I had a weird thought about this the other day. If there is no limit on time then there is no limit on possibilities. So there would be an infinite amount of things happening over an infinite time. Not sure if I believe in that. But you know.
I think one of the problems here is people thinking of themselves as a fixed point, or even themselves as a completely integrated indivisible unit. The metaphor here would be the earth. Every year there is an autumn. Things die back. Then every year there is a spring, which comes with an explosion of new growth. This happens over and over. After 100,000 or 1,000,000 cycles, is it still the same place? After enough time has passed, with the weather, and tectonics, and so on it would essentially be unrecognizable.
Yeah but "you" is your self-aware consciousness. When you are star stuff you aren't "you" If you live infinite lives with no memory, "you" are not living them. If you are another you in another place, time or dimension, you are not really you. So why even entertain that as a possibility since it is an unprovable concept? Why don't humans accept that this as their sum and total existence?
"You" as an integrated, inseparable, unified thing is not a real thing. It is slight of hand by your brain. Start with this book: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained Also, this, besides being a really good book, will help disabuse you of the idea of a little you inside your head, riding the reigns of your brain: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat
The micro-universe is strikingly similar to the macro-universe. In other words, what we see through a telescope is similar to what we see through a microscope. Perhaps the two universes are an endless loop and somehow merge into each other.
If I take you and erase all of your memories, are you still you? Yes of course. No, you have lost all of your memory and is now a different you? Both answer seems correct. Expand that over (assume possible) rebirths with no memory intact. Are you still you? I think both answers still seems correct. Every single moment, you have new memories and your old memories are degrading and changing... so every single moment, the old "you" pass away and a new "you" arises. We already live countless rebirth of "you"!
Even being aware of all these concepts, it's still a trip considering how "normal" time, memory, and the existence of self feels. I could consider sleep a coma-like state where the "you" dies every time one closes his eyes. Can you imagine a life totally changed from the inside in one day? Outside of clinical insanity, that might feel impossible among us who suffers from first world problems, but it's not an uncommon question either.
Existence & nothingness. Opposites sides of the spectrum that are equally frightening. Can't think of anything more monumentally baffling, maybe black holes. -Dr Manhattan
Even more fundamentally weird that time and space is - where did the laws of physics come from? If you think everything came from nothingness. Then wrap your noodle around what nothingness is like. Nothingness has no dimensions. No where, no time, no frame of reference. It is infinitely big and infinitely small at the same time. If everything spontaneous came to being out of an act of random potential, for no reason. That's the only explanation that we can say makes any sense that gets us away from the paradox of time having a beginning but what was before time. But can we really comprehend nothingness?
It is one of those concepts that is very difficult to wrap our head around just like the size of the universe.
I just want to tell you that I’ve been having some insane existential depression lately. So I went back and read this thread again. Your posts legitimately made me feel so much better. Thanks for sharing your thoughts years ago.
Infinity isn't scary. It's just an idea like any other. Mathematicians break infinity down into two categories even. Listable and unlistable. Listable would be the natural numbers going from 0,1,2,3,4,5,.... all the way down to infinity. Unlistable as an example would be every single number between 0 and 1. For example, 0, 0.01, 0.001, 0.0001 all the way down to infinity. Since you can always add another number after any decimal place, it's an unlistable amount of infinite sums. Here's a good lecture on Georg Cantor. He dedicated a lot of his study towards infinity. In his era, mathematicians looked down on him for studying the idea of infinite sums and he was ridiculed for it. Ended up going to an insane asylum as well. Interesting stuff. Physics says the infinite sum of all natural numbers of -1/12.
