D mechanical motion world:

the concept is of a world where objects change position, where they "move" in three dimensional empty "space". if there is no metaphysical truth in this but this is a concept that is so universally known that it barely requires explanation, there is the question of how this came about.

of the basis of this, first, it must have been seen that an object seemed to move. second, it must have seemed that the body could move relative to its surroundings too. and so the initial concept of the 3D mechanical motion world was formed.

CLEARCHARGE

An Examination of the Possible Effects of Neighbouring Matter

an examination of the possible effects of neighbouring matter:

though we may never be able to truly, fully "see" or know in a visual sense what is happening at the micro level of matter in real space, we can posit various ways matter affects its neighbours:

it makes its neighbours more like itself. this is the most evident possibility and explains how our eyesight works and how objects seem to "move" as the visual pattern or image is copied incrementally. this is how signals are passed through space, how we communicate, etc.

it makes its neighbours more different, as though, to use a 3D mechanical motion theoretical model metaphor, it knocks its neighbours off course.

it has no effect on its neighbours.

two neighbours tend to stabilize each other, so they stay more or less the same.

what we are thinking about is how matter's change changes its neighbours' change, so to speak.

CLEARCHARGE