Why run in the Infinite?

I recorded this article while taking a stroll in Westmount park, and later went home to transcribe it. It doesn’t read as if it was written, but reads as it was spoken (which it was) – with some minor edits for clarity.

I saw a kid running today as I was walking around Westmount park. I wondered why the kid was running. And then I didn’t care about that anymore. I started to ask a new question, why would someone run? And then that led to the question, why are we able to run? And then I tried to think of the answers.

You are probably able to run because things have to be achieved in haste; quicker. Which means that you believe that something has to be achieved quicker, which means that there’s a reason why you should achieve it quicker. The word quicker means before something else happens, quicker than something; quicker is a relative term. So quicker than what? Quicker than death, quicker than the thing that’s going to cause you to die before your desire is fulfilled. 

It’s achieving your goals quickly because you’re fighting some other time limit that if surpassed, will prevent from achieving that goal. There’s some fundamental want that forces speed to occur in your bodily motion. It means you want to prolong your existence, and if you believe that that’s true, then you have to ask why. Why do I want my existence to be prolonged? The answer to that is “what you believe life is.”

If you want to prolong something it means there’s a reason to prolong it. And that reason only has so many options. And those options compose your backbone beliefs of consciousness and existence. Whatever category you fall under, that’s the backbone of everything for you. After that, all of your behaviour is chosen, the “why you do or don’t do something.”

Everyone has an ability to run because there’s a haste, and that haste has a reason, and that reason is everything for you. Whatever you think that reason is, even if you don’t have one, is how your life is lived. I promise you. That’s how it always works.

Sometimes running is fun, too. Running can be fun. You can run just because you’re excited or want to challenge yourself. In all cases running has some purpose.

So what do I make of all this? Basically we have a system that fundamentally builds itself to have a reason to do things. A reason to eat, to run, to get upset, to feel fear. All that reason, all of them, are linked to what you think is happening in this strange world. 

You may need to begin re-thinking the idea that what exists is only empirical – that is – measurable by some instrument (including our senses). There’s no way that the world is simply empirical, and I’ll tell you how. The answer is in causality,

The answer is in “what do you think happened before the other thing.” If you go back in time down the chain of causality enough, you’ll start to see that there’s only two ways of thinking about this world. 1) That something caused some other thing, and that happens many times backwards in time, up until a certain point where everything was created but before that there was nothing. This is the creationist view; at one point there was a creation, and after that point, things caused things until now, and that creation point is the initial cause, and before that there was nothing. The universe was created and then it began to play. 2) The other is that you believe that there was always a cause to every cause, and that chain exists infinitely backwards and never stops, and thus never began. This means you believe fully in causality, and that there’s an infinite “cause for a cause” answer.  Here, since you cannot now possibly believe there was a start to the universe, you also cannot believe there is an end to it. You have to believe that it never ends, which means there was no creation point. There was the universe, infinitely. 

Science is leaning towards the second one, which is that the universe was infinitely here because the big bang may not have been unique, but perpetually happening. Thus the universe never ceasing but opening and shutting. This means there’s no creation point (and contradicts the creationist). One believes there is a creation point, and the other believes there is no creation point. One of them might appear to be true depending on one’s personal bent. Science may, I say may go towards that infinite model, and if it does, then creationists are going to have to confront this problem. 

But, the creationists are not only the one’s confronting the problem; it’s also the scientific community which would have to admit to believing that the world is infinitely present, meaning they’d have to answer a fundamental follow-up question which is “Ok, then how is it here?” You’re telling us that this was never created, so then what is it? What is this thing that seems to have been instantiated but has actually gone on forever?

If you look at the problem that way, the world you’re seeing right now does not look the same anymore because the only answer that we know for “how can something be infinitely present, doesn’t begin or end, was never born; how is that possible?” It’s possible through appearance. 

When you dream, you believe there is a world that exists in the dream, and you believe it’s very real. In that world you feel emotions and fears, and that universe seems to have been going on for some time. It also seems to have been created. When your dream ends, you return to the waking state where you realize that world never existed. When you were in the dream, you believed it. It looked like it had a duration and a length, it had a sense of both history and a causal sequence of things happening, but it only just appeared. It didn’t actually exist for millions of years – since you only sleep for about 8 hours – yet in your dream you believe it did. 

In the waking world, a somewhat similar thing is supposedly happening. There’s a potentially provable infinitely-existing universe that initially seemed to have been created. This means we need a way of explaining why it’s here; what caused it? The answer is that, like the dream, the world also isn’t real. This universe was not caused, but is appearing – just as your dream is not caused, born, or real. It’s appearing to be real, but in-fact it isn’t actually there.

This question (what is the cause of something that exists infinitely) must be posed by science if and when they prove the infinite nature of the universe. I do hope that we confront this question soon, because I want to compare it to the Hindu response that the world is just as the appearance of a dream; it would be an incredibly shocking admission.. It’s also going to be interesting to see if it doesn’t go that way. 

OK, I’m off. Goodbye