Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

later.

Do these speculations on eternity help in our understanding of narrative and essence? There is a bit of a paradox here. On the one hand, some people don’t like speculating on such ‘existential’ questions. On the other hand, as I’ve said above, some kind of duration in time is needed in order to make sense of having purposes. Individual purpose is a bit pointless without some continuity in time. Humanity as a whole seems to require at least a considerable longevity for us to seem worthwhile. And people are probably more comfortable with a universe that is eternal, even though eternity is a difficult concept to grasp. The reason, perhaps, is that the alternative is to try to think of non-existence, which is an even more perplexing concept!

To a proton, travelling at the speed of light, time is reduced to zero — it does not exist. It’s only our limited perspective that makes it seem like light takes time to travel. For light itself everything happens at once. So we could say, if light has a perspective, it is God’s perspective, or simply, for light, everything is one. This, I feel, is science on the edge of mystery. But it is so far a bit beyond us to figure out scientifically what this ‘time reduced to nothing’ idea really means.

The eternal and the infinite are always pushing the boundaries of our knowledge. Holism, and such concepts as ‘The One’ require quite a bit of unpacking, since, clearly, the world that is seen around us is a blooming, buzzing confusion of multiplicity rather than a tranquil Oneness! The

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