Musings on a Day before I Turn Seventy

Is Infinity possible or impossible to avoid? Do the same questions apply to Eternity?

Seemingly, we live amidst conventions based merely on probabilities but sense that there must be absolute truths, truths hard to find among interacting, dynamic variables impossible for us to either quantify or qualify, but truths just the same. Epistemologies exist to question that premise but perhaps only so that we can jury-rig frameworks in which to engage in evolutive philosophical exploration while simultaneously avoiding questions like those above, questions we are not only not yet capable of answering but on which most of us are incapable of speculating.

Still, “most of us” leaves some of us and those, not only willing, but driven to do so.

Is there only one universe bounded by limits on time and space, many universes and many times, or even an infinite number of universes spread over an infinity of eternities? The possible combinations which infinite eternities and eternal infinities require are infinitely different than the possibilities if even the slightest limits are imposed. Fascinating that most of us are incapable of accepting either limits or the absence of limits, and that is beautiful as well.

Particulate memory is something that also fascinates me. How do elemental particles, constantly in flux between matter and energy and possibly other infinite variables, seem to remember to reconfigure in a manner that provides what we perceive of as continuity of form? Why does an apple continue to be an apple, even for a single second?

Or does it?

There are theories that time is an illusion and that everything occurs simultaneously, theories that space is an illusion, perhaps a sleeping deity’s nightmare.

The fascinating thing is that if infinity and eternity exist, then all contradictions are also possible, including their non-existence.

Some things to think about when everything around us seems at once so certain and so unlikely.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2016; all rights reserved