The Eternal Return

[Desiderium]

The Eternal Return is a concept that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. The concept of "eternal recurrence", the idea that with infinite time and a finite number of events, events will recur again and again infinitely, is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. I think this is very life affirmative.

[Asher]

One problem is his requirement that we say ‘yes’ to everything, Nietzsche retains something of the ascetic ideal. He criticises that ideal for its notion of ‘unconditional’ truth and goodness. But isn’t the ‘all-embracing yes’ equally unconditional? It is, but Nietzsche argues that we must embrace it all, or not at all, because everything is entangled. To think that we can separate the good from the bad, the true from the false, suffering from greatness, is an illusion created by the ascetic ideal.

[Dick]

One problem is his requirement that we say ‘yes’ to everything, Nietzsche retains something of the ascetic ideal. He criticises that ideal for its notion of ‘unconditional’ truth and goodness. But isn’t the ‘all-embracing yes’ equally unconditional? It is, but Nietzsche argues that we must embrace it all, or not at all, because everything is entangled. To think that we can separate the good from the bad, the true from the false, suffering from greatness, is an illusion created by the ascetic ideal.

Hmm...

[Anthony PV]

The Eternal Return is a concept that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. The concept of "eternal recurrence", the idea that with infinite time and a finite number of events, events will recur again and again infinitely, is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. I think this is very life affirmative.

That's what he meant by that? I thought he meant something akin to Schopenhauer's quote 'Life is akin to a pendulum that swings back and forth between boredom and suffering'... Or, in other words, that human existence is repetitive and that people have to find the will to go through the same events over and over again...

[Nyx]

We often hear from scientific institutions like NASA and such that our universe was created from an empty void. This is simply not true.

There is no such thing as nothingness, because nothingness is nothing in itself. What we perceive as "nothing" in our universe is empty space, but empty space isn't nothing, it is space which is itself is most likely dark matter/energy.

The only logical conclusion is that our universe spawned, not from nothingness, but from something infinite - without boundaries, where everything exists simultaneously at once without the illusion of time.


What makes us separate from infinity? The finite. What makes us finite? Dark matter/energy, because empty space is what makes our universe have boundaries or limits. My hypothesis is that our universe was created by the introduction of dark matter into the infinite and our consciousness could simply be sparks or leftovers of the infinite.

[Nyx]

BTW, I really like this guy's theory:

"Isaac Newton thought of time as a river flowing at the same rate everywhere. Albert Einstein unified space and time into a single entity, but he still held on to the concept of time as a measure of change. In Barbour’s view there is no invisible river of time. Instead, he thinks that change merely creates an illusion of time, with each individual moment existing in its own right, complete and whole. He calls these moments “Nows.”

“As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows. The question is, what are they?” Barbour asks. His answer: Each Now is an arrangement of everything in the universe. “We have the strong impression that things have definite positions relative to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see, directly or indirectly, and simply keep this idea of many different things coexisting at once. There are simply the Nows, nothing more and nothing less.”

Barbour’s Nows can be imagined as pages of a novel ripped from the book’s spine and tossed randomly onto the floor. Each page is a separate entity. Arranging the pages in some special order and moving through them step by step makes it seem that a story is unfolding. Even so, no matter how we arrange the sheets, each page is complete and independent. For Barbour, reality is just the physics of these Nows taken together as a whole.

“What really intrigues me is that the totality of all possible Nows has a very special structure,” he says. “You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in this country is a Now, and I call the country Platonia,” in reference to Plato’s conception of a deeper reality, “because it is timeless and created by perfect mathematical rules. Platonia is the true arena of the universe.”

In Platonia all possible configurations of the universe, every possible location of every atom, exist simultaneously. There is no past moment that flows into a future moment; the question of what came before the Big Bang never arises because Barbour’s cosmology has no time. The Big Bang is not an event in the distant past; it is just one special place in Platonia.

Our illusion of the past comes because each Now in Platonia contains objects that appear as “records,” in Barbour’s language. “The only evidence you have of last week is your memory—but memory comes from a stable structure of neurons in your brain now. The only evidence we have of the earth’s past are rocks and fossils—but these are just stable structures in the form of an arrangement of minerals we examine in the present. All we have are these records, and we only have them in this Now,” Barbour says. In his theory, some Nows are linked to others in Platonia’s landscape even though they all exist simultaneously. Those links create the appearance of a sequence from past to future, but there is no actual flow of time from one Now to another.

“Think of the integers,” Barbour says. “Every integer exists simultaneously. But some of the integers are linked in structure, like the set of all primes or the numbers you get from the Fibonacci series.” Yet the number 3 does not occur in the past of the number 5 any more than the Big Bang exists in the past of the year 2008."

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/apr...p-the-big-bang