Summary: “If causality is the nature of theories and the universe, then things repeat themselves, and if things repeat themselves, then some things continue, and if some things continue, then we can choose what continue, and life is about choosing what continues, as if life itself depends on it. That’s all.”
#Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence’ concept, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Everyone’s got to be the best and longest-lasting prey against death. It’s over after that – or sometimes, maybe it isn’t…
Let us consider the root of things – the root of the belief in causality.
Indirectly, it is also the root for believing in plans.
We should look at the wordings of today, tomorrow and yesterday. What would we call each? We could – and did – start with the present, the future and the past. The present is called the ‘present’ and not something else. The present is a gift, and our ancestors noticed that each time they survived another era. What is the nature of the gift? What is the label for the gift? What does life itself, left to itself as the wilderness, seek, out there in the mountains, in the forests, in the tundras, and even in the most drastic of temperatures, in frigidity and dryness? Why would the father inspire and teach, as would the mother? What would you take for granted in all these presumptions of actions, as to share, to start and to end? That is continuation. We, as humans, may be weak and strong, and perhaps, mostly weak throughout. Yet, we rose and swam through to the future, and we continued.
We lived for the gift/continuation of our time, tackling existential dread and existential happiness. We believed some things continued, though we were not entirely sure what.
Continuation is the reason you pick up your favorite movie, your favorite song, or your favorite memories. The favorite thing may not be your all-time favorite, but it can be canonical enough to you. You make a family to make your personal genes and knowledge continue. Humanity’s greatest wish is continuation. It can be continuation of memories, or continuation of other things like negotiated standards which become law, or our parables and stories of adventure, which we share even with animals.
Truth, as an space-time constant preserved through dictionaries, like the site iq.wiki, preserves the gift of continuation. because it provides a dimension of immutability to objects and principles. People go on quests of immortality. People go on quests to discover how the universe can keep regenerating itself and prevent human extinction. The individual can either continue by object, stored information or by direct transmission of his DNA, along with that of another human, if he is not just cloning himself, or adopting a child.
The baby, if not your clone, announces the continuation of the marriage you are part of. It announces the baby’s shot at starting and continuing life.
Inherited knowledge and behavior is like the Baldwin effect, but with things like Richard Dawkins’s ‘meme gene’. A wikipedia definition: “James Mark Baldwin and others suggested during the eclipse of Darwinism in the late 19th century that an organism’s ability to learn new behaviours will affect its reproductive success and will therefore have an effect on the genetic makeup of its species through natural selection.”
The Baldwin effect is a side-effect of the process of natural selection. Dr. Jordan Peterson (2017) associates the Baldwin effect with ‘meme’ ideas going viral, with religious experiences and with the following:
Tide pool: “As the idea of the hero becomes clear, it manifests itself more clearly in society, then there is more reward for doing it, then the selection pressures get more positively related to that kind of behavior, and then the whole thing loops upward.”
Perhaps nothing could have made the experienced human happier than the presence of another human with whom to share his knowledge, even when the person sharing the ‘knowledge’ is young. Time spent alone is time spent learning what is meaningful to you and what should therefore continue.
Continuation’s aspect of sexual reproduction is such that the parents are happy with the baby. The master is happy with the disciple. The master gets another chance to be meaningful. Continuation is like anything you will witness in the universe, be it the living, or the non-living. It is the stars, birthing, shining, weathering, traveling across the great abyss of eternal-seeming space, and meeting their demise, to bring about new stars. It is the natural order of the universe.
From Brave search AI results: [A star is born from a vast cloud of gas and dust, known as a nebula, through a process driven by gravity. As gravity compresses the cloud, it causes the gas and dust to clump together, forming dense cores. When the core reaches a sufficient density and temperature, typically around 10 million degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion begins, marking the birth of a star.]
If there is little continuation, as in meaningful continuation, your brain depresses, and you feel purposeless. If there is continuation, you become grateful and you become entitled. You develop more expectations. You have selected yourself, or someone else or you yourself have been selected.
Expectation is, at best, just another word for entitlement and gratitude. The summative phrase is ‘relationships are made of expectations’. Your relationship with continuation is such that you are either grateful for another day you are alive, or you feel entitled to being alive. Obviously, it might be easier to be nihilistic about continuation, and to expect nothing – frees your mind from attachment, if we are being serious.
You keep going, keep continuing. Maybe you even open a dojo to transfer your mastery. You pass on your artwork to someone eligible or to someone who is promising. And then you die. Where you were the symbol of continuation, you become a bearer of continuation.
Continuation is the the idea of causality, and the way it is rooted in us, and in our motives and beliefs. Causality is the foundation of religion and of global narratives.
Take the supposition of ‘man has lived all of the life asked of him; humanity has lived all of the life and story which it has evolved for.’
That’s about it. That’s one of the suppositions for the nihilist.
However, it’s a different case when causality/repetition itself is taken to be life’s reason for existence, to an extent, much like a multiple-routes game. So far. we have not seen the end of creativity and of different things to do. However, some day, we might indeed see such an end, and that might bring in a level of prediction that some ‘immortal’ people or subjective AI might possess, becoming, technically, omniscient ‘gods’. Of course, this is sci-fi at best.
Further on the point of pre-nihilism, “How far do we still have space to go?”: We haven’t even crossed into the realms of transhumanism beyond prosthetics and elf ears – latter seems like a useless modification.
However, at least, we can be wrapped in the comfy-sounding notion that, despite entropy and death, some things – and cycles – will continue.
When you speak of the various directions civilization could continue in, you speak of the three Norns, in Norse mythology, that is, Urd (past), Verdandi (present) and Skuld (future), who weave fate at the world tree, called ‘Yggdrasil’. In terms of mathematics, it is a tree of possibilities. In terms of string theory/physics, we instead have a multiverse.
Now, it’s time to troll you. (Btw, I liked the following anime):
Source: Gamers opening song, 0:49 (timestamp)
Okay, that’s too childish. But I like the blonde – obviously, a grown-up version. Who doesn’t?
Link:
Jordan B Peterson, 2017, 2017 Maps of meaning 09: patterns of symbolic representation, March 29, online video, 2:06:24-2:07:54, viewed on 22th August 2022, <