Violet light and a hum

[bholdr]

"So Billy experienced death for a while. It is simply a violet light and a hum. There isn't anybody else there, not even Billy Pilgrim is there."

-From "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegutt

In a couple of his novels, Vonnegutt expressed his solution/ conception of the problem of death- that is, it exists, our own deaths exist, alongside every other moment of our lives simotaneously. All of time, in fact, is meerly a necessary conception formed of our conciousness, without which life/death and conciousness wouldn't make sense and wouldn't be liveable. The main character in slaughterhouse five, Billy Pilgrim,. has become "unstuck in time" he is able/doomed to percive his life out of order, that is, randomly living and re-living parts of his life in no particular order.

It's a very intresting conception- and a comforting one to an atheist like myself. All moments exist as a progression from first to last only in our minds- if we were able to percieve reality as it actually is- all moments existing together- life would not make sense or be liveable- the stream of time is an invention of our own conciousness, necessary to our survival. In fact, we are all right now experiencing every single moment of our lives and deaths at the same 'time', and will be doing so eternally, and there's nothing to be done about it, we should be thankfull that conciousness filters out the future and the past so we can live and have the perception of free will.

Of course, if this is true, there is no causality, and hence no real free will, so it's a bit of a tradeoff, as we'd all like to believe that our decisions are just that, instead of being made already and forever the same.

It's a nice little metaphysical thought, meaningless, like everything else, and ultimatly umprovable, but it shows that an atheist doesn't necessarily have to believe in "death, and that's it".


Cyrus said in another thread: "The refusal to accept our fate (which is death) and our condition (which is the wonder/horror of consciousness) lies at the very core of our psyche and is the root cause of everything we do. (Suggested reading). Hence our continuous and all-inclusive effort to replace or fill up total meaninglessness with artificial meaning"

I have always been baffled by such efforts. isn't just BEING enough?

[drudman]

Nietzsche - "What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?"

Sounds like Nietzsche was close then. Every moment for eternity, but just not in the same order.

[bholdr]

[ QUOTE ]
Nietzsche - "What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?"

Sounds like Nietzsche was close then. Every moment for eternity, but just not in the same order.

[/ QUOTE ]

love the quote, NH.

luckily for us, though, since we're capable, forced, in fact, to seperate the future from the past by being INcapable of remembering the future, we'll never, ever know if we are or are not stuck in time or flowing down a river.