Eternity

[EmpNapoleon]

What is it?  Do you get to choose a particular duration of life and live it over?  Are you given a particular emotion, like happiness, and feel that forever?  Eternal peace?

There's been a lot of Nietzsche bashing.  Let me defend a philosopher who needs no defending.  In Zarathustra, he makes it clear that belief is worth little.  I'm not going to try to "prove" ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME.  For those who don't know, it's the "idea" that what I have just written now has been written an infinite amount of times in the past (not in a similar way, but identical, by myself), and also that what I am writting now will be done an infinite amount of times again in the future (like I said, exactly as I just typed it).  Every moment lived is eternal.  I've lived some treacherous moments, and Nietzsche rightly calls EROTS his "most abysmal thought."  But I've also lived euphoric moments, so I've lived in both Hell and Heaven on Earth.

There are no underworlds, overworlds, unconscious worlds, etc., etc. etc.  Their essence is danger.  I think it's an ingenious, courageous idea for the modern human to understand that when the body dies, there is nothing.  The body is all.  The "mind" or "spirit," as intellectuals have distinguished it for over two thousand years, is a tool to prolong the existence of the individual or species.  As Nietzsche said, "The mind is a metaphor for an elevation of the body."  What I don't understand is when Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, notes that there is a twofold falsification: one of the mind and one of the body.  The former I've just described (an error without which we wouldn't survive), but the latter I can't grasp.  Although, WTP has some problems with authenticity.

Perhaps someone can better explain the mere concept of eternity.  Smile.  The joy lives and dies.  We wish for perpetual laughter, but it always passes away.  Like the man said, "All joys want eternity."  Happiness and peace need sorrow and war.  I'm pretty sure that someone will say that eternity can't be sensed.  If I can't taste, touch, smell, hear, or see something, to hell with it.   

[david johnson]

'I think it's an ingenious, courageous idea for the modern human to understand that when the body dies, there is nothing.'

i believe such is just a cop out.
doesn't mean we can't agree on excellent music though.

dj

[Ephemerid]

To quote from one of my favourite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke (who like much of what Nietzsche had to say):

Once for each thing. Just once; no more.
And we too, just once. And never again.
But to have been this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth,
seems beyond undoing.

(from Duino Elegy No. 9)

That sums up one of my most essential attitudes to life.  Unlike Pascal, who was terrified of those "empty spaces," I want to embrace it, to love THIS world. 

It has bothered me for so long the idea that "The world can't be all there is" when I find "this world" to be an overabundance of beauty, mystery terror, awe, joy-- a mixture of so many things that no one finite human being will ever be able to experience it all.  I think people who view "the world" that way do it a terrible disservice.  I want to embrace this world, and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. 

The transience of all things is not a flaw in the universe-- its the very thing that makes it so precious. 

At least, that's my own take on things.   

[Joe_Campbell]

That's a beautiful poem, although I don't agree with its message.

[EmpNapoleon]

At least, that's my own take on things.  

What you wrote was perfect.

Rilke also said something like, "We're only given one spring."  Hopefully, here's one comming up soon (I'm in Chicago). 

[val]

I can only see eternity as absence. My absence.

Everything that I am, everything that I become with time, has only meaning within the life I share with other living creatures.

Eternity before my birth, eternity after my death. The non-being is my border. But within those borders I am everything here and now.

And when I die the world I experienced also dies.

[Sergeant Rock]

Once for each thing. Just once; no more.
And we too, just once. And never again.
But to have been this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth,
seems beyond undoing.

(from Duino Elegy No. 9)

That sums up one of my most essential attitudes to life.  Unlike Pascal, who was terrified of those "empty spaces," I want to embrace it, to love THIS world.

I love the Elegies too but unfortunately they give me little solace. I don't believe in eternity except as a vast emptiness:

...the total emptiness for ever,
the sure extinction that we travel to
and shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
not to be anywhere,
and soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
That is a special way of being afraid
no trick dispels. Religion used to try,
that vast moth-eaten musical brocade
created to pretend we never die.
And specious stuff that says No rational being
can fear a thing it will not feel not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound
no touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
nothing to love or link with...
            Phillip Larkin "Aubade"

Sarge

[david johnson]

i think i'll stick around for 'payday' after i die.  since some of my companions here choose not to attend, i think i'll get their checks, too.
don't worry guys, you'll get them when you do show up.  i'll even invest in your behalf so you'll have some extra.

the party starts at deathtime.  this physical existence is just the all important warm-up.

dj

[Sergeant Rock]

i think i'll stick around for 'payday' after i die.  since some of my companions here choose not to attend, i think i'll get their checks, too.
don't worry guys, you'll get them when you do show up.  i'll even invest in your behalf so you'll have some extra.

the party starts at deathtime.  this physical existence is just the all important warm-up.

dj

I'd like to believe that, David. It's no fun believing in nothing. I just can't make the required leap of faith. Maybe someday.

Sarge

[Harry]

I'd like to believe that, David. It's no fun believing in nothing. I just can't make the required leap of faith. Maybe someday.

Sarge

Faith will come Sarge, at its own time, and you will embrace it as a good friend, believe me!

[canninator]

There's been a lot of Nietzsche bashing.  Let me defend a philosopher who needs no defending.  In Zarathustra, he makes it clear that belief is worth little.  I'm not going to try to "prove" ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME.  For those who don't know, it's the "idea" that what I have just written now has been written an infinite amount of times in the past (not in a similar way, but identical, by myself), and also that what I am writting now will be done an infinite amount of times again in the future (like I said, exactly as I just typed it).  Every moment lived is eternal.  I've lived some treacherous moments, and Nietzsche rightly calls EROTS his "most abysmal thought."  But I've also lived euphoric moments, so I've lived in both Hell and Heaven on Earth.

It's a beautiful philosophy and both frightening and comforting at the same time. It is also a wordy version of the Poincare Recurrence Theorem and the Recurrence Theorem is provable. The problem is that for even relatively simple states to reoccur will require time scales longer than the life span of the Universe. True recurrence therefore would require an infinite multiverse to even have a shot at being true.

[head-case]

It's a beautiful philosophy and both frightening and comforting at the same time. It is also a wordy version of the Poincare Recurrence Theorem and the Recurrence Theorem is provable. The problem is that for even relatively simple states to reoccur will require time scales longer than the life span of the Universe. True recurrence therefore would require an infinite multiverse to even have a shot at being true.

The Poincare Recurrence Theorem is provably for a narrowly defined class of mathematical dynamical systems.  It has nothing to do with the world.

[Ephemerid]

Sarge, you do read quite a bit of poetry, don't you?    Maybe we could start up a poetry thread at some point (for the US, April is "National Poetry Month" by the way).

I'm not an optimist per se, but I suppose my general experience of the tragic is quieter, smaller, more wistful than gloomy (though there have been moments I have felt that kind of despair).  I'm also somewhat sympathethic to the idea behind mono no aware in Japanese culture, the recognition of the transience of all things and a feeling of empathy for them because of that transience (I would add: a feeling of wonder because of that transience).

Another favourite poem of mine that expresses something inside me (and you'll spot the reason for my screen name in the first line ):  

THE TREASURE

Mountains, a moment's earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too's an ephemerid; the stars--
Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral
Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky's
Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf
After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome,
Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity.
Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely
To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called life? I fancy
That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of breath at that silence;
Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: a man finding treasure says "Ah!" but the treasure's the essence;
Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.

~ Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

[MN Dave]

People who want to live for an Eternity should have their heads examined.  0:)

[canninator]

The Poincare Recurrence Theorem is provably for a narrowly defined class of mathematical dynamical systems.  It has nothing to do with the world.

The original conjecture was that any bound and isolated system of finite energy will return, after a finite time, to its original state. If you assume that the Universe is bound and isolated and finite then the theorem can be applied. I'm certainly not the first to propose this. The provable bit was flippant.

[head-case]

The original conjecture was that any bound and isolated system of finite energy will return, after a finite time, to its original state. If you assume that the Universe is bound and isolated and finite then the theorem can be applied. I'm certainly not the first to propose this. The provable bit was flippant.

The theorem only states that the system will revisit the neighborhood of the initial state.  More to the point, when Poincare refers to a "system" he means a system of ordinary differential equations.  The conditions he imposes on it and the properties of the system invoked in the proof do not make sense for a more general definition of "system."

[canninator]

The theorem only states that the system will revisit the neighborhood of the initial state.  More to the point, when Poincare refers to a "system" he means a system of ordinary differential equations.  The conditions he imposes on it and the properties of the system invoked in the proof do not make sense for a more general definition of "system."

Ignoring proofs and the limitations thereof, take the quantum Poincare recurrence theorem. Given a system in which all energy eigenvalues are discrete, a state will return arbitrarily close to its initial value in a finite amount of time.

Therefore sum of the quantum states will eventually return arbitrarily close etc etc. Yes, I note that the eigenvalues must be discrete but this theorem can most certainly be applied to the Universe (with certain caveats fulfilled)

[Sergeant Rock]

Sarge, you do read quite a bit of poetry, don't you? 

Yeah, I do. It's been a passion since high school. My girlfriend brought a modern American anthology to play practise one evening. We laughed about a Conrad Aiken poem ("A Is For Alpha: Alpha Is For A") but there was something about it that intrigued me. I borrowed the book--and that was it. I was hooked. The middle Ikea Billy houses my poetry collection.



I like late 19th and 20th century poetry best. Besides the giants (Dickinson, Frost, Yeats, Eliot) my favorite poets are those Americans who came of age in the 30s and knew each other well: John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke). Other favorites: Phillip Larkin, James Merrill, Dylan Thomas, Donald Hall. I love the Beats, too...and Charles Bukowski 

Robinson Jeffers is special. He was my favorite poet in my youth. During my senior year I spent many a seventh period in the school library reading Jeffers when I should have been doing some serious studying in the study hall. I think I spent my time wisely though 

Sarge

[head-case]

Yeah, I do. It's been a passion since high school. My girlfriend brought a modern American anthology to play practise one evening. We laughed about a Conrad Aiken poem ("A Is For Alpha: Alpha Is For A") but there was something about it that intrigued me. I borrowed the book--and that was it. I was hooked. The middle Ikea Billy houses my poetry collection.



I like late 19th and 20th century poetry best. Besides the giants (Dickinson, Frost, Yeats, Eliot) my favorite poets are those Americans who came of age in the 30s and knew each other well: John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke). Other favorites: Phillip Larkin, James Merrill, Dylan Thomasm Donald Hall. I love the Beats, too...and Charles Bukowski 

Robinson Jeffers is special. He was my favorite poet in my youth. During my senior year I spent many a seventh period in the school library reading Jeffers when I should have been doing some serious studying in the study hall. I think I spent my time wisely though 

Sarge

Enough about the poetry books.  Who's the one with the boobs hanging out on the upper right?

[Ephemerid]

Yeah, I do. It's been a passion since high school. My girlfriend brought a modern American anthology to play practise one evening. We laughed about a Conrad Aiken poem ("A Is For Alpha: Alpha Is For A") but there was something about it that intrigued me. I borrowed the book--and that was it. I was hooked. The middle Ikea Billy houses my poetry collection.



I like late 19th and 20th century poetry best. Besides the giants (Dickinson, Frost, Yeats, Eliot) my favorite poets are those Americans who came of age in the 30s and knew each other well: John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke). Other favorites: Phillip Larkin, James Merrill, Dylan Thomasm Donald Hall. I love the Beats, too...and Charles Bukowski 

Robinson Jeffers is special. He was my favorite poet in my youth. During my senior year I spent many a seventh period in the school library reading Jeffers when I should have been doing some serious studying in the study hall. I think I spent my time wisely though 

Sarge

DROOOL!!!   

Funny, Aiken was one of the first poets I got into when I was a teenager.  I used to read mostly 20th century American poetry (Merwin, Strand, Kinnell were some of my favourites-- still great stuff).  Nowadays most of my favourites are Rilke, Neruda, Paz, sort of re-discovering Jeffers' better stuff, and exploring what I can in translation now, just to see what else is out there.  Unfortunately, I don't read as much poetry as I used to (I used to be a voracious reader of poetry & used to do a lot of writing too).

[--hurriedly returns back to work!]