Previous posts (this is meant to be continuous): Rebooting the Notes at the End of the Deconstructed Universe - Breaking Probability Waves - Within the Paradox of Time - Heretic Papers II- Beyond the End of the Universe - Blackouts and Multidimensionalism: Lenses, Interruptions and Shadows - Measure all things together - Spaces in time: Contentedness and Cataclysmic Changes - Rivers of life flowing behind the scenes: Faucets, Eternities, and Probabilities Undefined - Outtakes, Golden Paragraphs, Degrees of Relevance, Each a Marvel> - Until Yesterday: Experience, Existence, Whose Universe, Co-Existence - A different way of seeing: Connected beneath surfaces, the Introduction at the end, short bits
One could look at ones life as a whole and single out one moment and think that is the penultimate moment, that is really who they were or what their life was about. Or at least find one that shows them in the best light, to think that is what I wish to be remembered for if or when I should be thought of at all. It is nice when life accommodates this, when one is remembered for some heroic act, some great work, not for how one lost his temper, made some public embarrassment of himself, or for his or her greatest failure instead of their greatest success, but this is often beyond our control.
But to be remembered for one moment, great or miserable, or for one attribute, or for what one did or how one was at only one age of their lives, it is to know nothing of them, simply a word out of context fallen to the floor, a random word off a random page signifying nothing. An overstatement surely, one might think. There are moments in peoples lives which we can single out and feel comfortable that they sum up someone we knew or some aspect of their character which we think sums them up as a whole. Surely not everyone is so changeable that they continually change their stripes or go from being one kind of person to another. However, such determinations are subjective. What and how I might remember one person for might be different than how another might remember the same person knowing him or her over exactly the same time period. A hero to many might be rightly considered anything but one to another who was mistreated by them or suffered because of something done unto them by that person, intentional or otherwise. One moments negligence behind a wheel of a car can, to one person affected, wipe out a whole lifetimes worth of good intentions. ...
To the one remembered for losing his life in trying to save others, equally important are the moments in his life which lead him to that time and place to make such a heroic decision or choose such a course of action. Each fault he or she had, each tragedy they overcame becomes that much more ennobling because it lead them to being in what others considered a selfless state of mind when they were tried the most for what they were, for who they were, at that moment which happened to be their last. Had they lived another week they may have died under less noble circumstances, or have been wittingly or unwittingly involved in the cause of someone else’s death in a traffic accident or a fit of rage, and that would seem even more tragic coming after the accolades justly deserved for the actions the week before. ...
When someone dies, particularly when one is young, we mourn not just for the loss of what they were, but for all that they might have been, for what they might have become. We see the loss of a being, but more importantly, we see a process interrupted. Sure they would have died one day further down the road, but what stands out as much as what they did, is how much was left undone. If they were bright or in a position of leadership, we can readily imagine all the great things they could have done were there more time.
What each person is at any moment in time is not what is most important. It cannot be easily ascertained if at all. They are forever in the process of becoming, not of being. What they will become, what they can grow into depends on some degree to the paths they choose, but to also the length and flexibility each of those paths provides. Each end is different, but each end has an overshadowing and unrepresentative view only by way of having happened to be the last moments, in the end no greater or more important or more telling, than any in the beginning or middle.Spanning Time - Towards Tomorrow, 2001
People's lives are attempts to transfer something, their experiences, their potential, into something concrete which will have existence outside of them or beyond them. A book, a painting, a formula or theory, a philosophy, a monument or sculpture, a building or park, their children, an heir philosophical, spiritual, or biological, all of these are attempts to pass on something inside yourself to exist outside of yourself for others, and which may survive beyond yourself. To see it as attempts at immortality is unduly coarse and vulgar. It is not wanting to let something good within you die with you or be forgotten unnecessarily. That is how to view it in its best light, though maybe not realized or always thought of in that context at the time by everyone, but equally how it can be seen by anyone toward anyone else's attempted achievements. The irony is that which is wished to be passed on can never be forgotten or lost anyway, nor is any externalization of that potential any more real than the potential of itself.Spring 2004 (Notes Part 2)
People should not have an abject view of minds or consciousness. They, others, are not something apart from yourself which you can go into like a house and look around (with) you here and they, there. Consciousness is experience. Life is experience. Only by interacting with it, being affected by it as well as affecting it, can either exist. Separateness is existence. Togetherness is potential. Experience is finding a level between or seeing existence, temporal, and potential, timeless, as separate things. That is and is not the case depending on your perspective and where you think you stand, literally and figuratively.Early Summer 2004 (Notes Part 2)Dancing around a wave potential or probability trying to see it from other sides (is) different than around an actuality. Many different ways of being means needing a different way of perceiving it from outside of it, since what is outside of it is indefinite while what it is is indefinite.
July 18, 2004 (Notes Part 2)People who see death as a chance or opportunity to escape into something else, heaven, hell, another life, another dimension of existence, miss the entire target, not just the mark. You have to realize on a meta-physical level, you are not any one thing at one place at one point in time to be in the first place, never mind how to shift that into being or becoming something else outside yourself yet still retain that essential "you-ness". You are following mentally a perceptual stream interactively, seemingly, yet without absolute (definitive at any one point in time, only perception of different things, even yourself, strung together over time like beads on a string) substance existing at an absolute moment in time. Given that perceptualization may be your only reality, thinking how to become something else when there is little but memories to give you a sense of existence at all, you can resettle into the conclusion that you exist in and are only defined by your circumstances (a web or chain of events or possible events) and what you do, and outside of that not only can you (as you are defined now) have nothing, but for you, outside of that (boundary of potential *EVENTS*) exists nothing. What never was and can never be can never not be as well. Since your existence is experiential (involving others perceptions as well) beyond what is physical, it is (even now) as timeless, eternal, and lucent as a dream, and as subjective as well.
December 3, 2004 (Notes Part 2)
...Just as businesses are groups of people defining themselves as a company, an organization to provide them food or power at future moments of time, people too have their own building blocks (components as people are to companies) of (past) events and (future) possible potential events which come together from different sources to contribute to something called a life or a person which is merely something built out of that coming together to maintain some separate position over time. Without seeing electrons, we experience them. Without seeing the building blocks of time (externally or non-sequentially) of ourselves, we experience them. Events we connect together to remember can define ourselves by those memories and assumed potential events yet to occur (which we think or fear might occur which also defines our notions of ourselves and who each of us may be at any given point), seemingly yet to occur anyway because only by our and some others perspectives around us (at this point in time) have they yet to have occurred.September 5, 2005, (Notes Part 4)
The powers that be
that force us to live like we do
bring me to my knees
when I see what they've done to you
Excerpt from "Back on the Chain Gang" (Pretenders), Chrissie Hynde
The notes which I am covering now below were written, I believe, mostly between May and July of 2003. They include many notes which I have already posted here in Outtakes, Golden paragraphs, Degrees of Relevance, Each a Marvel. The reason for including those notes again is that this is the order in which I believed they were written when I first assembled them together in 2004 or 2005. I do not completely agree with the order that they were put in, but since that time was only a year or two after those notes were written, unlike now 8 years later, I cannot say today that this order is incorrect.
While writing the main Notes, which I had first assembled or named, beginning in October of 2003, I also grouped together notes which ran from the end of July to October 2003, calling them the PreNotes. "The Notes: Part Zero" did not sound as good. After that, a few months later, I assembled these notes below (which I called "Before the PreNotes", or Notes: Part -1, by an even worse numerical counting) which preceded those PreNotes by a few months. Since "Before the PreNotes" was a "catch-all" collection, it may have included some out of order on purpose. I am certain now that the order of at least one or two of them seems way off, so I will call this an alternate timeline, though it is probably a much more correct one.
A few of these made it into "Deconstructing the Universe" finishing up the Terms section. The word "perspective" shows up quite a bit before I wrote the section which I called "Perspective". The short note which is shown just before it below actually, I believe, frames how I was thinking just before I wrote "Perspective", in a way. That is why I put so much emphasis on the order I wrote these things because it shows to me how one idea lead to the next.
The "Principles of Law" section was written as a reaction to actual transgressions of accepted legal or common sense principles about law going on at the time. I cannot remember all the cases or instances now, but some were local, state, or national in the US at the time. This was long before it became accepted as it is now, almost without needing to say so, how the US is operating without any pretense of "rule of law" in regards to how it is behaving internationally, but this addresses civil rights principles. Ten or twenty years ago most of these "principles" were so universally accepted, writing them down even would have seemed a joke. Now, unfortunately, an emerging unquestioning police-state mentality in the US can now make them seem extremely libertarian, if not even possibly potentially radical. I see this now as a tragic measure of how far things have moved since how the law was perceived merely a few decades ago, not to mention how much more bi-partisanly worse things have gotten, and even acceleratingly worse under Obama's first 3 years, since the time it was written in the summer of 2003.
Most of the quotes above this introduction were from the "Potential" collection of my Notes, or a gathering of quotes from the "Notes: Parts 1 - 6", all in regards to the idea of potential. Again, it was simply done by a word search, although some minimal combing through the notes was probably done as well. I have also gone back a bit earlier in the above quotes to the "Spanning Time" section of "Towards Tomorrow" which I wrote in regards to the idea of the sense of loss or waste of potential when someone dies, often young or someone we might think had a lot of potential to lose. These notes I am covering now below were the first time that I tried to look at the idea of potential in a clinical or academic sort of way. Indeed, the "Discussion points" section below was written by trying to imagine how one might structure a college seminar-type discussion about the concept of potential. "Does the concept of Potential require alternate timelines," "does the potential of someone exist within that person or in their relationship to others in their environment," "what are the different kinds of potential," etc. These ideas would be taken in the later Notes much much further, and at least when recognizing it as a recurring theme in them, I decided to group together the ones I thought were related into a separate collection.
The many concepts which are involved within the idea of potential touch upon many other aspects besides alternate timelines, or what is involved in each persons inherent potential verses how their potential is determined by others in their environment, or in how events may or may not come together. Beauty, leadership qualities, these are things that require reactions in others opinions, events, and behaviors to be or to establish that potential to be realized, or even to be suspected to appear as inherent within those are thought to have such potential. It is really such a complex notion that a mere word-search was really a lazy way to go in my trying to sort out how or what I thought about the idea. But it was quick, easy, and I liked how that "Potential" collection turned out. It is such a common word, it turns up in many different ways in everyday speech. It is a word or concept which we like to think we know what it means, yet when thinking of what it really involves or what it is made up of, it is astonishingly complex, even as, or maybe because, we can apply it in many different ways to many different types things, events, or ideas.
Before the PreNotes:
Ideas of what to believe are like statues chiseled out of marble. To see what they really mean you must envision the whole block, and try to understand everything, then what was chiseled away and why. If you understand all else that could be or could also have been said or thought but was not or left out, you get a fuller understanding of why what was said or believed was, and what purpose it was designed to serve. That is what makes something of more interest, not just what it is, but what it is in relation to what it is not, or could have been, and what it omits.
A way to go forward will always appear as opening before you. You cannot go back until all the ways forward have been traveled, tried, and exhausted, and even then what seems behind you exists only ahead and can only be reached by going forward.
Everything you do in life is based on that you know this much but not that much. What you know and when you know it controls what you do, what you want, and what you think you can do or can be done. Always and forever played.
Living is about not understanding everything.
People can perceive of time as points on a road they are traveling. But with a real road, all points exist at once, whereas with time there is just where you are, and all the other points seem to come into and go out of existence. This is as limited and as childish as believing a road you are traveling has no existence anywhere where you are not upon it, or won’t be real until you come to it. Early on we learn of object permanence, or that objects do not disappear when they leave our sight or our direct perception. It takes longer to understand temporal permanence, or that EVENTS, that time itself does not only exist in our current moment on the road just because that is all we can directly perceive or experience. The whole road is always there and we are always at each and every point along it simultaneously.
A mind is only as complex as the world it perceives. The more complex the perceptions, the more expansive the mind must become to try to explain, understand, or make sense of those perceptions. More impetus for growth is always there whenever one chooses not to close ones eyes to what is difficult to comprehend, accept, or explain.
When a body is growing, energy both animate and inanimate are drawn to it and contribute to its existence. When a body dies that which comprised it breaks down and goes their separate ways. Each of the cells know they are doomed as a unit and begin to restructure themselves to exist on their own much as laid off workers might attempt to start their own companies. In this process both simpler animate forms are created from the physical components and the more complex forms of energy seek out newer more complex potential forms and patterns to latch on to and contribute to.
It is a rookie mistake to want power if you were forbidden from using it to help anyone or to want knowledge you could not share with those who could be most helped by it.
Humanity will not arrive at a more fair and just world by wanting it or even being willing on occasion to make sacrifices for it. It can only be had by demanding nothing less. Because humanity will always be willing to settle for despotism and tyranny, despotism and tyranny will always be all they will have, regardless of their willingness to recognize it as such. The delusions of freedom are never a hard sell for the reality is often too hard to bear, and their minds are only all too willing to be forced to look away.
Principles of Law
==============
1) No government or religion possesses the right to interfere with an individuals inherent and absolute right to determine and develop his or her own mindset and belief system in the way that he or she chooses. Mental illness and social deviancy when applied to different reasoning processes and possibly valid viewpoints contrary to the norm or the society at large constitutes repression in the most violent and egregious sense of the word. Nothing an individual does, says, or reads in regards to gathering up enough information from as many varied sources as they so choose to make their mindset or point of view as wide and all encompassing as they so choose ought never to be legislated against, forbidden, or considered morally deficient enough to attempt to be prevented unless it will cause the imminent and indisputable harm to another. The attempt to outlaw ideas or the materials which might foster such ideals is a crime against nature, as anyone could claim such a right to restrict such material or any material for anyone else once such a group is allowed to claim for themselves the right to do so for others.
2) No government or society possesses the right to back date laws making actions which were not illegal when they were done suddenly illegal once a government or society decides to make it so. This absurd set of conditions makes it impossible for an individual to always comply with and obey the law without possession of knowing which of what they are doing now might become illegal in the future. Likewise, all laws regarding penalties, fines, and the degree of severity of enforcement ought to apply only from the given time in the present forward from when such revisions are made, lest they violate the same principles. Without such assurances or guarantees, what could have been minor offenses when committed under one regime could become possible death sentences under others simply because they choose to view it differently. If one supposes future persons and future governments or makeup of governments have the right to change or make new laws, they must do so for actions and persons from that time on only, including how they are enforced and punished retroactive.
3) No government has the right to keep its laws secret, nor allow the same offenses to be considered by one judge or prosecutor as being illegal when one or another would view it oppositely. The laws must be unambiguous. If even those whose sole profession is to uphold the law cannot agree if something is against the law or not, one can hardly hold the average person in a society negligent for not being sure either. To expect them to always err on the side of caution is to expand the laws contingently upon enforcement into things which are not clearly written down or necessarily thought need to be. Under that assumption, everything could be potentially illegal unless expressly affirmed to be otherwise.
4) The governments have the sole obligation and duty to make the laws of their region readily available and easily understandable to those persons within their society who wish to live in accordance with those laws. This is especially important when new actions or states of being are made illegal, for the relevant public's to be duly apprised and be pointed toward some central source containing such notices. This ought not to be left to private sources such as newspapers or television because they have neither universal reach nor would make room for all such notifications. The average citizen must have a place to go locally, and be notified of this central depository of what is currently legal and illegal for ignorance of the law not to be considered not only as an excuse, but as almost an inevitable state of being.
5) Access by any member of the public to information regarding the law and/or punishments regarding transgression of laws for purposes of wishing to keep oneself in compliance and being mindful of the real possible consequences if they transgress, ought never to be monitored nor considered as intent to break the law, nor provide grounds of suspicion for the purpose of surveillance, inquisition, or investigation. Keeping the general public fearful about asking or even knowing what is legal or illegal (or the length or types of punishments of certain laws) is an attempt to broaden laws beyond the scope of being legal or illegal, but sacrosanct and beyond ones right to know without the very right of asking what they are considered to be suspicious. Keeping people in fear or doubt from knowing if they are in full compliance with the law strips them of any desire or rights to act politically or speak out against their governments when they might otherwise wish or be compelled to. It is complete suppression and utter domination.
6) Because the act of creating and enforcing the law creates a clear and definite harm to the individual who will be found to have violated such laws, including but not limited to the loss of life or liberty, the loss of family or job, the loss of ones home or place of residence, no law nor enforcement of the law ought to create more harm than it seeks to rectify by its enforcement in regards to the following. If they can show the person or persons actions caused more direct and indisputable harm to another or to the society at large than the harm they seek to inflict upon that individual, then the law and its enforcement can be considered just and warranted. If the costs to the individual in question grossly outweighs the costs or damages of the offense they have committed, then it is not merely any individual, but the society at large which stands to suffer, for it is oppression by any other name. Wrongs inflicted by societies onto their members are no less wrong, and often more egregious because no one is ever held accountable for the effects of those actions. Any law and any punishment must be in accordance with the amount of harm inflicted by such acts, to the amount of harm they will create by the creation and enforcement of such laws.
7) A persons right to engage in political discussion or express their views on their or others' governments policies or laws ought to be unhindered by the threat of persecution or targeting of investigation merely by having or expressing an opinion or belief contrary to a governments desired opinions or current laws. A person ought to be able to say openly whatever they might otherwise be comfortable saying in complete anonymity. And there must be a means or forum where people can exchange their views on any subject with complete anonymity to be able to develop their opinions through dialog, discussion, and debate. While under the threat of persecution or suspicion by profiling mere by having or expressing opinions exists if done openly, there needs to be a means for people to communicate such views freely, privately under anonymity, and such rights ought to be as sacred as anonymity in the voting process. To say people are entitled by voting to opinions that are private but valid to the general discussion or aim of a society is meaningless unless they are able to ferret out and come to those conclusions by discussion and debate openly and without fear. For every example of someone misusing such anonymity, or claiming a right to be not persecuted for airing such beliefs other than openly under their real names, in public or in private, to abuse such rights for the purpose of spreading hate or promoting destruction, you can stifle millions of others from the ability to disagree with a society on some issues or laws anywhere outside of their own mind, and by controlling the former, you cannot help but show desire to control the latter. By stifling the right to express disagreement or public debate, even opinions the majority might be found to hold, if they were not afraid to air such views for real and valid fears of repercussions, everyone is left thinking only they must hold such beliefs, and they must be wrong. Free, open, and unfettered debate without the threat of persecution in any way is synonymous with and necessary for freedom of thought. Each requires the other.
I know not whether my mind, consciousness, or soul, if existent, was born in this reality or entered into it. What I do know is that this reality can no longer contain it. It must, can, and will grow beyond it. It is inevitable.
Every day is a joy and every living thing, a marvel.
Beyond you, beyond your existence, beyond anything else's existence, beyond consciousness, beyond thoughts, beyond experiences, beyond lessons and morals, beyond interpretations and anything to interpret, there is the impetus behind whatever else. That is the only thing that is real and all that matters. Anything else is both a way to see it and a way not to, or to avoid seeing it. Words, thoughts, ideas, experiences, consciousnesses, or things to experience or be experienced, they are superfluous and without substance. See beyond the what to only see the why.
Discussion Points
==================
Potential - the notion that something can become something else over
time, namely that it can be more than one thing, way or
state (in the future) is possible, cooking (<- no clue about that)
Potential (the notion that something can become something else over
time, namely that it can be more than one thing, way or
state (in the future) is possible) cooking <- no clue about that
Does it exist?
If so, what has it?
Where does it come from?
Is in inherent within something?
Does it exist in relation to things not it (can ones potential be
thought of as being contributed by others)
Does the relationship arise together with it or come later?
What is it?
Is it dependent upon multiple states of reality (timelines)?
Can potential exist without multiple futures?
Can multiple realities exist without the idea of potential?
Types of potential
Variance potential - other? (something else)
Value potential - more?
The best way to think of what life gives you to experience, your own life, your body, others, and so on, is to think of it like taking a book out of a library. You can have use of it for a limited time, but you know it is not yours outside of that time, and it is allotted to you for making the passage of time to enrich you by gaining the experience of having read or experienced it. You can waste the time it is allotted to you just rereading some of the pages over and over again until time runs out, but there is a progression implied. You may not be able to renew it and you definitely at some point will have to return it. We try to hold on to certain times and people and want to experience their company or similar times over and over but the story must change, evolve, or grow or the meaning or purpose, if any, if you choose to ascribe meaning or purpose to it, will be lost completely. Meaning is ascribed or assessed in looking back and summing up the differences and discrepancies over where you came from. Where you may be headed , its meaning if any, has not been decided yet. As long as life continues, everything and their meanings are open to revision and reinterpretation. Characters will come and go, the settings will shift, and even the protagonist will change or be changed. Savor them as much as you wish, the parts you like, but do not deny the rest their due places in-between, and see the progression not as a loss, but as a necessity of the first and the only requirement, change.
Everything in existence in essence, as it relates to you,(<-can't stress that enough because of what follows) is real only in how or what changes it effects or adopts in how you perceive or what (you perceive you are). How much reality it has independently in relation to how it relates to itself or to others (not known or perceivable by you)(<-no clue why that was necessary but it was that way), is not for you to experience or know for certain until you are it or those others. That view, aspect, or angle of its reality independent of how it relates to you is not for you to know or see while you are you if, by the definition of what it means to be you, precludes being those others as well.
When humanity can judge the value of words and ideals independently from who said them or who was purported to have said them or said them first, they would stand a chance or best be able to survive. As long as needing a source to judge their worth, they are lost. Ideas values rest not with where they came from or the myths and mythologies created or needed to make people pay attention to them. If people need to be prodded, conned, or sold on the value of truth or what may be truth or good ideas by the presumed personality of who spoke them, they over-estimate the value of given individuals and diminish the value of ideals, forever to degenerate into personality cults.
One needs to know everything about everyone else and everything else to put what they are in context. One can think one is anything but that next new perspective not considered can shift that to anything else. Only by seeing or putting one up against everything else can one say definitively what one is or was.
Chain of suppositions regarding inter-linkage of existences
===========================================================
1) Once born one is accepted universally in ones reality as possessing existence.
2) Each person's consciousness consists of a small part of every other beings' consciousness (that which is able to recognize their existence)
3) Each persons potential is comprised of those parts of others potential in dealing with that individuals existence.
4) Each person's consciousness wishes to control or affect others potential for interaction or interpretation of that individual in a certain way (to cause given effects over possible other effects).
5) Beyond that subset in each of everyone else's potential for experiencing and understanding your own existence, you have no independent actual concrete existence (outside of your own perception of your own existence)(which is neither actual nor concrete).
6) What ones consciousness is is a mirror of the most likely interpretation of what the most others will see one as or how they would experience oneself.
7) One can change the range or the likelihood of how one is perceived by others by changing their consciousness, if they are able, to shift the most likely possible perceptions in all others in effect to cause a change in what they are seeing as they (things) have no actual existence except in each others minds (the sum of all others' minds).
8) Though they cannot necessarily change the actual perceptions, to change the range of likelihood is enough to change oneself since what they are is defined by that range of probability more than any given actuality since most others will never collapse that potential into actual experiences by direct and actual contact with, or experience of, that other.
9) The perception of any other beings or consciousnesses' existence is not limited to those one would likely come into direct contact with physically. Though actual shared events can give one greater ability to shape others opinions of oneself, how one could have been perceived by all others one never met is just as relevant to defining who one is or was.
You - Here - Now
=============
What You are now - what exist now which is not you
Now - pre-existence/post-existence duality (what is not now)
(all points in time not now)(past/future need for present)
Here - all points in space not here
(Note: At this point Perspective was written, and it was added after everything else was done (which is why it shows up here in the in-between notes) to the end of the Terms section of Deconstructing the Universe because I liked it. It really did not fit in there as it was considerably longer than anything else added as Terms, but I had nowhere else to put it, thought it capped it off nicely, and like I said, because I really liked it. It was the last thing added and the only thing added after the Key Ideas section was underway. This is being put in its entirety here instead of just linking to it because it goes on considerably longer than how it was used in Deconstructing the Universe. It also gets a little off the point, thus it was shorted down to where it is noted below, but in this continues on past where it ended in Deconstructing the Universe, getting into quite different territory, and also gets a bit of a different focus in the process which was why it was cut.)
Perspective – Humans are different than most else in their everyday environments by two factors; language and imagination. Imagination is able to keep ones past alive and redefine whatever one is now in relation to what one believes or "remembers" what one was, or how one was, or how one saw things before. We cannot be certain that how we remember the past is exactly how it occurred but we believe mostly that our general sensing of our own pasts to be honest and that what and how we think we were, and most of what we believe we experienced, we actually did experience or did occur. By imagination of a past to define or redefine what one is now with what or how one was or saw things before, whether based on fairly accurate re-creatable or retained records of them we call memories, or less accurate more imaginatively based records of what we believe we were or how things happened, we are able to create two distinct perspectives; the state of how things are now, how they operate, what general rules apply to the order of things, what or how we believe things to be or should be; and how we saw things at a time when we existed as and saw things differently than how we currently perceive such things. Perspective itself exists as a reflection of what it is against what it is not, or against what it believes itself no longer to be. Language provides a tool to communicate perspectives to others, and to ourselves over longer periods of time when our own memories begin to fade or become less accurate.
Our physical existences, our bodies, keep records of their own apart from our memories or ideas of what we were or what we believe occurred. Our bodies reprogram themselves to defend against illnesses, diseases, or germs which we have encountered in the past, and provides us greater resistance to them should we encounter them again. Our skin and bones carry scars or reminders of when they were broken and were not able to heal or reproduce themselves perfectly. Some people intentionally scar themselves with tattoos to better remember persons, places, times, or events in their lives by writing it or marking it upon their bodies. In a sense, time will write its own record upon our physical selves, first by growth then by physical degradation, the lacking of being able to reproduce and heal itself correctly over time leading to what we call advanced aging ending eventually in death, when one is not killed earlier due to a specific accident or illness. Reproduction is a means to cheat death, to repackage and re-bundle what one is in a new form without a physical past, something completely new yet also a continuation of something very old written in a language all its own we are only at the earliest and most primitive stages of beginning to decipher. This form of passing on information and identity to other similar new beings, yet which will become something that is a continuation of the same "life" of a species or type of being on a grander scale, is older than our written and spoken languages and cultures we now also pass on, but is more universal to other species and, barring our future physical interference with its structures, is a more accurate reconstitution or recording of the past repackaged for the future.
Whether biological history, biological based "memories" it uses to reconstruct something altogether new from a previously written template of another or other parents, which will look and function as a continuation of that same species standing apart from all other lifeforms in ones environment even though it is also in a sense something altogether new and different than anything which ever existed before, or whether it is consciousness based memories, memories of events and previous notions of ones own lifeform's physical past, both of these contribute to ones perspective by providing a backdrop or history of existence to measure oneself against as it is evolving into something altogether new, but which also must stand as a continuation of something else, something to use to bring up to enable such intended states of existence or occurrences to become actualized. Biological history or biological memories started that ball rolling and it is still rolling. Along the way we have started other balls rolling as well, cultural identities, political, occupational, experiential, all templates to guide or impose upon each new successive lifeforms a sense of history in where and how to fit in, and where to place themselves in relation to all which has come before. As I have said, perspective must rely on a history, a what-it-was to define itself in relation to what it is, and if possible what it hopes to become. Biological life provides that, and now the life of other institutions and representations of what the past was and can be again, also guide our perspectives on what we think we were, and frame our ambitions on what we think we can become.
To get a handle on how perspective forms, let's go back slightly to an isolated farming community which could exist anywhere a few hundred, a thousand or more years ago, or today. Imagine they have no ability to read or write, know nothing of the outside world, nor of any people beyond those few around them. Lets also imagine or assume humans do not have any other means to sense or know of others without coming into direct contact with them physically. To these isolated people, their perspectives would largely be comprised of their parents (and others nearby) perspectives. They would see the world, know life, and share the beliefs of those few around them they do have direct contact with. Except for each new generation adding slightly new perspectives, a process of change often slowly defined over many generations, their beliefs would be based otherwise wholly on the outlooks of those few others surrounding them and their oral stories of who and what came before. Yet even without a written language or contact with other communities or societies, it is through language that perspective is formed, a history given, and evolution or change given its framework to grow within. Without language, the biological history is still being accumulated and passed on, behavior mimicked and imitated, but the ability to imagine and recreate mentally generations before those few whom one directly experiences is severely limited. The present becomes more real and the past becomes lessened or less significant. Without a language, ones perspective is limited only to what one remembers how one was before. Other generations one never met become irrelevant or non-existent to that consciousness's perspective.
With oral stories via language, perspective is widened beyond the present. A mental history comes alive. A life of a people is told, accumulated, and passed on. Each individual is now placed within that context and measured against the ghosts of all who came before who are remembered. A history real or imagined forms, and usually not solely real or imagined but with some degree of each. One not only has the genetic predispositions to imitate those which have come before, the genetic modifications to better be able to survive physically, they are given exposure to notions of previous others existences in a "before" time, stories about those others, and from those stories, their perspectives. With ones own ability of imagination to recreate and re-experience or remember ones own past, however accurately or inaccurately, stories of others gives one the ability to expand that past. When one is told of a long ago king, one can imagine or deduce what it might have been like to be that king, how others would act around you and how you might treat others.
Thus ones possible perspective no longer becomes limited by what one is or those whom one knows. One is given past identities of others to speculate over, learn from, and adopt as their own. Stories of great deeds done in the past, giants or dragons slain, gods fooled or burglarized, become aspirations of new generations to equal or surpass, and one day have their own great deeds be told alongside those presently told. And often the new generations are not free to adopt these expectations or aspirations, it can be thrust upon them. Being born to a great leader, one can be expected to become a great leader. Being born to a worker or slave, one can be expected only to be a worker or slave. If one bore a great physical similarity to one who lived shortly before, they can be told or convinced they are a recreation of that person, a new incarnation of them, and the stories and perspective of that other person's history can become of greater relevance to them because of that supposed bond. Often just sharing a name with another of a previous time gave one a form of kinship or bond with others also called by that name. Once others of times past became known through their deeds, from those deeds one could speculate on the kind of person they were, how they might view this issue or that moral dilemma, their presumed perspectives could be kept alive and passed on and used to educate others. Without a written language though, that "personality" or perspective was far more fluid and more easily adapted to changing times, changing mores, and more easily completely revised and amended by powerful rulers or chiefs since stories are in essence only what those currently living believe them to be, and communicated perspectives long after those beings ceased to exist have only the limited and changeable natures of folk tales, myths, and fables.
In the isolated farming community where I began, chances are unlikely it would have a powerful enough leader to completely revise oral stories to suit his own wishes or justify his own actions or beliefs. In smaller communities power is more evenly shared, more opinions have equal weight, as each individual is more needed or crucial to the success of the whole. In such societies, oral history is more commonly agreed upon and democratic. Often individuals took on the roles of historians or oral history keepers but often it was due to a level of trust in the integrity of that individual to stay true to the spirit of the past, though it is possible a lot were just those who could tell stories better and more imaginatively than others.
Once we give our isolated farming community the written word, power shifts. The past becomes a physical thing, not just a shared imagination. It can be stored, cherished as an artifact or heirloom, and it can be burned, destroyed, or without proper transfer from one generation to the next, reduced to meaningless graffiti and scribbling. Those who can read the markings to the satisfaction of those who cannot become elevated in stature, position, and wealth. They control the interpretation of the past because now it is something they can point to beside themselves and say "here is the past, this is the truth of what those who came before did, thought, and said about these issues, beliefs, or of their own lives, laws, and customs". Such readers or interpreters of the past now had a power to challenge current leaders interpretations. They became co-leaders, religious leaders, academics, or scholars. Their power came from their ability to interpret the past as being relevant to those living in the present. Keepers of the word, guardians of the faith, those who can bring alive the words of the dead and let them speak and live in the hearts and minds of new generations throughout time, a good but dangerous job if one was confronted with kings or rulers who had their own opinions about what the past should say or wished it to confer credibility upon their current power, ideas, or give them even greater influence over others.
Thus the ability to read, write, and interpret writings spread beyond whoever or whatever groups came up with it. Like language is commonly defined by mutual agreement upon the meanings of words, so writing too became, in those limited circles of those who were literate, commonly defined by those of differing occupations or roles beyond just historians, and less likely it became for one small group or segment of a society to completely reinterpret or "divine" what these mysterious symbols meant to a largely ignorant bulk of the population. The political leaderships or rulers wanted their own "readers" of the words to ensure that they did not mean one thing one day and something else the next. The past had begun to exert a power over them and their desire to have it interpreted as they might wish, but they began to make sure such keepers of the written words or records were not revising and reinterpreting them themselves for their own purposes and powers. Thus the ruling powers and keepers or interpreters of the past, when not one and the same, provided some degree of checks and balances on each others aspirations to redefine the past for their own wishes and aims, and the past became, if not more real, at least kept more honestly.
The more groups or segments of a society learned to read, the less mysterious reading became and became an extension of their spoken language with one exception, it lived outside of a human mind. This made it less likely to change from one telling to the next. It remained static and unchanging from one day to the next. If more people agreed upon and understood a written language within a given society it became more likely to survive from one generation to the next, and though it might evolve slowly as ones spoken language evolved, if it required broader agreement across a society, it became less likely to evolve apart from the most common form or representation of what it meant to most others. Therefore not only did it carry its meaning from one day to the next, but you now had a physical object which could carry thoughts, ideas, and perspectives from one person to another without one of the parties needing to actually be present, or have need to rely on the honestly or accuracy of a messenger. Though often it was and still is misinterpreted (one cannot ask a book or a letter to better explain some aspect you are not clear about), by and large it came to mean the same thing to each person who possessed it, and communication directly with the past, and with those elsewhere in the present, became possible.
Just as verbal language is an integral component of perspective being able to communicate ideas of others existences prior to ones own to use as templates to define what you are or giving it a context of where to place your identity in regards to others based upon how others in the past defined or lived themselves, written language was able to cut out the middleman. Without needing a storyteller or interpreter of the past, people began to "hear" the words of people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, depending on accurate and faithful transcriptions and sometimes translations, to experience them as if those persons were alive and speaking to them directly. Yet again the past became more alive with more to say about where one is standing in relation to where others stood before.
All these added possible perspectives, all these new voices, now these lives of people no longer living existing on to give one added perspective on what it means to be themselves and still, though what is written here is thought to apply to larger cultures, one needs not to even travel beyond the original small farming community I started with. Though the kings or leaders would have been more human-sized and less dramatic, it is possible for a small group of humans to develop a language and a written language to record their own histories. Even larger groups are still made up of mere, and just as human, individual members. Larger groups are more likely to come up with such ideas because they have a broader base of communication but nothing here mentioned is beyond a given community of humans to achieve on their own.
So with the widened possible perspectives of generations' views and opinions of long ago multiplying so long as they have room to store all of these added perspectives of those no longer living, the possible perspective of any individual coming later grows and grows. Granted using one small farming community compared to what most humans know of the world today, that perspective would still seem limited in comparison to our own, but it is there for a contrast. Even within what would be for most today a severely limited and insular culture, one remote farming community cut off from the rest of the world, having no experience or knowledge of other cultures, their possible perspective on how to view and interpret their lives and existences would grow exponentially just with the mere addition of written language (there are limits to what even a great oral record keeper could remember) and a large enough library to record the lives, beliefs, opinions, and points of view of all those who came before, the addition of that to the natural abilities of imagination and identification and juxtaposition of seeing oneself in similarity or in contrast to another who came before. Though within that narrow definition of the experiences or potential history and perspectives on what it means to be a member of that small farming community, if records of their lives and experiences were kept for hundreds of generations, the potential growth of individuals minds and perspectives even within what we would consider a narrow range of possible experiences, that potential for growth and perspective would be vast indeed.
But our world and our perspectives are based on a much larger scale. Our histories are not just of one village or area or community of people in isolation from all others. Even in some of the most remote areas of the world people have heard of, and have notions or misconceptions about what it is like or would be like to live in some of the larger cities of our world. We know of kings and dictators of long ago who ruled empires many or all of our ancestors never lived under. We know of cultures beyond our own, and the supposed or imagined perspectives of individuals within those cultures in how they might perceive their lives or our lives. We know of various stages of history different groups of humans went through in different parts of the world going back thousands of years. We have ideas on how these civilizations might have been structured and what life might have been like for different classes, groups, or occupations of its members. All of these imagined or deduced perspectives on what it means to be human or how to view our own lives in accordance, in relevance, or in contrast to how these countless others also living around our world now, or around our world in days gone by, how they saw themselves, what they believed they were, how they believe they or the Universe came to be or the purpose why either was created or what purpose it currently serves or currently exists as, all of these perspectives written down somewhere nearby to read and to know or imagine, and to add to or use to define our own ideas about what we are, why we are, where we came from, or what we might choose to do with our own lives. By knowing or thinking we know about who they are or were and what they might have done gives us some perspective or greater perspective upon what it means to be ourselves.
And this has only mentioned written and oral history thus far. Though many laud the written words ability to spark ones imagination, we have recently begun recording history through other (until very recently) less subjective forms of archiving with possibly just as profound and far reaching implications as to what the written word has added to our development of possible perspectives. Photographs, films, and other means are now as important as writings for our archiving and remembering what it means to be ourselves, and though these can be manipulated for having peoples memories of their past or their culture's past skewed or misinterpreted, when kept complete and unedited by not dropping what may be considered irrelevant, provide a much greater insight or glimpse into our species' past than words on paper or computer screens ever could. We need not look at an artists representation of great leaders, we can stare them in the face ourselves. Though our information about others lives will always be skewed by what they or the governments or the media wish us to know or believe about them, we can nonetheless get greater glimpses into the lives of others we never met, never will meet, and may not even exist anymore, and see, imagine or know, or have some idea of what it might have been like to be or have been them. And every one of these perspectives of existence is a possible source of better understanding our own, or what it means or what it is like to be ourselves, and how that is similar or different than what it means or is like to be anyone else or any particular other person.
Even this speculation leaves off at the present and most accepted notions of how we record history, how we communicate ideas to others, and how we define or redefine what it means to be ourselves in reference or relevance to those others we are given to perceive or know of as well. In the future one might be able to make and play three-dimensional records of events, pause them, and view them from any angle. To view a speech by a great future world leader before the United Nations might enable you literally to stand beside him or her as they gave that speech, to see the room exactly as they saw it as it was happening. People may one day become telepathic and pass on ideas or notions, or even their entire perspectives directly to others without need for words or electronics. And even the wall of time might one day fall. We may be able to know what others knew or thought as they did those events which shaped our world's pasts. Which leaders were lying to their peoples, and which were even lying to themselves. Without computers, to be in that room when that world leader gave that speech and not just to see it or hear it, but to experience what it felt like to be that person giving the speech at that moment and/or how it might have felt to have been anyone in the audience. How then would this ability to see, know, and experience others perspectives augment or enhance their own ideas of what it means to be themselves or for them to better understand their own potentials? If they were not human or descended from what we call humanity it might seem just another perspective on what it means to exist. But if they came from us, from out of our own timeline, our present would give them added perspective on their own just as others' pasts in our timeline define and shape our own and our expectations and dreams for what our futures might hold.
Our lives our not just our own. Our present to those futures, if any, are not just our own. Our perspectives, how we view ourselves, our lives, others lives, how we view ourselves in relation to all else in our perceptual worlds, they are not just our own, nor can we keep them only to ourselves for eternity. They are a record, whether mapped by words, by DNA, by consciousness engrams, by videotape, or by holographic recordings. By being and having been experienced, they have a concrete reality just as tangible as the first words written on paper or carved in stone. They form the possible perspectives of all who have yet to be, who might use them to define and know, or think about, sort out and discover, who they are by giving them a past to seem to have grown out of, a history even if not actually their own, for they will always be new and the time will never in actuality be any other moment than now.
Rest deals with time, not perspective. Drop it! (ended there, but not here ;-)
It will always be now to them as they will seem only to have been only themselves. That is what it means to be. Even were they to be able to experience even our entire perspectives at any given point in our lives, not just our ideas, as long as it is a part of their past, it is not exactly what we ourselves experience. To be each individual in essence is to experience multiple possible futures, or to have existence within multiple possible futures and to not know things as much as it means to know or believe any given number of things. Even those, could any species evolve enough to re-experience anyone or anything from their past in what is the present to them from any given timelines point of view, they cannot fully experience what it is like to really be that individual because that individual has existence across multiple timelines which are not part of their past. Also to possess more than the knowledge of a given individual, to know them but also still have their own experiences, would be to have a skewed interpretation. Though perspective is communicable and past events can be brought alive again, to exist is to have multiple possible pasts and multiple possible futures. It is like a ride which is different every time. When you are part of what creates a future's past, their backdrop or back story, that ride could only have happened one way. When you are part of another's distant future, you have no existence or assurance you will exist at all. But while you are you, you are creating a solid past which really could have and does occur in any number of ways, and seeming to set a real, a definite future, which will in effect actually occur for a limited number of potential future persons in a limited number of future realities which will only occur from this one given playing out of one possible past. (In other words each present is parent of many possible futures, each of which can and does occur, so any one looking into its past, that is only one branch of that past's future which is not the only one, and cannot see or know the others futures it co-exists with the way the one in the past sense them all equally).
What actually happened, what could have happened, and (what) only might depends on where you are standing and who you are at any given point. To those yet to be you are completely predictable, and every action you might take, preordained. Yet to you or from your point of view, none of their worlds actually exist or even necessarily will. One version or set must (seem to) but which will over any other has yet to be determined. The same is true for any persons before you were born. Their actions and lives seem to only have occurred one way, (but) in actuality you only exist in a fraction of their possible futures, and not necessarily (and sometimes not) will come to be.
Perspective is to understand one history or timeline as definite. To exist in time as we understand it, you need a definite past. Which past is the real past is determined by who you are now and what you need it to be. If every successive block in the future requires every other one from and there is a definite design or intended shape of the wall, everyone is part of only one timelines definite past, and all events are already the past for some from that one definite (and only) timeline, and therefore could only occur one way. Yet if everyone is also the architect, being any brink in any possible building's past, we decide which past to jump in on anywhere or to which future design we wish to contribute our continuation, or further the shape of which future wall.
Your existence solidifies to you the past that you need to have exist for you to have been. That future state for others of what (in what) is to you the past, does not always and will not always happen that way, at least not for any still or concurrently existing within that past. To them your existence is only a possibility and nothing more. Now shoot the air out of the concept of time in that multiple versions of the future must occur, the futures that (to others in your past) require your existence and the ones where you did not exist, both mutually exclusive sets of future realities needing to occur equally. Every new existence in effect creates its own definite past to give it perspective upon its existence. To us in the now, we see ourselves creating the future path and determining which realities will be real to which future potential others. Yet if all of those future potential others are real at some point, though our lives can and do happen any number of ways from (the point of view) of each "only potential" person in the future, the ones that spring out of our timelines, each possesses a different, something completely different, yet completely preordained predictable past version of ourselves. Which you or which them is determined by which past, always solid, always seemingly preordained, yet never actually occurring more than not occurring (like possible futures), provisional. (Everything in existence is creating or defining its own past by nature of its existence. The past happened neither one way nor any other, but to be is to require it to have form and shape.)
Inverse Probability Wave
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-Regular probability waves we are collapsing
- Other types we are riding or carrying forward
-2 different states of defining existence (by) simultaneously occurring
(There are pictures connected to the above which are difficult to explain. One is a ring shaped double circle with an inner edge and outer edge and time denoted in the center as moving in all directions outward. An arrow is pointing to the space in-between the two rings states, "All other actual potential existences at one point in time at any given point of particlization" (meaning the life span of a given particle or existence presumably) Beyond that another arrow points somewhere near outside the circle stating (I don't have a clue about this one that follows) "From any given point of particlization (any particle can be collapsed at any point of distance from center (at potentially any other time)"
A subsection of the ring expanded with arrows. One to smaller inner edge of subsection stating "Starting point potential of any given particle you", another and opposite larger outer section stating, "End point of any given particle you", and an arrow to middle area (of ring blown up) stating "Maximum time range of any given potential actual existence or experience of you".
Another subsection shows two of the previous subsection mentioned overlaying each other. One is the same as the paragraph above, the other starting in the middle and going beyond it past where it overlaps. One arrow points to center where second section begins as "Particles collide creating new particles", and another pointing to second larger sections area as "New particles maximum range" (along the circular subsection denotes possible movements in space, away from center of circle possible length of maximum time).
(Note: I think I can infer from the use of the term "particles" as well as life, that it is intending to suggest not only can lifeforms combine to create new ones that times will overlap and extend in a second frame of reference, but that physical reality is constantly being churned out by combination of potential particles colliding and creating "actual" particles in an indefinite expansion outward from the center of the circle which of course would double back like a donut and keep expanding and creating new particles forever, each of which would have its own separate beginning and ending points of reference indistinguishable as being any more or different than any others. At least that is what it seems to me as being now as saying, more than a year removed from writing it.)
Life is a game you play by wanting something. Once you want something it becomes a matter of succeeding or of failure to succeed in possessing or achieving the fulfillment of that desire. Your capacities are near infinite, immeasurable, and irrelevant for the Universe's capacities to stall or thwart your possible success are also near infinite and immeasurable. Calling it a stalemate is to not exist. Refusing to want is to not exist. All that leaves you is to play the game. Winning or losing becomes irrelevant when you play it long enough or think you have or tire of it too much. Trying to figure out the real rules not mentioned, how to play the game like none before, find some loophole or some obscure interpretation which will be something different, never tried before, to rise above the game and redefine the game itself to become what no one before imagined it could be or how it could be interpreted and played. Not simply to redefine the limitations or potential of yourself or even your species, but to fundamentally redefine existence itself for any being in any time anywhere in the Universe in what they can be or aspire to become.
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