20240311

You know Zeno's dichotomy paradox? It's that thing where you can take the distance between you and that wall over there, then move to the halfway point, then find the new halfway point and move there, and do that again, and again, and again, infinitely, without ever actually reaching the wall? Of course as a human you'll bump into the wall because we can't actually move with that level of precision, but imagine it as just points X and Y on a single line instead. One can keep slicing that distance in half infinitely, without the points ever meeting. Or, one can traverse the distance in a single step. You've got options; just depends on whether or not you want to explore that particular chunk of infinity. Or, better, depends on how much of that particular infinity-chunk you want to see.

Now, reverse it. The paradox I described allows us to find infinity in a space that can be traversed discretely. 1 - 1 = 0, but also I can start with an infinitely small space on one side of zero, and then divide it again, and again, and again. I think this might be where we exist. There's a wedge driven in alongside the nothingness, and from that zero point we divide and descend, finding more and more spaces to be the further down we dive.

To translate this into something we can imagine experiencing, consider dream-time. We can save some time (I mean, maybe?) if you've seen Inception. But just in case you haven't, recall how much time you can experience within a dream, while having been asleep for a much shorter period of "real" time. You can have a massive experience within a 5 minute nap.

The wedge feels urgent to me, like consciousness panicking and grabbing an infinitely small foothold on either side of the void. And then, having found that, it dives inward, falling into a dream, and into a dream again, where each dream is bigger than the one that holds it. Never mind the claustrophobia of a finite human life, can you imagine the urgency of having no time at all? Would you choose to find more time by abandoning your reality for a deeper one? Would you choose to keep starting over, knowing only that you would find more, without knowing what it would be?

Maybe we're networking between dreams? Maybe the quest to find one's higher self is literally to link up with the dreamer, before then creating a dream within?

It feels vulnerable. I feel compassion when I imagine this. Each layer of existence, predicated on the one before it, originating with a desperate handhold on nothing at all. We divided by zero because it's the only thing we could find, and now we're trying to remember who we were in the first place.

On this day, 10 years ago: Pattern recognition