h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Granted, the odds would be vanishingly small, but isn't eternity vanishingly big? Borges's Library would be something of a galactic-sized, if not universal-sized, wordfind puzzle. Forget whether or not a planet would be hospitable, such a endeaver would use up the lifetime of humanity at least, much less the years of one life, and I certainly don't have that much time on my hands. But probabilty and possibilty are two different things. Just because we're not there to see it happen doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Consider that some jumble of letters that one sees and ignores for lack of sense-making, could very well include the random novel of some long dead, or not yet born, race.

Ah... L- Space.

Maybe eternity isn't vanishingly big . . . if it's "outside time" that doesn't make it equal to "a long long time"

"L-Space"?

It had always been my impression that time was the primary dimension of eternity. (That's meant in the mathmatical sense, not the spacial sense, of course. As in length, width, depth, duress.) If that's accurate, then how could eternity be outside it's primary dimension, time?

Pratchett.

The wizards, when confronted with L- Space, get a computer (essentially) to delve into L- Space and find a book on the subject. L- Space being all possible configurations of letters etc, ever.

Ah, my scrolling reveals that your a Pratchett fan. Unfortunately all I've read of his is "Good Omens" (co-authored with Niel Gaiman which was the hook for me).

Good Omens is fantastic.

Like Dogma the movie but as a book, and much funnier.

How could eternity be outside its primary dimension, time?

As mind is outside the world. See F115543?thread=337310&skip=2

If by "the world" you mean "existance", then I can see the perspective of a flowing awareness or a collective unconscious not being able to be imbodied. But I do not feel that the mind is independent of the world. I see the world as the means, the measuring device by which we judge the mind, judge our Self.

Say there was no world/existance (again we are dealing with the limitations of words and language) and a mind yet existed, how would that mind come to recognize its own Self? There would be no other Thing to refer to as "That is. It is not I. I am not that. I am this. I am. Yadda Yadda Yadda." There must be objective perspective before there can ever be inner/self perspective. So, the mind cannot exist without the world. In this sense the mind is embodied by the world, it is fulfilled by the world and without the world it is nothing. In a moment of Self-realization, in a moment where the mind exists independent of the world, is where, as one point of the thread pointed out ... "...the awakening is usually described in terms of the non-existence of any personal 'I'." (This brings to mind the origins of my often used psuedonym which means "Nobody and Nothing")

In our worldly limitations we, or at least I, generally tend to think of time as the measurement of one moment to the next, or as the relationship between various moving bodies. As in, "what time is it?" which regards the relationship of the Earth's rotation and the sunlight which shines upon its face embodied in, first the sundial, and now clocks. However, even without movement there exists duress of whatever exists. Further, duress exists without anything which could or could not move, (the world/existance.) The duress of nothingness could not be measured for it would have no frame of reference, but measured or not, nothingness would exist (oh the irony! or is this a semantics nightmare?) and therefore have duress. So everything is emobodied by time, whether it exists or not. Nothing can be outside time, well nothing can't be outside time either, but you know what I mean. (Grrrrr.)

Anyway, or therefore, or whatever, as mind is not outside the world but threaded throughout it, eternity, seeing as how it has being, would be threaded throughout time and cannot exist outside it.

Or not.

Recumbentman is correct. Eternity can be concisely defined as 'timelessness'.

Thank you Toxxin.

Nemo's position, that the world is the means by which the mind can know itself, looks very like Berkeley's. Berkeley (1685-1753) is remembered as an immaterialist, but he was the one who took freethinking to its logical conclusion and showed its weakness. It was impossible then to do what Pinker and Dawkins and Dennett are trying to do now, show how intelligence can arise from non-intelligent matter. Just as the Pali Dhammapada begins "Experiences are preceded by mind" (echoed by St John as "In the beginning was the word"), Berkeley made the case that matter only exists as a mode of perception; the primary existences are minds that perceive, but are themselves unperceived. This is in turn echoed in Wittgenstein's description of the mind as being outside the world (he defines the world as "all that is the case" -- the sum of all knowable facts).

You might enjoy the "who am I" discussion in the "Dying haiku" thread F115543?thread=337310

I did a study once on Berkeley's writings about Time. Berkeley specifically challanged Newton's description of time as something that "flows equally" whether anything happens in it or not. (Newton spoke of "duration" which I take it is what Nemo means by "duress"). Berkeley said (I paraphrase him) that there is no possible meaning to the statement that time could flow through nothing; it is an unimaginable concept, empty words.

You are right about "duration" being what I meant and not "duress". Oft times I jumble the words which I pull from the ether. I think I'm somewhere in between Newton and Berkeley, at least that's my self-impression from what the threads here read. I do not feel that Time "flows", I do not feel that it is some mutable substance that can be molded and twisted, the flowing would merely be a false impression. Rather, I think it is we that flow through Time.
Though Nothing, by its nature or lack thereof, is also an immutable, having no form to be twisted or molded, and so it cannot flow either. Nothing is a hypothetical concept which is in essence the idea of non-existence. Of course no thing can flow through nothing,including time since it is some thing. Berekley's right about that.
But then there's Pluto, I think it was him, who discussed the concept of Forms and Ideals (I think that's what they were) where Form being anything that can be imagined would have an Ideal, being the superior actuality of the Form. That's seems to be the general idea of it as I recall, but then I confuse duress with duration, so there you go. If one could imagine it, it could exist. The question to that is whether or not one could ever truly imagine Nothing? I know I can only approach it.

Yep. Plato was an Idealist, believing that earthly things are only imperfect copies of their ideal forms; he assigned greater reality to the ideal (accessed by reason) than the actual (accessed by sense).

Pluto on the other hand was Mickey Mouse's pet dog. (You'll have to stop drinking that stuff.)

One of those theories of everything, really. Language, religion, knowledge.... perhaps not mind but it covers a fair bit.

Time for another favourite quote:

"Feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition."

Charlotte Brontë, 'Jane Eyre' ch. 21 (1847)

Cool.

A rather lame one:

"Things just happen. What the hell."

"Time is the form of inner sense." Immanuel Kant

There's no definitive reason why the universe itself should not be timeless, and therefore eternal.

Plato's problem was essentially the same as Descartes'. How is the world of immaterial forms connected to the world of material forms?

Noggin

Through the pineal gland of course.