Taking the long way home
Fate seems to be too final. Too absolute.
I don't like the idea. Also, it's too much of a reach to think everything is predetermined. The whole idea doesn’t sit well with me and it just doesn’t make any sense.
Besides the fact that such an idea would mean free will is merely an illusion, why would anyone want to live a life they have no control over the outcome of?
I prefer to think that rather than being a passenger in the vehicle of my life, I'm firmly at the wheel.
Taking that analogy one step further, I believe that instead of a rigid fate, there is a series of sign posts. These signposts are places that travelers will often converge and sometimes .. just sometimes, your life will be touched by another, for better or for worse.
So your route is still undetermined, you have many roads to choose from, and the number of possible routes is almost infinite, but they're roads non the less. Each road being a well-defined, narrow passageway leading to yet more roads.
Right now, I’m traveling alone...
posted by Wayne Smallman at Monday, January 31, 2005
5 Comments:
I'm the last person to be dismissive of pre-cognitive events.
There is a truly enormous volume of anecdotal evidence and I'd like to think there's also some hard evidence kicking around, also.
It's very, very easy to see these kinds of things and then say that everything is all mapped out and the course of our lives is fixed.
That's romantic whimsy and owes very little to the physical realities of the universe we live in.
Plus, such ideas start to drag everyone into the inevitable creator-god thing that I find utterly vacuous and quite dull.
I great physicist by the name of Michio Kaku once said -- and I must paraphrase -- there's simply no room in the laws of physics for a god.
It's that simple. There can be no creator who stands outside of our world of physical laws. If such a being existed, then such a being must also be subject to physical laws themselves.
Whichever way you slice it, you'll either stubbornly grip hard on the frayed cloth of religion or you'll bump into a huge wall of numbers and an infinitude of space and time.
I prefer mathematics, simply because there's more scope for reason and still unknown possibilities. Religion tries to answer everything in the most painfully prosaic and uninspiring way.
I think there is a great deal that we do not fully understand.
There are some things that I feel quite sure we as species are simply not ready or able to understand yet. And I emphasize, the word: 'yet'.
The likelihood of this universe having existed previously, running the course of its life until the point of cosmological death, then everything being rewound to the point of the singularity and then starting again .. and then everything happening in the self-same order is just utterly incalculable.
The late Albert Einstein once touched upon the subject of time travel -- which he himself did not dismiss, but did highlight that such a thing is highly unlikely.
And again, I can only paraphrase, but he said something along the lines of that all of the empires in the history of mankind have not yet risen, not have they yet fallen.
I think it's easy to see where he was taking us with that idea. Rather than all events having been decided and that we're now entering the universe on a second pass if you like, all events are taking place simultaneously.
Nowadays, there's a common belief among physicists that there are various arrows of time. There's three of them, ‘psychological arrow’, ‘cosmological arrow’, and the ‘thermodynamic arrow’
The psychological arrow is the one we experience; the inevitable passage of time.
But as far as physics is concerned, there's no reason why we should not have memories of events yet to come in addition to those we've previously experienced.
When this philosophical chimera crawled from the numbers and letters of pure mathematics, it created a sizable debate.
If you want answers, mathematics beats mysticism hands down every time...
I've got you thinking, now!
Although when I started this article, I never gave a moments thought to the topic you raised, which for me, is truly fascinating.
A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of others being able to see into the future, or they themselves having the ability.
While others are utterly dismissive because they are so inhered by their beliefs, even if you could provide a great body of evidence proving that such things exist, the schism of cognitive dissonance would overwhelm them, and you simply entrench them even more.
I'm very much open to most things and I try not to be too judgmental until I've at least given the idea some legitimate thought time.
There's a mechanism at work, and even if physicists were able to see the cogs & wheels of such a device, I don't think they'd be able to make too much sense of it, for all of the letters after their names.
Something to consider: a recent survey of the universe uncovered evidence of a calculation made some years ago, that being the universe isn't heavy enough .. there's something missing.
All of the visible matter in the universe only constitutes a shade over twenty-five percent of all of the matter known to exist.
So where the hell is all the rest of the matter?
In addition to all of the 'dark matter', there is also 'dark energy'. What might reside within this as-yet unseen part of our universe?
As always, there are more questions than answers .. and that's just how I like it...
I have a theory: what if all animals could remember the future?
What if they lived their lives knowing the instance of their own death?
What harm would it do them? They're not sentimental, nor are they prone to depression or fits of self-pity.
Humans are.
Not only that, we're able to choose whether me act or sit idle. We're able to contemplate, love, hate and all of the other wondrous and ponderous stuff we've come to call emotions.
But what would happen if we knew the moment of our own death? For an animal that's self-aware, that would be a disaster.
So what if, as our brain developed, we lost our ability to remember the future and instead such foresight was a closed door in our mind?
For all those that get a glimpse of the future, somehow, that door has been left open. Sometimes a little, just enough to see through the gap. But for some, this door is wide open.
If my theory is true, then I would not envy anyone standing in that open doorway...
This may be the greatest irony of life: to attain such gifts as knowledge and power we had to sacrifice the sight of one eye and a knowledge all its own...
There's no denying animals have emotions, but they don't have the range of emotions that humans do.
I certainly never heard of an animal committing suicide. Even the stories of Lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs is simply a work of fiction, owing more to wishful folklore than reality.
Humans are animals, and given our lineage is over four million years, we've been kicking around in one form or another for quite some time...
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