On 16 sep, 20:33, Martha Bridegam <bride... DeleteThis @pacbell.net> wrote:
> Joe Fineman wrote:
> > georgeorw... DeleteThis @email.com writes:
>
> >> from the NY Times,
>
> >> "There is new hope that Earth, if not the life on it, might survive
> >> an apocalypse five billion years from now.
>
> > If we assume (plausibly, IMO) that the evolutionary process taking off
> > from life as we know it and the human species in particular continues
> > till that era, we are left to speculate what forms it will have issued
> > in, over a period modestly longer than any life has existed so far,
> > and several orders of magnitude longer than human beings have
> > existed. That is bound to be a strenuous exercise even for so
> > speculative a species as this company belongs to. Certainly, we must
> > not take for granted that "the life on it" will mean what it means to
> > us. It may well happen that our successors will have spread over so
> > large a volume of space that the solar system will have only
> > sentimental interest for them. If, indeed, they are all that
> > sentimental, they may figure out how to move the earth away until the
> > sun quiets down, or hook it up to some young star that will preserve
> > its amenity for tourism.
>
> Joe, you're an eternal optimist. I think.
>
> /M- Masquer le texte des messages précédents -
>
> - Afficher le texte des messages précédents -
And yet, there's still the problem of entropy and the ultimate fate of
the universe. Here is a different sort of optimism, which is strangely
consoling:
Consider [death] on a much vaster scale - the death of the universe at
the time when all energy runs out, when, according to some
cosmologists, the explosion which flung the galaxies into space fades
out like a skyrocket. It will be as if it had never happened, which
is, of course, the way things were before it did happen. Likewise,
when you are dead, you will be as you were before were conceived. So -
there has been a flash, a flash of consciousness or a flash of
galaxies. It happened. Even if there is no one left to remember.
But if, when it has happened and vanished, things are at all as they
were before it began (including the possibility that there were no
things), it can happen again. Why not? On the other hand, I might
suppose that after it has happened things aren't the same as they were
before. Energy was present before the explosion, but after the
explosion died out, no energy was left. For ever and ever energy was
latent. Then it blew up, and that was that. It is, perhaps, possible
to imagine that what had always existed got tired of itself, blew up,
and stopped. But this is a greater strain on my imagination than the
idea that these flashes are periodic and rhythmic. They may go on and
on, or round: it does not make much difference. Furthermore, if latent
energy had always existed before the explosion, I find it difficult to
think of a single, particular time coming when it had to stop. Can
anything be half eternal? That is, can a process which had no
beginning come to an end?
I presume, then, that with my own death I shall forget who I was, just
as my conscious attention is unable to recall, if it ever knew, how to
form the cells of the brain and the pattern of the veins. Conscious
memory plays little part in our biological existence. Thus as my
sensation of "I-ness," of being alive, once came into being without
conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the
"central" Self - the IT - appears as the self/other situation in its
myriads of pulsating forms - always the same and always new, a here in
the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the
midst of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in
how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness
between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.
Actually, we know this already. After people die, babies are born -
and, unless they are automata, every one of them is, just as we
ourselves were, the "I" experience coming again into being. The
conditions of heredity and environment change, but each of those
babies incarnates the same experience of being central to a world that
is "other". Each infant dawns into life as I did, without any memory
of a past. Thus when I am gone there can be no experience, no living
through, of the state of being a perpetual "has-been". Nature "abhors
the vacuum" and the I-feeling appears again as it did before, and it
matters not whether the interval be ten seconds or billions of years.
In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant.
This is so obvious, but our block against seeing it is the ingrained
and compelling myth that the "I" comes into this world, or is thrown
out from it, in such a way as to have no essential connection with it.
Thus we do not trust the universe to repeat what it has already done -
to "I" itself again and again. We see it as an eternal arena in which
the individual is no more than a temporary stranger - a visitor who
hardly belongs - for the thin ray of consciousness does not shine upon
its own source. In looking out upon the world, we forget that the
world is looking at itself - through our eyes and IT's.
-from *The Book*, by Alan Watts
B.
>> Stay informed about: The Consolation of Astronomy 
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