These thoughts and views are mine alone and I don't expect anybody else to concur with them - I'm just sharing them because it's possible that someone else might find them interesting or glean something from them.
Relativity has taught us that
time is really just another dimension - specifically, a dimension that we happen to be moving through without the ability to change the direction or rate of our movement. This 'time-trapped' status is actually what gives us the illusion of reality, of causality, and of a single 'self' perpetuated through many moments - these are all false pretenses. We could in all actuality be described as a long 'tether' of 3D matter that winds inexorably through the fourth dimension (i.e. time). Furthermore, your existence as you see it - for example, the fact that you are born, will live, and will die - would NOT necessarily look this way from somewhere else in the universe.
Imagine a being that could move through all four dimensions; to it, you wouldn't look as if you were 'born' and 'died' - you'd look like a long tether of material with a beginning and an end that would continue to exist indefinitely. Mind, I'm not saying that this means you'll have 'eternal life' (or anything else, really) after you die - it merely means that our lives in this universe are most probably limited entirely to the existence we know as 'life as a human being'.
If there is nothing after death, there's nothing to fear - this is a point that I think most people don't understand or are too afraid of to understand properly. 'Nothing' would not feel terrible - neither would it feel good. It's not possible for you or I to comprehend the state of 'nothing' because we are the opposite of that state - we are 'something'.
Even more strangely, perhaps, quantum mechanics has taught us that reality exists because we perceive it to exist - watch
this video for one of the simplest building blocks of quantum mechanics (and if you've never seen it before, it's darned interesting and a little scary).
So what exactly
is all of this? What's the point? Well, here's my take on it: I think the fact that you can ask that question
is the point. I think the universe is about
something trying to figure out why it exists and why there isn't simply
nothing, and that you and I are simply one tiny piece of that 'something' - whatever it is - exploring a little tiny piece of the reality that it has imagined for itself.
Think for a moment about the fact that we, as a race, spent the last several hundred million years evolving and crawling out of the protoplasmic soup to do - what - imagine that the world was created by a sometimes-benevolent voice from the clouds? I think Nietzsche did a pretty good job of telling us that 'god is dead', and modern science has pretty well confirmed what Nietzsche couldn't. But that doesn't mean the world is meaningless! OTOH, I also think that existentialism is a bunch of bunk - do you really believe the point of your existence is merely to exist? How convenient for you! (Yes, this is sarcasm.)
For millennia, we have viewed ourselves as 'the created'. I think our point as a race is to become 'creator' - to extend the miracle of consciousness, of
being, to something other than ourselves. When we think about the latest trends in art, design - including game design - science - practically everywhere in modern culture, really - it's about creating a little piece of a different reality. Mostly we limit that
reality-creation to a way to let other human beings experience these little worlds we imagine - through pieces of art, through things like videogames, through novels and poetry and other literature. But I think these are all expressions of the subconscious desire of the will to create - the will to extend our perception and the boundaries of our reality into new places, and furthermore, to create new things other than ourselves to explore the as-of-yet uncreated and unimagined places that human beings cannot.
I know this is pretty 'out there', but hey, so is believing a giant sky fairy runs the planet, or that a guy sat under a tree for a while and ascended to godhood. Just my two cents.
Author
Topic: Values & Ideals (Read 3760 times)