RobokkuTue, Jan 22, 2008 I loved this post, although I didn't understand it the way it seems others did. I took this to be a reminder of limitations rather than an imagining of possibilities.
We try to gather the meaning of the "age-in-years" of the universe. The obvious thing to do in getting our heads around this is to take some passage of time we are familiar with - our conscious life - and extrapolate. Naturally, we would first imagine stringing together lifetime narratives one after the other until we get the length of time the universe has existed - and it's like a really, really long story. But what Obvious pointed out is that you can and do have that many full lifetimes' maximal interpretations of the universe in just three and a half years.
(The same habit kicks in now and we all make mental leaps to three birthdays ago so that we know how long a time we're talking about.)
A theory of the universe - a world-view - builds relentlessly and inevitably in every healthy human as it lives. In the case of any person, that process necessarily could not be any more extensive within the same lifetime. That is, nobody could get through a lifetime with less than a lifetime's worth of perceiving the world.
The entirety of one person's lifetime's perceiving of the universe is absolutely tiny, but it is nonetheless the limit of what is available to a person.
In populations considered together, there could be more, but no one person could actually have more. A collective can grow beyond its parts, but the parts may not be able to grow at all themselves.
I loved this post, although I didn't understand it the way it seems others did. I took this to be a reminder of limitations rather than an imagining of possibilities.
We try to gather the meaning of the "age-in-years" of the universe. The obvious thing to do in getting our heads around this is to take some passage of time we are familiar with - our conscious life - and extrapolate. Naturally, we would first imagine stringing together lifetime narratives one after the other until we get the length of time the universe has existed - and it's like a really, really long story. But what Obvious pointed out is that you can and do have that many full lifetimes' maximal interpretations of the universe in just three and a half years.
(The same habit kicks in now and we all make mental leaps to three birthdays ago so that we know how long a time we're talking about.)
A theory of the universe - a world-view - builds relentlessly and inevitably in every healthy human as it lives. In the case of any person, that process necessarily could not be any more extensive within the same lifetime. That is, nobody could get through a lifetime with less than a lifetime's worth of perceiving the world.
The entirety of one person's lifetime's perceiving of the universe is absolutely tiny, but it is nonetheless the limit of what is available to a person.
In populations considered together, there could be more, but no one person could actually have more. A collective can grow beyond its parts, but the parts may not be able to grow at all themselves.