Who created whom?

A

At the end of this sentence I will type the letter A.
This time, I will not type the letter A when I get to the end of this sentence, I will copy the first A and paste it in here: A.
Now I will use the same A again - it's still on the clipboard so I will paste it here: A.
At the end of this sentence I will type the letter A.
That last sentence was actually copied from the first sentence and pasted in above, so it's not true to say that I typed the letter A that time. So the sentence above is false, but the first sentence was true. The two sentences contain the same words but one is true and the other is false.

Some things

Some things we think of as alive are actually dead. Ghosts hiding in the crowd and passing themselves off as living humans or animals.

Conversely, some things we think are inanimate are in fact possessed of life. Some rocks, some mountains, the wind sometimes. 

The World Inside Our Heads and the Real World Out There

The WIOH is made of stories using language, thoughts, mathematics, maps and models. As we become more sophisticated, it is the World we live in most of the time. We think the WIOH is the RWOT but it isn't - it's more like a sort of map.  As our knowledge advances, the WIOH expands - the map explains more about the RWOT in a way we can understand. Will it ever match the RWOT - Like the maps made by Borges' cartographers which grew bigger and bigger until they became as big as the real world?
The RWOT on the other hand just IS. It is indivisible, it does not contain 'things' or phenomena - these are all made up in the WIOH. It just IS.

Time granules

1. Suppose time is granular (ie atomic, discreet or digital) so the Present Moment is a granule of time.
2. The present moment is different for each observer
3. If there was a present moment granule in which nothing happened, time would stop - it would not be able to proceed to the next moment.
4. But in a movie - if two frames are identical, the film does not come to a halt. That is because it is being run through a projector which has its own time-agenda.
5. As the present moment is different for each observer (2) perhaps that is what keeps things rolling along just like in the projector.
6. In other words Time does not stop for one observer because it is kept going by all the others.
7. Only if they all stop, time ends.

Purpose

What is a knife?

What is its purpose?

What is  a  tree?

What is its purpose?

What is a man?

What is his purpose?

In order to define something we might consider a number of aspects – description, concept, function, potential and purpose. A thing is easier to define if it has a function or purpose. Eg. Cheese-grater - a device for grating cheese.

A function is just a description of what the thing is doing in a particular context – it can have a function without having a purpose. Eg. Tree, spider, man

Purpose implies intelligence and time. A fire extinguisher has a purpose, even if it never functions (ie puts out a fire)

A ladder, a spider’s web, a symphony, a heart, an iPad all have a purpose.

God (the human invention) has a purpose – to inspire, act as a moral compass, give humans a purpose. But God (the supreme being) cannot have a purpose as he was not designed by someone else. As the old hymn goes: ‘God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year’.

Energy is a concept (ie something we have conceived) the concept of energy has a purpose (to clarify our understanding of the universe). Energy itself does not have a purpose (though it does have a function).

This applies to other concepts eg: matter, time and space.

When is now?

When we look at a scene, we are constructing an understanding of what we see from past experience (is that a tree on the horizon or a pylon?). We can’t look in two directions at once, we have to take time to construct the picture (we look over here, then over there – even if we don’t move our head, our eyes scan the scene).

Yet we perceive this as experiencing the landscape in ‘the present’. This is sometimes called the ‘spurious present’ – “the interval of time such that events occurring within it are experienced as present”. This is by contrast to the ‘real present’ which is supposed to be dimensionless.

In the diagram, the point at which the two cones meet (at the observer) is supposed to represent the real (objective, dimensionless) present.