Om ingenting. Eller någonting.

Hey guess what?  Marketers and advertisers have this cliche.  They say “think outside the box.”  You have undoubtedly heard of this phrase because advertisers and marketers can’t take their own advice and spout out the same old dumb shit. Here’s the thing though, it doesn’t matter whether you think inside of the box or outside of the box, Euclidean fourth-dimensional beings will laugh at you and think you hopelessly quaint for even messing with boxes.

today I had an email conversation with a colleague.  We were talking about existence and non-existence. He mentioned something along the lines of people would be sad about their non-existence (in this context, he had mentioned that those who were on a bad acid trip would say that non-existence is a negative thing).  I replied that since they exist, they can only think of what non-existence would be like from their view of having existed in the first place. He had argued something about how one can understand or comprehend non-existence.  I argued that this was impossible, as in order to comprehend or hold some feeling or memory of non-existence, a mind or intelligence or even basic instinct would have to exist.  This is not non-existence.  I explained then my definition of non-existence, hoping that this was the point of miscommunication, and hoped to receive his definition of non-existence in return.  My definition of course, is very simple, no physical, mental, instinct, nothing.  It’s just non-existence. There is nothing there.

He derailed my argument by abandoning it and moving onto another argument (this left me greatly unsatisfied, but I went along) about how to study or research existence vs. non-existence.  I’ve never seen back to the future, but I think that’s what he was alluding to. He mentioned whether a study could be performed to send the scientist back in time to stop his assistant from ever being born  (as in: take notes now about what things are like when my assistant exists, and then prevent him from existing and take notes on that —and then somehow get him back into existence before the whole movie is over, I guess).   I rallied that this could not occur (unless one believes in predestination…is that the right term? something like things are supposed to happen and that they cannot be kept from happening… I do not believe this) since, even if the doctor did prevent the assistant from being born, the doctor would be wiped out, since without the assistant to prevent from being born in the new thread/future the doctor would not go back in time to prevent the non-existent assistant from being born.  And if the doctor was then pulled to this new future, where the assistant never existed, then he would not know to study his existence or non-existence.  He would never be able to get back to the original present… I think.

All of this took me an embarrassingly long time to formulate but in the process, I became curious about time and space and about time as a dimension.  Instead of working, I went to the dry erase board and drew pictures and tried to make sense of a fourth dimension.  I tried to do this without any assistance from wikipedia; I wanted to know what kind of solution or ideas I would be able to come up with on my own.

these are my wild trippy half-formulated ideas.  In a fourth dimension based upon orthogonal axes, the other three dimensions move as they will along the 4d vector as a ray. but this seemed really simple, too simple, mostly because I cannot seem to grasp time as a vector.  so i tried to visualize three dimensions with the ability to move in any direction (which is just the more advance way of explaining the previous).  and then I was caught again—if a something doesn’t move in space, then is it moving through time?  I tried to think on a larger scale, not just like the cabinet doesn’t move, therefore it isn’t moving through time.  But I mean, if the cabinet didn’t move in relationship with the earth’s revolution around the sun, would the cabinet end up lodged in the earth somehow?  I am probably confusing space and time.  I don’t know, I wanted to get this all out before I started reading and learning as much as I could, so I will probably be cringing as I think of this post in the FUTURE TIME, but whatever.  I am happy to be thinking again.

anyway. I need to go read up on this stuff. I crave it.