a thought came to me today, while, as most do, i was amidst a task mundane. the simplicity of my work gave it ample spare space in which it settled, and still nests in my cerebellum; which am i, entirely faithless or utterly gullible?
one cannot have it both ways, after all, but i seem to vacillate on a scale in every given situation.
i would like to think i am not taken in like a fool, that i am of strong and skeptic mind, and that i follow logic and practicality to their conclusions before making mine.
i know that is not the case.
when someone lays down a statement as fact, i take it automatically at face value unless some instinct insists i disbelieve - what proves to be - the illusion. i latch on to the paranormal and supernatural with excitement and awe. i obey the heartstrings of my hopes and paranoia, churning my own insides at their whims.
it is this struggle to find poised balance on that scale which leads me to write this out. i have no answers for myself, only more concerns.
i abase myself before a God, but alternate complacent assurance with prideful hesitancy. the best argument i have heard for the Universe as nothing but a meshup of physical systems was something said about finding it a relief to assume life is not simply a test, and my response is only that one can learn a system's rules, and perhaps strategize to one's favor a handful of times, but one can manipulate a personality much easier, and with more regular results - especially when that personality provides one with tests by which to cheat.
even my faith in myself is skewed and circumstantial. is this a matter of pride? do i let my assumption that i can outwit, outcharm, or outsass my way around all obstacles overtake my ideas about what i believe in? should i do so more often, or less so? just how much should pride/faith inmyself should be a part of my worldview, and how much should i sacrifice to my God? or, if one takes the Atheistic standpoint, how much of my intention should i sacrifice for the (good)will of other people?
Wednesday, May 20
Monday, May 4
Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem. ~ MICHIO KAKU, Wired Magazine, Aug. 2003
lazy entry today. though i find myself boastful i have remembered to update at all. such low standards!
i assume that Time is the fourth dimension, and subscribe to the block theory that it's like space; we cannot be in more than one area of the dimension at once, and therefore cannot know both past and future. since we're in the middle of the tesseract though, instead of masters of it, as we are the third dimension, we can't see beyond the trees we've past and the ones we're currently staring at.
from that standpoint, time is a measurement not of the volume an object takes up, but the distance between the initial displacement of empty space and the replacement of it (as far as we can understand it, anyway). would manipulating the past then be like affecting an object's mass or girth: impossible (without understanding how to manipulate quantum mechanics)? we instead manipulate our recollection of time, via apologies and histories, much as we blur our account of space with guesstimates and analogies.
that's just talking about the actual possibility, though, not the potentiality.
i suppose the point of time travel (and anything into which effort is put) is to ensure that something of ourselves gets left behind, becomes irrevocably entangled with the universe as is, and therefore finds immortality. and for those who can't actually claim eternity through Achievement or Attachment (which leads into my presumably professional assumptions about human nature + moral psychology, as opposed to this topic, so i'll not detail that) time travel would just be an extension of faking it.
therefore, to answer your question, a perfect paragraph, short though it may be, is technically all we ever strive for. what do you expect to be written in your eulogy, a character testimony which only a relative few will ever hear, as opposed to your obituary, which seeks to notify complete strangers in few words and with little effort, that you have died, and perhaps they might give a shit (forgive morbidity) as opposed yet again to encyclopedic entries, which would detail your relevance in terms of objects/thoughts/etc that you have gifted to the general populace.
my questions are thus: for which reasons would we attempt time travel? to cement our place in the global history, or in the memories of those we have loved? and if we could all access time travel, would we learn to distrust even our own experiences in the face of the outside world? how would we relate to one another if everything was in flux? would we be bolder, knowing that we could simply buy a do-over? or would we cradle more closely our moments with one another, and a lover's promise become "i would never relive this day"?
the rest is all just me pontificating as usual. is also copy/pasted, because my facebook message conversations are like this by nature.If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring.
CARL SAGAN, NOVA interview, Oct. 12, 1999
****
i assume that Time is the fourth dimension, and subscribe to the block theory that it's like space; we cannot be in more than one area of the dimension at once, and therefore cannot know both past and future. since we're in the middle of the tesseract though, instead of masters of it, as we are the third dimension, we can't see beyond the trees we've past and the ones we're currently staring at.
from that standpoint, time is a measurement not of the volume an object takes up, but the distance between the initial displacement of empty space and the replacement of it (as far as we can understand it, anyway). would manipulating the past then be like affecting an object's mass or girth: impossible (without understanding how to manipulate quantum mechanics)? we instead manipulate our recollection of time, via apologies and histories, much as we blur our account of space with guesstimates and analogies.
that's just talking about the actual possibility, though, not the potentiality.
i suppose the point of time travel (and anything into which effort is put) is to ensure that something of ourselves gets left behind, becomes irrevocably entangled with the universe as is, and therefore finds immortality. and for those who can't actually claim eternity through Achievement or Attachment (which leads into my presumably professional assumptions about human nature + moral psychology, as opposed to this topic, so i'll not detail that) time travel would just be an extension of faking it.
therefore, to answer your question, a perfect paragraph, short though it may be, is technically all we ever strive for. what do you expect to be written in your eulogy, a character testimony which only a relative few will ever hear, as opposed to your obituary, which seeks to notify complete strangers in few words and with little effort, that you have died, and perhaps they might give a shit (forgive morbidity) as opposed yet again to encyclopedic entries, which would detail your relevance in terms of objects/thoughts/etc that you have gifted to the general populace.
my questions are thus: for which reasons would we attempt time travel? to cement our place in the global history, or in the memories of those we have loved? and if we could all access time travel, would we learn to distrust even our own experiences in the face of the outside world? how would we relate to one another if everything was in flux? would we be bolder, knowing that we could simply buy a do-over? or would we cradle more closely our moments with one another, and a lover's promise become "i would never relive this day"?
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