Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Temporality, Ontology

It has come to my attention that there are no dimensions. I used to think of space as a three dimensional cube and time as a fourth dimension. Not because it made sense but because it was taught to me this way. Time happens on a line, past on the left, present on a dot, future on the right. Spatial. The question that got to bugging me was how the past crossed over the present to become the future. Past and future seemed simple; present presented problems.

This may not be original, but I've figured out that there is no past and there is no future. All that exists, and has ever existed, is now. The past is a concept in our minds, an unreal, simplified remnant. It is also in the body, in altered form. It does not exist, as such. The future is only a concept, the past re-imagined, visualized, conceptualized. The past in abstract, simplified and projected forward on a spatialized time line. If the past doesn't exist, the future really doesn't exist.

Now is not a passage from past to future. Past and future -- visualized, simplified -- are fictions. Only a human could come up with this stuff.  Now is self-replication and diversification.

I took a walk. I looked at a cinder block wall. I realized that it was self-replicating, partially (imperfectly?) at that very moment. Its changes were too minor to notice. Time is self-replication and diversification. Time, or the world, which are the same thing,  manifests itself in space.  

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