Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

‘ultimate substrate’ that might lie beneath what we see and experience.

At the moment time is thought of as a property of the universe. There was no time before the universe came into being, and there will be no time after the universe comes to an end, if it should indeed end. This, of course, is provisional! There may have been universes before ours, our universe may have always existed, or it may go on forever. Or there may be other universes that exist now, or will exist in the future. Humans (or some alien species) may even interfere with nature in order to sustain the universe indefinitely, even if this was not going to happen by ‘natural’ means. So the prospect of infinite time, or eternity, is very real.

Whilst obviously our lives are time-limited, nonetheless notions of eternity still intrigue us. Having purpose, for instance, assumes some longevity to our efforts. It would be frustrating to think that all impacts of our lives would be immediately snuffed out at our death.

There are variations on the general theme of eternity that can be mentioned here. ‘Aevum’ or ‘aeviternity’ is eternity thought of as an infinite past and an infinite future, with the totality of events constrained within a matrix. It is not quite outside of time (as in, ‘the view from eternity’) but perhaps the way the ancients might have thought that the gods viewed the world.

The ancient Greeks used the word ‘apeiron’ (boundless) to express infinite space. This seemed to be seen as something of a bad thing

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