Out-of-the-Box Entertainment in association with Different Angle Productions and the Question Everything Company presents:
Infinity: just a B.F.?
About a year ago I came across a Ricky Gervais clip on YouTube in which he has a conversation with someone who (if I'm not mistaken) isn't from the entertainment industry (i.e. not necessarily an idiot). I can't find the clip, but I can pretty much roughly paraphrase something Gervais said about the nature of life in terms of how it relates to infinity, the statement that motivated me to write this text.
It goes something like this:
"We are alive for just one very brief period. Before us there is infinity and after we die there is infinity. We are dead for an eternity before, and we will be dead for a whole eternity after. (So it's best to use this time as best as we can.)"
The stuff I placed inside brackets is what I believe he said afterwards i.e. the point he was trying to make. But I am not sure anymore.
I can't recall the context within which he said this, but it was something along the lines of how tiny our existence is. (The usual cliche...) Or perhaps he was trying to make a different point. Or maybe what I put in the brackets was it.
Ultimately, that's not important anyway; why he said it has no bearing on what I'm about to discuss.
Also, he wasn't doing a comedy routine but was offering his own viewpoint about life. He was being serious.
Ricky Gervais is a very funny comedian, one of the best, and a fairly bright guy. BUT... he isn't nearly as bright as he thinks he is. He very clearly fancies himself an intellectual, or at the very least an "advanced free-thinker" - this much is blatantly obvious from the way he carries himself, his outspokenness on a variety of subjects, the complete and utter confidence with which he offers his (sometimes very dodgy) opinions to millions of people - in particular when he tries to preach; and preach he does a lot.
Ricky gives the impression of one of those uncharacteristically ambitious lower-class smart alecs born into a family of modest intellectual capacity; a guy who made it all on his own: no nepotism, no sheer crazy luck, just talent and perseverance. Someone who succeeded because he was handed more intelligence and insight than his background would normally have afforded a person in his place.
Perhaps due to this vast and unlikely success, I have a feeling he grandly overestimates himself, that he believes he's "figured it all out", in a sense. That he believes he has the answers to all the burning questions. I used to be (almost) that deluded and stupid too... though I was much younger when I realized my delusion - i.e. that in fact I knew and understood far less than I'd initially assumed.
But that's just an impression I have of him. I may be (a little) wrong.
He may be of above average intelligence, but he shares a very common weakness with the vast majority of people: he is an analytical failure; he doesn't go deeply enough when trying to "unravel the secrets of the universe and life" (to put it a bit stupidly/simplistically; I hate using the word "existentialism", it's sounds so bloody pompous). As nearly everyone else, he merely scratches the surface and then stops there, foolishly convinced he reached the truth. I don't notice him digging deeply enough into the more complex issues, which is nearly always achieved by asking more and more questions. (The more questions you ask and the less you can answer - the bigger the odds that you are getting closer to the truth, paradoxically enough. But that's just a general rule.) I can tell he is this way just by the way he rationalizes things. He is a pseudo-intellectual precisely because his analytical method is so superficial.
I am not saying he is necessarily a "reads-the-headlines-then-reaches-immediate-conclusions" type of moron, which at least half of any population is like, but he is very far from the wise "freethinker" he fancies himself to be. (Certainly being a left-winger speaks heavily against him.) He thinks just because he'd figured out that the Bible is full of contradictions and bullshit that this makes him a great thinker, and superior to most others. What he doesn't realize is that it doesn't take a great mind to realize how silly the Bible and the Quran are, especially in this day and age. He is too lazy for the truly difficult stuff, the tricky philosophical enigmas, a bit too quick to jump to easy conclusions and solutions - which are often there as unintentional "traps" to lull the weak-minded and the lazy into following false leads and bad logic.
But enough about Gervais, he is basically irrelevant in all this.
So let's analyze the crucial flawed thinking in his statement...
"An eternity. Then life. Then back to eternity."
On the surface, this appears to be an unassailable fact. Irrefutable. But beneath the surface, there is a whole new ball-game. There is a "reverse logic" lurking in this concept which is a real game-changer.
We live. Yes. For a very brief period - cosmically speaking. Is there an infinity before us? For all practical purpose, there is. Is there an infinite amount of time waiting to pass after we're gone? Also true. Regardless of whether we live in a finite universe, infinite universe, are part of a multiverse of infinite space and time, or within a very limited simulation - or whatever - one thing must be certain: time cannot stop. It makes no sense for it to do so. (I didn't subscribe to the view that time started with the Big Bang, even when this theory used to be popular, before cosmologists finally figured out the obvious - but to many uncomfortable - truth that our "little" bubble must be just one of countless universes. Time doesn't have a starting point; it's always been there.)
So why is his statement so completely flawed?
Because he is looking at individual human existence from a "god perspective", i.e. from an outsider's perspective. To a god, an eternal all-knowing being, his statement is true: there is an eternity, then a life, then back to some more eternity. To a god.
(Which is ironic, considering that Gervais is very proudly atheistic. He is one of those smug I'm-smarter-than-thou atheists who love rubbing their non-belief into believers' faces. I used to be like that too until I realized certain things about human nature, and why this is a habit that's in very poor taste. Mocking believers as a sport/hobby is a form of "intellectual bullying", for lack of a better term. Gervais probably thinks it is his social duty to do so, but he seems to ignore the crucial fact that we're not in 15th-century Europe anymore, when such an attitude was not only brave hence rare but crucial. We're now in a Europe in which Christian figureheads have roughly 1% of the power that they used to have, and an era in which most Europeans are either atheists, agnostics or go to Church rarely and/or simply out of habit. If this weren't so, Ricky would have been beheaded or at least spontaneously stoned by a mob, ages ago. Ditto me. (I mean ditto in the sense I'd get stoned too, not that I'd be in the mob stoning Ricky.))
Why would a mere, pitiful human look at his own existence from a god perspective though? Shouldn't we look at it from a subjective perspective instead? I believe we should.
Life is an intensely personal experience, as silly/obvious as this may sound, hence it should be analyzed from the subjective perspective. This perspective should take precedence over the objective or god perspective, at least when it comes to philosophical analysis in terms of how one views one's own life - which is the angle from which Gervais was looking at it. It makes zero sense to analyze life from the standpoint of what it means to each individual who goes through it - yet to do this through the god perspective. Not only are we humans not gods, we are pretty much the opposite hence perhaps the reason why the conclusion we reach from the subjective perspective is the complete opposite of Ricky's generic cliche.
It's all well and fine that our life - objectively - occupies just an insignificant, tiny fragment of cosmic time, but what about the puny human that is actually living that life? What are time and infinity to us, to each of us personally, individually?
I was born about a half-century ago. Do I have any memory or knowledge, whatsoever, of anything before my existence? Of the 60s? Of the 19th century? Of a million years ago?
No. I didn't exist.
(How and why I am certain that I never existed is explained in my Why Reincarnation Makes Zero Sense post.)
Will I have awareness after I snuff it?
Let's just take the atheistic stance and assume that the answer is no as well. So all I'm left with is my life. That's all I have! All.
Think about it. If life is all you ever experience, then your life is your own infinity, i.e. infinity subjectively speaking. Your life is infinity to you. It's not an infinity to a god, or to other people. But to you, your own life is the only time there is, hence it's infinity.
Let that sink in for a bit.
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| A randomly picked photo, to help with the sinking of the bit. This face may inspire you to new, before unreached intellectual heights. |
Infinity: just a brief fart?
Let me elaborate...
All of cosmic time - regarding the life of a creature - can be divided into three sections, just as Ricky (and many before him) did:
1. Pre-life eternity/nothingness.
2. Life.
3. Post-life eternity/nothingness.
Which of these do we experience?
Only number 2.
We are not there to experience either 1 nor 3. Hence...
... That one life that we live is all of time - to each of us individually. Hence because we experience all of this time i.e. all of this "subjective time", we own infinity, in a sense. A type of infinity. Our personal infinity.
Gervais and others like him don't seem to understand one crucial fact: that the two post-life and pre-life eternities are not experienced by us. Not even passively. We are not part of these eras. Even in order to be "comatosely passive" i.e. completely unaware of something (in this case the passage of time) one needs to be in some kind of existing state to begin with, in a manner of speaking. Being dead does not constitute a real "state". Being unborn isn't a real state either. We only have one true state, the state we are in during our life. How can time have meaning to a dead or unborn person? It doesn't.
"I think therefore I am" isn't applicable to pre- and post- eternities. (It isn't applicable to Sean Penn either, but that's a whole different story. He doesn't experience number two the way the rest of us do, except in the sense of being aware when it's time to take a shit: even Sean grasps this basic concept with (relative) ease, or at least his ass does. To Sean, his life is experienced similarly to how an amoeba experiences its own life i.e. doesn't experience it, or barely experiences it, or extremely vaguely experiences it. But enough about this little, nepotistic, pompous, overrated, Marxist, unicellular organism...)
What I mean is that pre-life and post-life are entirely irrelevant eras to each of us individually, precisely because one does not exist during those two infinities. We do not "wait" to be born because "waiting" would imply some form of pre-life existence - which is clearly not the case. (There is certainly no evidence for it or logic behind it.) Likewise, after we snuff it, we are not "sitting out" an eternity. We are dead hence we do not experience any time whatsoever - not even a second - let alone an eternity.
Gervais's statement implies that we are in a "state of waiting" in pre-life and in a state of "deadness" during post-life. It assumes actual "states" of (non-)being. But we are neither. Once you are dead both time and space cease to exist for you, hence you no longer have a state. Even saying you're dead is kind of misleading, a semantic trap of sorts. Time and space continue to be part of reality unto themselves (and to a god) and to those still alive, but to you personally the entire multiverse - no matter how inexplicably vast - ceases to exist. Suddenly.
Completely.
No more time.
No more space.
No waiting.
No "boredom".
Nothing.
Because the world ceases to exist to you, that means that time too ceases to exist. Hence there is no eternity on either end of your "short" lifespan. There is just the lifespan, your life.
From this I draw the inevitable and 100% infallible conclusion that the life we experience - the only thing we ever experience - is an infinity. To us. A "subjective infinity", as preposterous as that may sound at first.
Yes, your life is infinite - to you. Not to others. Not to the universe. To you it is infinite. Because the only time we get to actively experience is the time during our lifespan. The fact that this time-span is brief changes nothing. A one-day butterfly experiences its 24-hour stay on Earth as an infinity, as comical as it may sound. (I mean, this concept may sound comical, not the butterfly: they don't even emit any audible sounds.) The butterfly, just like us, has nothing to do with the two eternities, he isn't involved in any way shape or form with either the one before or the one after. Our non-existence during those two time-spans means that in effect those two eras simply do not exist to each of us individually, hence they are not part of our reality.
The notion that our tiny, "meaningless" existence may be infinite sounds like a blatant, absurd contradiction. But your own life is in fact infinite to you, by the very definition which I just presented to you.
I know, this sounds like an incredibly optimistic conclusion. Trust me, I was not searching for an optimistic outcome, just as I never seek for a negative outcome: I simply follow logic and wait to find out where it leads me. I never have an agenda, at least not when trying to find the truth.
In theory this conclusion may appear to be very optimistic, but!... I am not one to just scratch the surface, as I'd already mentioned: I delve deeper...
In theory, yes, it seems optimistic. In practice though this realization changes nothing about the fact that "life's a piece of shit, when you look at it", as the Python song goes. Nor is this conclusion optimistic to people who hate their own lives. It may be the opposite. Many who want to commit suicide or are waiting to snuff it are looking forward to a "great, long rest". However, there is no "rest". When you're dead you don't rest. You don't do (or not do) anything. Nothing at all applies to you anymore, and that includes this optimistic notion of eternal rest. You do get to "rest" because you no longer have to struggle for survival like a dumb animal but since you are not aware of your rest then how true can it be?
A tough dilemma. I have no simple answer for it. A rest it is and isn't, at the same time.
The "permanent vacation" is not a vacation; it is nothing at all. But because we only get to understand and experience life, we have zero chance to truly understand death. Hence why we assign it flawed characteristics such as "rest", "vacation" or "an eternity of nothingness". We are too dead during that second eternity to experience anything, including nothingness -whatever the bloody hell that is.
Of course, if we throw the increasingly popular simulation theory into the mix, i.e. the notion that "our world" (whatever that even means exactly) is just a manufactured i.e. "fake computer-generated world", then that completely negates time as a real concept, not just space - something quantum physics seems to prove. (Quantum entanglement and the observer effect: fascinating phenomenons that completely defy logic.)
In other words, if we actually exist within a computer simulation, then time is just a temporary illusion, and that would mean only one thing: that we are in a sense immortal/infinite beings, regardless of whether our essence exists outside of our dimension and is dreaming this world, or whether we only exist while the simulation is switched on i.e. running.
If I am dreaming this world and "myself", then I will live on in that other "properly real world" - and even if I die in that world this will change nothing about my conclusions, due to the subjective perspective.
(The issue of whether the "original me" that is dreaming the "current me" can really be considered to be me i.e. whether these two can even be the same person - since I have no memories/awareness of this "other me" while it is dreaming me - is something that touches on my Why Reincarnation Makes Zero Sense post.)
Whichever way you spin it, there is no valid reason to make you feel "insignificant" in the sense of eternity, in the sense of time. To yourself you are everything there is, for all time. And that's all that really counts. To you. Why would you give a crap that you are mortal to others, to gods, and the multiverse?
Your need to be noticed, to be famous (if you are so inclined - which means you're either young or a moron, or a young moron), the compulsion to break out of this imaginary insignificance within a vast (?) world that makes you feel tiny, is a mistaken attitude caused by a flawed perception of your own existence and what it entails, plus perhaps a failing brought about by your own ego too. Each person is their own universe, as pathetically corny i.e. "spiritual" (can't stand that word) as that may sound.
I, personally, am convinced that the simulation theory is true, for a variety of reasons some of which aren't science-based but purely subjective - plus a few observations/conclusions I'd reached on my own. But that's for some other time perhaps...
4.12.2020.
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