This is the unedited result of having taken double the recommended dosage of multivitamins by mistake. There is probably no order to these thoughts, as it was an exploration in the midst of hyper-nervousness and jumpy limbs hitting keystrokes at the speed of light. I haven’t taken the time to re-read it or make sense of it yet. Maybe someday I will. In the meantime.. enjoy!

Yin Yang. No, thank you.

It took me 30 years to fully realize and internalize this

The human mind and perspective usually depicts abstract concepts and feelings as opposites:

Life v death; Good v bad; war v peace; love v hate, admiration v envy; educated vs illiterate ; smart v dumb; dark vs light; happiness v sadness. Dirty v clean. Agreement v disagreement. Early v late. Day v night. Fear v bravery. Hunger v fullness.

It seems we mostly classify things in a spectrum of two options, usually not in varying levels or degrees.

Why is there usually a hero, in movies, and a villain?

Is this balance and opposites a construct of the human mind, or does this go further than that and is defined by nature or the universe?

That is, do we automatically classify into sets this way to simplify our thoughts? Is our brain naturally wired to process concepts this way? Or is it actually defined by some law of the universe regardless of the perspective of the human mind?

After all, the definition of “opposite” is something limited by our own limitations, our brain capacity to evaluate and abstract away concepts…

This is where I’m going with this topic:

Is dark vs light created by us? We know there are intermediary levels.. do we just automatically split and group these concepts? Is there something less pitch black than what we think so? Is there something more “light” than what we think so? I know there’s more “light” than what we can see. The wavelength light spectrum and whatnot:

Original author: Philip Ronan. No changes. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

So… we could agree that what we construe as light v dark is actually a limit on our biology. After too much light or too much darkness there’s still wavelengths that our eye is not meant to capture. Am I interpreting this right? Still part of what I’m wondering myself today still stands… is 10^24 or 10^-16 (to the left) the lower bound, then? Or does this “spectrum” go to infinity and we usually don’t think about it and are limited by our current context of visible spectrum and the boundaries, what we define as these opposites? Can we go infinitely forever to the left? Why yes, or why not?

I mean.. We say the universe is infinite in “size” or “distance”.. Again, definitions limited to something we arbitrarily or lazily defined per our immediate concept. Then these opposites possibly don’t exist:

Is space eternal? Eternal return (also known as eternal recurrence) is a theory that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.

Is life really the opposite of death? Aren’t we in many different intermediary stages between life and death? We are 50 years old, we might say we are half alive half dead.. We are closer to death in the frame reference of the ~average time a human being is alive. Or we might say we are 50% further from having being born, that is, to having started life, and 50% closer to being dead. So it’s not a matter of if you fit in a bucket of “alive” or “dead”, but an amount of life-ness or death-ness.

Having said this, we bound the limit by this opposite. Pure life is defined by us from the moment there are cells that react and can reproduce. When do we decide death? Do all our “live” cells die with us when we “die”? Or can a % of those cells continue to be alive unless you burn the body?

How do we define the limits of something even closer to physics- like pure darkness and pure dark. Either pitch black where we can use our eyes and brain to sense anything, or pure whiteness light that doesn’t allow your brain to process anything, and could even blind you permanently… is that something we came up with, or something defined by physics and the universe and we just said “it is known. This is the way it is”?

It’s funny how the idea of balance has been discussed since ancient times. Think yin yang. The earliest reference we have of this is around 300 BC. We probably have a brain 99%+ match of what we had 2,300 years ago.. Since we believe humans have been in existence in their current form since ~~130,000 years ago. So we can agree that 2,000 years ago is relatively close, and that we still have the same brain capacity. Why do we keep “bucketing” values from so many states into opposites? Why is there always a hero and a villain? Why not a “fairly normal 65% hero, against one that is 35% hero, the rest villain or bad person? I guess the answer is obvious.. Abstractions are used by the human everyday to simplify ourselves. Why are we SO lazy?? Is it laziness?

Written history started between 4,000 through 3,001 BC

I want to continue my conversation of life and death. We might be able to classify life and death as variant amounts of life and death, but the concept is indeed bounded by death on the lower bound, and life on the upper bound (or vice versa). Is that the limit? Is there something that classifies me, myself, as alive before we classify me as alive? Is there something that classifies me as still alive after what we perceive death? Is that what we try or explain through religion or God? Am I just writing an essay in Theology, unknowingly?

So… Good vs bad is defined by us. You can never be the worse bad, just maybe in relation to anything known. But if you’re the pure baddest (lower bound), there can always be a person worse than you. It may still not have existed yet, but inevitably there will be a person worse than what is known to history at some point. Same for “good”. Opposites for good and bad are just simplified constructs of us. Nice.

What about war v peace? Same… you can think the worst war is the one that destroys our planet. Is it possible to have a war that causes the COMPLETE universe to suffer? Is that the lower bound? What about peace? Can there be the peace-iest thing ever? Another point is… if we were always in peace, there would never be peace. Nobody could say “ahhh we are at peace”. If we continue to be in peace for 200 years, new generations haven’t experienced war and can’t understand it. Then does the definition of peace fade away?

So yes.. We humans have been “lazy” (not lazy… just our brain is trying to be efficient, conserving energy and using it to an extent for surviving..it’s not targeting on becoming a genius brain, that I know of).. But at the end of the day we have opposites in everything because we created them.

That’s the reason there will always be war and peace. Either that or we end up at some point always on one of these two bounds, until the meaning of it fades away and we are just in that state which we can’t describe anymore.

The only way there can’t be any war is if there is no peace. The only way we can eliminate hate is by 100% completely eradicating it, which in turn would remove the definition of love due to this “law of complements or opposites”. One cannot exist without the other. Maybe some have come and gone and that’s why the only remaining abstracted opposites we know are the ones we know… and yin yang will be forever a rule in the context and limitations of the human mind.

QED

On the practical results from this mental “proof” or exercise, if you are a popular person (artist, president), you’ll always have agreement and disagreement on the people that know about you. Varying degrees, but simplified into “fans” and “haters”. While the idea of several opposites that complement the agreement or disagreement still exist, you will never be able to achieve 100% of one side, and you’ll always have followers and agreers or haters and disagreement.

Realizing this is something good. You can live better if you know that it is inevitable. As inevitable as we believe (and our brains are able to understand) that death is, having someone who hates you is inevitable, having someone (or multiple people) that disagree or envy you is inevitable. Good news, having someone that has the potential to love you, admire, or agree with you is inevitable as well. I choose to think on the glass half full, so I always have the potential to perceive and live with the upper bounds that I wish to, and live in “peace” since the lower bounds that I don’t like are inevitable and will inevitably occur at some point (many times), and enjoy the inevitable great upper bounds that life brings me.

Another practical consideration: If we wanted to say “All we need is love”. Then you need hate too. The correct way to achieve this end goal is, all we need is the absence of love and hate. So that hate does not exist, nor love. Sounds boring… but that’s per our limitation to visualize the world without these two. How would that work look like? Would life still be worth living if this was the case? It’s possible, since biology wants us to thrive. Or maybe we can never achieve lower/upper bounds because biology will not allow us, since biology (nature, environment, etc) is dictated by physics, which we can’t control. Or maybe if we do achieve it… if we, after millions of years, stop living in these bounds and there is no more love nor hate, war nor peace, we would have become something else. Another species? A transcendental being? Is that boring? If you leave in greatness and pure joy, satisfaction, completeness? Are these terms I just mentioned bounds and thus this God-like being will actually not feel them? Would it feel anything, at all?

More musings, we are limited by biology. So I think we can never achieve pureness on one side. Let’s strive to reduce one side as much as possible. We’ll never get to pure upper “good” bounds that we desire anyways, or we would cease to exist (as how we exist today; ie we become something new). But getting closer to pure peace with a teeeny bit of war might be better than pure peace, which.. achieving all the good upper bounds would not be possible and go against the law of nature… so that’s the best result we can hope for.

More notes… day vs night. This is not created by the human brain, it is actually a “thing” in the context of a planet. There is in fact a planet rotating and we have less or more light. And we have degrees of how close to day or light we have- time tracking.. clocks, time units, etc. But again: that is in our immediate context- planet Earth (or a planet, to simplify). And now we know that the universe is bigger than that.. So that opposite wasn’t planned by us, just that in the context of earth, and our eyes that can sense these levels, there is day and night.

Interesting reads I found after I wrote this.. Trying to answer the idea of “certainty of something occuring once”:

https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-09/book-excerpt-there-no-such-thing-time#page-2

If time is also a human abstraction and construct on the scope or context we understand. Limited by our biology, then there was never a beginning of time, a first start from big bang. No past nor future- that’s us making up stuff. Things can happen again always, they always are happening and always have happened- because there is no time. Then, there is always life and there is always not life and always life in other universe and there is always an universe and there can even be multiple universes and multiple clusters of universes and multiple whatever it’s called when you have a composable thing of units of clusters of universes. Grab ten universes in time-space where all things are now happening in this instance- then space and time are infinite and my questions that I considered since the start of this essay can be summarize in one line:

There is always a balance and a not balance. There are always opposites and not opposites at the same time. If Jesus and God exist and “were” here, they are here, and always will be. Because as well as time (which does not exist) there is the concept of a God, which always exists.. the opposite of saying that there was nothingness at some point- there always has been somethingness. There was always universe, not universe, God, not God, etc.

My conclusions and practical implications still hold: choose the good upper side when evaluating your immediate context, while understanding the inevitability of the lower bound or variants of the lower bounds- because all time and space and universes and everything already happened and will happen. Is it inevitable because it did happen, not that it is going to happen at some point. It’s continuously happening now.

More fun

https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/chopra/article/There-Is-No-Real-Universe-Now-What-13404300.php

http://www.messagetoeagle.com/past-present-and-future-exist-all-at-once-unravelling-secrets-of-quantum-physics/