Time and
Travelling 29 July 2010
It occurred to me that time may
not be real . . . . . hmmmm, sounds weird. But if we
play with it a bit, it could fall out like this . . . . .
There is
movement. We move from one state to another;
we move from one place to another. We look back and identify a
"past", that is where we have moved from. We look forward to
where we expect to "go", to travel to. Even if I sit still
and do nothing, it is not a "nothing", my body is decaying, my
brain is moving from one state to the next. States like
"being still", "balance" and "nothing" are thus illusions and
linguistic conventions only. We invent time, by creating a
measurement system, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years.
And then we have to modify it by creating nanoseconds and even smaller
units. But really, this measuring is just an act of perception,
codified and mechanised to be sure, but it is still us
looking. So, before there were humans, there was of
course no time, just movement.
Time is thus a perceptual invention, albeit a very
clever and evolutionary required one. Whichever direction our
perception goes, whether out in to the astonishing distances
of cosmology, or in, towards the even more astonishing distances
of the sub-atomic, it is just a form of travelling,
we move from one perception to another, from near to far and
back.
By definition, you cannot prove that
infinity exists, because, you can never get to the "end of it".
In the same way that "nothing" and "balance" are illusions, temporary
linguistic and perceptual conventions, so to is the concept that "things
end". The most we could say is that a phase might end.
However, phases are connected to other phases, both consecutively
and concurrently, this is demonstrable in almost any place you
look. So, death is the end of a phase.
"You" die but the body decays into something else
or is burned and converted to
gas and ashes. If consciousness is just a by-product of neural complexity,
then it ends when the neural network decays.
Then again, phases are connected consecutively and concurrently; if this
is true (and we can see it certainly seems to
be true), why would consciousness be the only thing not connected to other
phases? Seen this way, consciousness cannot be an isolate thing, even if
we cannot see the connections, because there are no isolate things, save
for convention and temporary linguistic convenience.
Einstein had very firm
ideas about time; Wikipedia describes time as . . . ."one of the
seven fundamental physical quantities in the International System of Units." However, it may be just a codified perception and not a physical quantity
at all. So if we play with this idea and throw in
the notion that consciousness is not an isolate thing but is a phase
amongst phases, then how might be we go about seeing the larger picture of
the nested phases that consciousness is a part of? I think
the concept that our soul is a created thing deposited in the vehicle
of our bodies, is a barrier to further exploration and will not help
us looking at the patterns of phases. I would
suggest we look at our emotions, our feelings - because
the feelings we can see are connected to ones we cannot
see. Our intellect creates structures (as marvelous as they can
be, they are "fixed" things, like the bricks of a building) but feelings
are fluid and layered, (like tides in an ocean). The deeper
layers can become visible, when we set up our constant looking.
There is a Kernel
about patterns here : http://www.praxispath.co.uk/4-kernels/K3.htm
