Analogy for time and eternity
(Perhaps not original, though I like to think it is. Perhaps not even good or capable of holding up at all. Just how I make sense of the whole idea of time vs. eternity/free will vs. omniscience, working off of C.S. Lewis's phrase that "the present is where time intersects eternity.")
***
Image: a house - no, make it a hobbit hole, with all of the rooms on one side and all of the windows facing in one direction. A person standing outside of the house would be able to look into all of the rooms at once and see what is going on in each.
Analogy: The house is what we call tiime; each of the rooms is a single moment in time; outside of the house is eternity and the person looking in is God.
Relevance: Within each room/moment, we act as we choose: we can look outside and take into account what we see there; or we can remain absorbed in our in-house activities and unaware. God can see into the 'now' window as well as a window that is 1,000 rooms away, but that does not change or remove our essential freedom.
_________________
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done."
Fail.
What is happening in the rooms are independent, but the future is determined by what we do now. It is like I tell you to choose any card you like, but I know which you are going to choose before you do. And you call that free will? If anything, it is the illusion of freewill.
leejosepho
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So then, what happens 1,000 rooms away is *not* independent.
Fail.
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I began looking for someone like me when I was five ...
My search ended at 59 ... right here on WrongPlanet.
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What is happening in the rooms are independent, but the future is determined by what we do now. It is like I tell you to choose any card you like, but I know which you are going to choose before you do. And you call that free will? If anything, it is the illusion of freewill.
Not independent - from our perspective, we are passing from one room to the next, and yes, determining the next as we go. From an eternal perspective, it is all moments at once - but the determination of what will happen in each lies with us. God knows what we will do not because we have no choice in doing it, but because standing outside, He sees it as done already.
_________________
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done."
Analogy for time and eternity - You are living in eternity now. Jesus Christ is resurrected/returns every time a person thinks about Jesus Christ. Earth time is based on the large clock of the planet earth revolving around the star sun at the rate of 1 revolution every 1 year. Other ideas: a wax candle is lighted and has life until the wax runs out. Time is counted by the grains of sand which fall through an hourglass. Time is money. Very few humans today (2011) live beyond 115 years (from the cradle to the grave). Time starts out every year as a baby and dies as an old man of old age on the last day of the year.
Resurrection means a physically dead organism is brought back to life. It has nothing to do with recollection or imagination. What you are saying borders on nonsense.
ruveyn
techstepgenr8tion
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Creative but.... don't agree.
Probabilities are fiction, they're artifacts of our inability to have and process all the data. Its the reason why 'quantum immortality' arguments seem so cheesy and, when you look at them closer, they're arguments that anything can happen on a roll of the dice - which is a local sensation that we get as humans - but, its not real.
Inputs are sensory 'things', data that hit us.
Processing is our nervous systems, limited chemicals, and a fused identity of genetics and past history.
Output is what we FEEL like we're responsible for and own, but, we don't own the input, we don't own the processing, therefore we don't own the output - its an intuitively compelling sensation to think we would but, its simply not there.
That's why I would go back to my own analogy of time:
JK Rawling and Harry Potter.
- JK can flip from page 1 to 255, back to 30, to the last page, to page 60, unaffected, its not her timeline and her paging through has no effect on the characters.
- Because the characters are fused to one path their existence could fit, encoded, like ink on paper, into an apparatus like a book. (For a more intuitive feel look at Heron of Alexandria's mechanical plays).
- Concepts of infinity could be just as fuzzy for Harry Potter and friends but they are irrelevant, ie. Harry et al are characters in a book. A book is written about a slice of time, the substance comes into being from the imagination of the author, hence Harry et al. trying to figure out what was before their own physical world's genesis is, like us, stacking tortoises. The 'stuff' of the story is simply spit into an infinite plane, ad hok, to make the story happen.
I'd leave the 'Is there actually a cogniscient author?' open ended. I simply mean that our reality likely functions like a book and that matter is coded to some sort of scaffolding, dark matter etc. is a good example of that scaffolding or framing elements which themselves even quite likely are governed by higher order dynamics. This unfolds as would the marble tracks be in Fracture or the wooden post with pegs acting as a computer program, moving the puppets, and making a lifelike performance of Heron's dolls and low and behold, all this from sand draining under a weight that moves a rod.
Two ways to interpret it:
1) If there is a God and we're Harry Potter et al, God is JK Rawling
2) If there is no God and we're Harry Potter et al, quantum flux is JK Rawling
Either way, infiniti in both directions doesn't matter because the way the stuff came together is from dimensions of reality that are a bit outside of our ability to interpret fully for the time being. That's not to say that they're mystical, IMO if God exists there's likely nothing mystical about God either, just that I would tend to think that what we experience as time is, like a novel, something closer to reactions flowing along tracks laid out by a contiguous object (ie. drop the marble in and watch it zip along the rail), and those rails are just as valuable to analyze at any width of the puzzle - weather 1 x 10^-100 seconds after the big bang or at February 14th 2011. Its all the same design, which could either be design with a purpose or design by grand accident times infinite probabilistic resources - I don't know.
Resurrection means a physically dead organism is brought back to life. It has nothing to do with recollection or imagination. What you are saying borders on nonsense.
ruveyn
Borders?
leejosepho
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Resurrection means a physically dead organism is brought back to life. It has nothing to do with recollection or imagination. What you are saying borders on nonsense.
Borders?
Have we forgotten "Christ-like", "little christs", name-likeness and metaphor?
_________________
I began looking for someone like me when I was five ...
My search ended at 59 ... right here on WrongPlanet.
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