Being alive and being dead are the ultimate of dichotomies. On the surface it would seem like we can only be one or the other. I am writing this, so I am alive. You are reading this, so you are alive. John F Kennedy is dead, so we can be pretty sure he isn’t reading this. Actually chances are there is very little left of him but bones and even those will be brittle. So if he can do anything at all, let alone read that would be quite amazing to say the least.
I don’t believe in life after death. I don’t believe in life before life. I am not even sure that I believe in life during life. Death happens, yeah, kind of. In the sense that a period of time ends, maybe. Time doesn’t actually ‘exist’ so it neither begins nor does it end. Existence neither begins nor ends either. It is another construct we find useful to say yes it is or no it isn’t - existence itself is dualistic/duelistic. It is not actually ‘real’. Just like time. And because I guess we seem to see life and death as types of existence, then life and death aren’t real either. They are just ‘points’ on a continuum we sometimes call time and sometimes call existence. Pardon the language being too fucking narrow to express these ideas clearly.
So existence/non-existence and life/death are false dichotomies. I can prove this logically without talking about metaphysical things. Very simple example. The man waiting on death row, either in a prison about to get the needle, or as a terminally ill person waiting for the inevitable. They know they’re going to die, even though the future is unwritten, they justknow. All the cards have been played in life and the hand dealt is death. Just so happens that this final round is taking a bit longer than a car accident or natural disaster. They do actually die, too. I mean, well, everyone does. But these people die as predicted. The man gets the needle and the other man with cancer just collapses in the hospice from too much pain and that’s pretty much it, right? Either dead or alive….
But before the death part, they are like Schrodinger’s cat, neither dead or alive, until we open the box that releases the gas that kills the cat. The cause of death has been set and the opportunity to enact that cause has been set. There is no farting around waiting for the magical hand of chaos mathematics to randomly permutate an iteration where the box is opened. Just open the bloody box. Sometimes that’s what people who get really, really sick think. Just open the bloody box. We know it’s going to happen, so get it the fuck over with. They know the next iteration is death because the current one is life - it’s binary, a flicked switch, is/is not. Schrodinger’s cat is binary.
Which contradicts my point doesn’t it? Except that those people who think that are wrong. The in between stage of alive/dead is almost-dead and somewhat-alive, just as an example. Just like being awake and asleep there are many shades of grey where not-quite-awake and not-quite-asleep may be more accurate descriptions. Likewise, the man on death row has an odd chance of clemency, maybe a last minute call pardoning the sentence, and he could wait and wait for this even though he knows that the last 10 guys who got the needle - well, they didn’t get clemency obviously so he’s basically fucked. So he can basically say “I’m not dead yet!” and be correct because he can talk, but be incorrect because the probabilities are all pointing to the box opening and the cat dying. Yet we also know the whole point of the cat experiment is that until the box is opened we don’t actually know at all! The cat is both dead AND alive, and neither. The variable has two levels (binary) but all levels of the variable can occur in a single ‘event’ (horizon maybe) until causality makes a freaking decision already.
So right now we are alive, but in the grand scheme of crap we call the universe, we’re also dead. We are both dead and alive, and neither dead or alive throughout the whole thing (all of spacetime which has neither space or time).
The Nazis were right and wrong, they both won and lost the war, they simultaneously existed and didn’t exist. Gandhi was peaceful and violent, the British both won and lost India, Gandhi simultaneously existed and didn’t exist.
This blog is a series of gates on a chipboard somewhere, I assume. But you wouldn’t know that by looking at it.
So maybe what’s important isn’t the same as what is. Although it can be, and can’t be.
Maybe all perspectives have merit because there are no fractals without angles. But then again, there could be.
Good luck!
