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Our day-to-day beliefs often come from established theories, but what about beliefs based on theories in progress? A new book asks literary and scientific thinkers about what they believe but cannot prove.
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The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.The protagonist of the story, Billy, is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians and for the rest of his life suffers an existence disjointed in time. The causality of his life thus extends outside of the normal flow of things:
Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.It's the best book I've read about time travel, time perception, and as you mentioned, consciousness extended in a variety of temporal ways.
Among the imaginary constructions created by the intellect working in service of the will, perhaps the most delusive is the view it gives us of ourselves - as continuous unified individuals...
- Arthur Schopenhauer
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