by Leo Volont » Mon Nov 08, 2021 7:10 am
RGSQ: I posted a subject which deals with an existential question in a purely rational way in an other website, I would like to have your opinion as a math teacher if that interests you! it is a hypothesis that our existence cannot have meaning if it is not eternal.
[RGSQ's] Hypothesis :
We could define the value of an existence by the average of the well-being felt during it
But to say that an existence has a value x defined by the average of the good being felt does not include the time that x is felt.
Thus, isolated this value not being subject to time, we can assume that it is felt for eternity.
Now if we submit it to the duration of the existence to which it relates, its value will necessarily be zero since this duration is only an infinitely small fraction in eternity (x / infinity = 0)
it's pretty crazy reasoning but I think it holds up xD It's up to you to tell me!
Me: Okay, the initial Proposition is speaking of “meaning” which you choose to define as Value representing the magnitude of “well being”. Really, there are people out there who are almost constantly Suffering and we can’t deny that they find that very ‘meaningful’, and they could only wish to be able to find a way to negate it. But we can fix that by stipulating ‘emotional intensity’ for your “well being”. But then we would have graphing problems since, well, loving an experience would be positive, but hating an experience would be negative, and they certainly don’t cancel each other out, so we could deal with that by SQUARING the Value, which would bring Negative Experiences up over the Zero Baseline (or in Math what we do is take the SQUARED ROOT of any value in order to turn it into an Absolute whose range is from zero to positive infinity, but since we don’t care about Scaling, we can just Square it.
I next wondered why you would be talking about AVERAGE Value. Heck, in our emotions I think we would really be paying attention to PEAK Values, wouldn’t you? But, yeah, some Peak Values are of such short duration that they may go undiscerned. Yeah, when I used to work for a Living, I found that I could use relatively low power circuits to process very high powered pulses as long as I kept their duration very short, that is, a very low percentage of the Duty Cycle would be at the max amplitude, you know, don’t give it enough Time to burn up my board. Oh, but, now that I think about it, for that application I would have been calculating YOUR Average Power over the entire Duty Cycle. But, if Peak Experiences are of sufficient Duration so that they are Discernable, than I think that would be a important metric.
But there is another way besides AVERAGE where one can look at it. Let Calculus come to the rescue and find the Area of the Intensity, that is the Area Under the Curve.
And then, with your X scale representing TIME, and then projecting it out towards Infinity, which in terms of time would be Eternity, then yeah you can refer to the convention that X divided by Infinity APPROXIMATES Zero. No, it doesn’t EQUAL Zero. Remember that in Math that Infinity is always an Indeterminant Value.
Next we need to look at the way we are referring to Absolutes as though they are real things, you know, whether it is even possible for an Absolute to have MEANING, once it goes past any knowable or experienced Scale. Absolutes are just concepts and conventions. In Life and in Reality there are no Absolutes. There is no Eternity. There is no Infinity. Mathematicians only created these Absolutes so they would have something to label their Graphs with, right? But, yeah, Theorists are all the time confusing Reality with what they can manage to Chart and Graph. People talk of 4th, 5th… Nth Dimensions only because they figured out how to Graph them, and not because they looked upon them in Reality. The whole Idea of Time Travel is derived from the circumstance that the Time Line on a Graph does not erase the Past while disappearing behind the Present Point, and then can be represented as a solid line going into the Future that hasn’t happened yet. It’s the Graphing Delusion, that Representations pretending to their own Reality, but which is just an intellectuals delusion.
Okay, so let’s look at that initial Proposition again: “our existence cannot have meaning if it is not eternal”. Well, let’s rephrase that casually so that it appears most certainly True. We could say “In Reference To All Eternity Our Experience of the Moment Doesn’t Matter”. But isn’t that just imposing artificial Scaling in order to mentally intimidate up. We could also say “The Experience of Our Last 20 Years Is Meaningless for Tomorrow Morning” which is extremely NOT True. We Build Our Lives Over Time and Our Past Is the Springboard Into Our Future. Many of us Get Up and Go To Work because we set up the circumstance by having at sometime in the Past gotten a Job. So, yeah, the Past is the Futures Foundation. We can’t negate the importance of the Past. It is like traveling in a Boat, where looking forwards you can’t know for sure where you’ll be because you might sink first or change course, BUT you can look behind at your boats Wake and see for certain where you’ve been.