I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of sentient existence and specifically the nature of time over the years and have reached certain tentative conclusions.
Calling them beliefs might be a step too far, but they are undoubtedly fairly strong suspicions. They are not ideas that have been served up to me whole by parents, schoolteachers and so on, but the result of a more personal trail of ruminations and digestions.
Diego Maradona died this week in 2020. Jules Caesar was assassinated on March 14, 44BC. Just over 2000 years separates this pair of events in subjective time, yet my suspicion that these deaths, and every other death, ever, occur at precisely the same moment in what I might refer to as objective time.
This is one reason why I do not believe in ghosts, at least not in the traditional sense, though I can see why the fundamentally concurrent nature of objective time, at least from a perspective usually unavailable to all of mutable existence, might lead to certain phenomena described by enthusiasts of the paranormal.
This intuition is also why I do not believe that my parents or any other departed friend, relative or pet, is waiting for me in “another place”. Indeed while I believe them to be dead to me subjectively, it would be just as reasonable to say that they are as alive in their particular time and place in the cosmos, just I currently am in mine.
One day I too will die and my subjective consciousness will collapse into that singularity of objectivity.*
And if you want to know what happens after that, you might well be missing the point.
For if you examine this matter with a degree of intellectual honesty, it's very hard to see the point of anything resembling subjective time in the next world.
*You could challenge that this is just a polite way of referring to nothingness, but like one of the great progenitors of all western metaphysical thinking, Parmenides of Elea, I do not believe in nothingness.
1 comment:
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