I would like to write about absolutes today, so here we go:
about absolutes today
There that’s it, that’s all you need to know. I’ve written about absolutes today and now I’m all good. Phew, I feel much much better! What should I do next??
Maybe I’ll whittle some soap, into a bear in a tutu that could be fun.
Haha ok, hopefully you could tell that I merely jest. It’s not a very good joke, in fact it’s very common and overplayed, but it still brings me laughs and I couldn’t help myself. (I certainly could help myself of course but I choose not to 😉)
This article I’m writing will serve at least two purposes beneficial to you:
- It will hopefully broaden your horizons regarding the way the world works and what “absolute” really is/isn’t.
- It will bring you insight into how I think and the real meanings behind my words/thoughts when I think/speak. It will do this in a way reminiscent of my “When I say ‘You’ here, I don’t necessarily mean ‘You’” article.
So, what is absolute? What are absolutes?
Again, absolutes do NOT exist in the real world.
This is not to say that they don’t exist as an idea/concept helpful in the real world. For example, we have imaginary numbers and they are certainly not “real”, but they do allow us to visualize concepts within and outside of the real world.
Fun fact: Zero (0) is both an imaginary number and a real number at the same time!!
I would like to get into Zero (0) for a moment while we’re here.
Zero is both a real and imaginary number and let me tell you why. We’ll start as to why/when Zero is “real”.
Zero, essentially means: Nothing
So Zero is “real”, when we say things like “Bob has four (4) apples, how many apples does Bob have if you take four (4) of his apples away?”
If Bob has four (4) apples, and you take four (4) away, that means he has Zero (0) apples or no apples.
Zero (0) is “real” in that it helps describes specific situations and whether something is “true”or “false” (aka “yes” or “no”). Does something exist in a certain state, or does it not?
This is why Zero (0) is so important and used in the binary/logic languages. Either you have something (any number other than Zero (0)), usually represented by one (1) to keep it simple since it doesn’t matter what number it is, just that it’s not Zero (0), OR you have “Nothing/Negatory” (I didn’t want to use the word “negative” to confuse things here) which is represented by Zero (0).
Essentially all logic is a series of yes or no questions.
This is essentially what programming is doing, what your brain is doing, and what humans are doing when they seek to understand the world.
Programming/Logic does have more layers to it, which I’ll get into momentarily, but there’s one more important thing here I would like to stress.
Programming essentially is asking “yes or no” questions, however it is important to note that there are more than just two answers to the question, there are really three answers. “Yes”, “No”, and “ERROR”.
The meaning of “ERROR” in regards to programming means essentially either one of two things, if not both things simultaneously:
- There is a problem in the question asked, it was asked/stated incorrectly, and as such no answer exists. How can a correct answer be given if the question makes no sense?
- There is insufficient data for a meaningful response. This one sounds similar to number one, but this doesn’t mean that there is a problem in the question; this one means that based on the knowledge accumulated thus far that there is not a satisfying answer. There is a fun thing indirectly inferred by the essential statement of “I don’t have enough data”. Do you know what it is?— That all you need to do to get a meaningful response to absolutely any question you could ask, is to supply sufficient data. You know what the coolest thing about sufficient data being the “raw material” to build answers is? Data is infinite. Data is infinite because our universe is infinite, not only that but it is infinitely small and it’s infinitely expanding. So if there is not an answer for the question you ask, eventually, there will be. You’ll just need to find the missing pieces. There are infinite possibilities in an infinite existence, it may take you some time, but eventually you’ll find what you need.
Anywho, this is very basic logic and it needs to stay that way, basic.
It certainly can get more “involved”, as my programmers and my psychologists know, programming/logic has more fancy layers to it than just “yes/no/ERROR” in appearance. There are Conditional Formatting statements/paths and they certainly do some fun tricks but ultimately at their core they’re still simply “Yes/No” or “On/Off” questions.
So that’s why Zero (0) is real.
This is why Zero (0) is imaginary.
Because there is no such thing as nothing. There is no nothing.
A glass has 50% of its volume consisting as water— is it halfway full or halfway empty?
THE GLASS IS ALWAYS FULL
50% water + 50% air.
The air is not nothing, the water is not nothing, the ground is not nothing– there is always SOMETHING.
Everything is made of energy/matter and “nothing” does not exist.
“But FCP! There’s space, the vacuum of space is the vast nothingness!” – You, possibly
That’s fair, and I’m no scientist, but here’s what I like to think:
I think that space is not actually empty, I think we PERCEIVE it to be empty.
Think about it. There is SO MUCH MORE to the world than what our senses allow us to perceive. There is SO MUCH MORE to the world that what even our machines are capable of perceiving. We, as intellectual beings, have an infinitesimal amount knowledge and perception of the known universe. This is an uncontested fact.
It was all the way back in Greecian times where they were hypothesizing that space was actually some sort of vacuum.
In the 1600’s a scientist named Torricelli (inventor of the barometer) concluded that air or atmosphere exerts pressure because it’s being pulled or pushed down by something to the Earth’s surface. His exact words read, “We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element air, which by unquestioned experiments is known to have weight.”
This is the way our world works.
You have the most dense matter (Earth) at the core, where there is no Earth you have less dense Water, where there is no Earth or Water you have less dense Air. We are less dense than Earth, but we are more dense than Air (it depends on the person for Water but generally we are less dense in comparison).
This is why we don’t sink into the Earth, this is why we can float on water, this is why we don’t float in Air. Essentially these are just three layers of different density matter with Air enveloping the whole planet in almost a bubble of sorts.
So here’s what I’m thinking: I’m thinking that space is actually some sort of fluid that is less dense than air. I think this because you can’t have nothing, it’s just not possible.
Why having nothing isn’t possible
Having nothing isn’t possible because of two simple cornerstones of our scientific knowledge.
First you have the First Law of Thermal Dynamics which essentially says that energy can be neither created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. We all remember that one right?
Next we have to look at Einstein’s most famous equation:
E=mc2
This equation essentially says that the increased relativistic mass (m) of a body times the speed of light squared (c2) is equal to the kinetic energy (E) of that body.
Do you see what this is saying? It’s saying light and matter are just aspects of the same thing. Matter is just frozen light. And light is matter on the move. If you have a really profound manner of thinking you will realize that this means that YOU ARE LIGHT (Hu-man – Light-Manifest), but more on that another time. Those who are smart or have the proper interest in that statement will be able to infer everything they need to have whatever they wish in their life and the greatest “secrets” of the universe.
Anywho, light is matter and matter is light and both of these things are energy and as such absolutely none of it may be created or destroyed, only transformed.
So what is light/energy/matter?
Light/Energy/Matter is simply vibration. What else is vibration? Vibration is also heat/temperature. Our sun is of a high vibration due to the chemical reactions its having and thus a high temperature and thus emits light.
What we can realize from all of this, is that there is no such thing as darkness. For vibration/heat produces light, it may be so small that it’s out of the range of our biological/built-in photo receptors so WE aren’t able to see/detect it, but it does exist. This is a true scientific fact, with all information derived from the very “basic” building blocks of science, but I bet you never learned this in school huh? (Unless you’re some sort of engineer or physicist)
To seal the deal, all we need to do is pull out the information we possess regarding this “recently” declared impossibility:
ABSOLUTE ZERO
Absolute Zero is essentially cooling something so much so that it no longer vibrates (heat is vibration). It’s known as 0K and is calculated to be −273.15°C/−459.67°F
For perspective, the moon is -192ºC/-378ºF and some of our deepest outer space measurements are about -235ºC/-455°F.
I would love to explain the science behind this, but luckily enough for me there is nothing new under the Sun and this has already been addressed before. ScienceAlert.com has a nice article regarding Absolute Zero and as to why it’s impossible to reach here.
So you can’t reach Absolute Zero, you can’t reach nothing, you can never stop things from moving completely, not unless you have infinite resources or the time of the whole existence of the Universe.
It says something about humanity that we try so hard to reach the limits of these things. It’s beautiful really, our curiosity.
There is one more reason I believe that “Space” is actually a fluid and not a vacuum.
For that, you’ll need to watch this video. (Pro-tip: Youtube has a x2 playback option if you’re short on time.)
What this video shows is how blue stars appear as red ones and it’s attributed to what is basically the Doppler Effect. Blue stars have fast/short wavelengths, but due to the fact that they’re moving away from us, they end up turning into slow/long wavelengths as they travel.
But here’s the thing, I was under the impression that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant 300000 km/s.
If that is the case, which indeed it is, then why is it that the light slows down in such a way to go from blue to red in the vacuum of space? Now again, I know this is currently addressed and we have an “answer” for it in the Hubble Telescope video, but here’s what doesn’t make sense to me.
If space were really empty, why would the light lose energy or increase its wavelength over a period of time?
The Doppler Effect essentially explains this, but something still isn’t right to me.
If space were a perfect vacuum, this light should have traveled, as it is, and remained unchanged throughout its journey.
This is what leads me to believe that there is some invisible material (likely a fluid-esque substance), in space, that causes the blue light (or any light) to lose energy/increase its wavelength, after traveling over an enormous distance. There is some sort of “material” there, enough something to create something akin to “air resistance” and causes light to slow down.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it simply gets transformed into another form of energy. (2nd law of thermodynamics)
Physics and our understanding of the world and how it works is constantly evolving, and there is actually a lot of science moving in this direction supporting this hypothesis (have fun reading this article if you’re interested).
So space being not a vacuum isn’t entirely “proven” as of the moment in time that I write this , but there is no reason to believe this is not the case and things are certainly moving in this direction.
There is no nothing, no lower limit, we can never reach it, we can get infinitely closer, but never touch it. For all intents and purposes that is -∞. Some may disagree, but this is how I see it. Time will tell.
So, we’ve established that there is no nothing, there is no lower limit. No lower absolutes.
What about higher absolutes?
Same story pretty much, but there is no limit on this one. There is no exact calculable number. There is no absolutely everything, there is no ceiling, there are no walls, there is no bottom.
Infinitely expanding means infinite data. Even if we could somehow go the speed of light, that’s how fast the edge of everything is going too, we would never catch up, we would always be some distance away from it. This actually also hearkens reminiscent of the Simulation Theory.
In a podcast with Joe Rogan, SpaceX chief Elon Musk said “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality” before concluding “that it’s most likely we’re in a simulation.”
Another high-profile proponent to the hypothesis is famous astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, who said in an NBC news interview that the hypothesis is correct giving “better than 50-50 odds” and adding:
“I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find none.”
The Simulation Theory
Now I’m not going to get into the Simulation Theory myself as I supplied links above for you to get a good picture of it.
The key thing I said previously that I feel supports the idea of the Simulation Theory:
“Even if we could somehow go the speed of light, that’s how fast the edge of everything is going too, we would never catch up, we would always be some distance away from it.”
It would be like a 360º holographic virtual treadmill, but the edge isn’t simulated by our moving presence, but it is moving by our moving perception. Every time we look at it, to try to see the end, to observe past it all, we have found that it only has expanded. That there just isn’t always more to see, but everything as we know it is moving away from us as well.
Say this is a simulation, and thus had a programmer/designer, I’m not sure what you think, but I think the universe having no end but also everything that is known continuing to move out could be called redundancy. Two systems that potentially stay in place to keep us in our place at the center.
Either way, again we have infinity, the data available in the known universe is expanding at a rate and we have but a fraction of the information available to us that is available in the known universe as it is.
Should our technology increase and thus our data capture and data storage increase, we may be able to increase the rate at which we learn knowledge and approach infinity, but the whole idea behind infinity is that it is infinite. Did you know that there are infinite infinities? Did you know that there is not just a whole number infinity, but there is an infinity between each whole integer? There are an infinity of digits in-between 1 and 2, 3 and 3, and so on.
If you’re familiar with the show Rick and Morty, they had an episode called M. Night Shaym-Aliens! where they were in a simulation. Watch the whole episode or watch at 9:47 to refresh your memory here.
So that’s the example of the simulation. Typically it re-simulates as they move through it (at the speed that they move), however, since they overloaded the CPU earlier in the episode, the computer wasn’t able to keep up and they were able to run toward the edge.
Theoretically, should we be in a simulation simulated by technology so well that we couldn’t tell the difference between the simulation and actual existence, we wouldn’t be able to reach this edge unless we were able to glitch the computer somehow. However, it would seem that this simulation of reality was so real that we likely wouldn’t have that option without superior prior knowledge of the system in the same way like Rick does in the episode to set about the glitch in the first place.
If you can’t glitch the system somehow, then you’re stuck on the 360º hologram environment simulation. Which is what this would seem to be similar to, if not exactly, based on our knowledge of physics thus far.
-∞ to ∞ is the law of our universe
Essentially. Certainly. Without a doubt. How could you ever think otherwise when you observe/understand all of the proper knowledge of the world?
-∞ to ∞ IS EVERYTHING!
-∞ to ∞ means, no limits, no absolutes!
And there are infinite -∞ to ∞‘s (infinities)!
Not only that but there are infinite infinities within the infinities!
There is every infinity you can imagine, and every infinity you can’t!
No matter where you look, no how you look, we don’t even need to look further, there is no limit to what we can learn and know.
But hold on for at least one more point, because I have not completely disproven the existence of absolutes for there is still one more type of absolute that I must make the case for non-existence of, or at the very least the unimportance/insignificance of.
The existence of individual absolutes a.k.a. facts.
On the (non-)existence/unimportance of individual absolutes a.k.a. facts.
Now before fully diving into this section I would like to remind you of the title of this article and what we have talked about before. First, this is an article titled “there are no such things as absolutes”. Second, in explaining the concept of Zero (0) I said that there is no such thing as nothing (technically non-existence is the same as Absolute Zero, if we could ever reach it). I remind you of this because I will be making some absolute statements, I’ve had to do so throughout this whole article. I am making absolute statements but they aren’t actual absolutes. For example, there are PLENTY of facts that exist and that are important. In writing this section my objective is just to point out that we often value certain facts more than we should.
This could possibly be one of the hardest and most confusing points for one to wrap their head around or it could be as simple as removing a veil from over one’s eyes/shining a light so they could see more clearly.
This is possibly one of the hardest and most confusing points for one to wrap their head around because it goes against everything that they have been thought. It goes against the thinking that has been programmed into one’s brain since the advent of speech.
It goes against everything to say that individual absolutes or facts don’t exist, or a fairer position that I feel more people could get on-board with– that individual absolutes or facts are unimportant.
So first let’s establish as to why these things don’t exist.
Individual absolutes/facts don’t exist because, typically, the conditions on which an individual absolute/fact occurs have to be EXACT. As always in life, there is an acceptable margin of error and those margins vary based on what the margin is referring to. However, even with a “margin of error” that is still essentially listing EXACT conditions for something being able to happen. Does that make sense?
Let me break it down using a commonly accepted scientific individual absolute/fact that everyone knows.
So, let’s take water. Everyone knows and learns about water right?
Water is one of the first scientifical things we (Americans in the public school systems at least) learn in the schooling system. Probably because it is important and necessary to sustain carbon based life, there are multiple forms of it (liquid/solid/gas), AND it is one of the simplest ways to demonstrate and explain a system (the water cycle) to a young mind.
To demonstrate my point of at least the unimportance of individual absolutes/facts we are going to take the two of the most known facts about water. It boils at 100ºC/212ºF and freezes at 0ºC/32ºF at 1 atmosphere of pressure (sea level).
Pretty useful facts right? How could those two individual absolutes not exist or be unimportant? It’s very important to know when water boils and freezes right? Pretty foundational to the world one might say.
However I would disagree. How could I disagree? Well I would disagree because of the qualifier in the definition of these facts. The qualifier “at 1 atmosphere of pressure”, makes both whole facts unimportant.
I say that because you reading this and everyone else in the world are likely not at 1 atmosphere of pressure currently. You may live at sea level, but you are very much likely not at exactly 1 atmosphere of pressure. You may say, “close enough!” but it doesn’t matter whether it is close enough, it matters what it actually is. The details are important for understanding a specific situation and the thing to remember here is that:
Water’s boiling point depends on where you’re standing!
What this means is that at any other atmospheric pressure, that water’s boiling point changes to something other than 100ºC/212ºF and freezes at 0ºC/32ºF!!!
What’s the use in knowing when water boils or freezes at 1 atmospheric pressure if it’s not applicable to you?
For example, in my hometown we have an elevation of about 3,000 ft. (I know I said details are important, but sometimes they’re important and sometimes they’re not, for this point they’re not, but also they are.) So a more useful fact to me would be that water boils at 97ºC/206ºF!! What use have I for knowing that water boils at 100ºC/212ºF at 1 atmospheric pressure?
If I were measuring my water for the temperature to know when it was boiled and I was waiting for my water to get to 212ºF (go America!) I would wait so long that I would be out of water because water the temperature of water, once boiling, will stay constant.
Whatever your specific boiling point of water is, when water reaches it and undergoes a phase transition into water vapor (steam), the temperature remains constant.
You can make the heat as high as you like. The water may intensely boil and transmute into steam faster, but it won’t get hotter.
What actually happens is, at the microscopic level, there may be cooler regions of boiling water. When vapor bubbles form near a heat source, like at the bottom of a pot, the gas bubbles insulate the water from the heat. It’s kinda similar to the Liedenfrost Effect.
Also, in all practical manners you would never need to know the freezing or boiling point of water. You just need to put heat on it till it boils, need to put it into the freezer, or listen to your body when it tells you it’s too cold to go outside (since we’re made of water mostly).
Do you see how useless knowing that fact is yet?
“But it’s not useless! It’s useful for science!” – You
Yeah sure, it can be useful for science, but what is it used for? Probably calculating something, like perhaps calculating for the gas bubbles I mentioned above that insulate water from the heat. Even so, I’m curious, what are the odds that they’re needing to do any science at exactly 1 atmospheric pressure? Any calculations that need to be done are in relation to the real world and most likely, where they are in the real world will need something different than 1 atmospheric pressure.
Plus, did you know that 1 atm used to be defined as a different measurement? Now, in bringing up this information and asking this question, I’m not attempting to knock scientists for updating their methods, that is the standard path that science takes– as we learn more, we find new ways of doing things, the only logical progression.
What I am doing in bringing up this information and asking this question, is bringing your attention to the fact that humans decided what 1 standard atmospheric pressure is defined as.
Does that make sense? Do you see what I’m getting at?
1 atmospheric pressure is imaginary
As are all of our measurements!!
Who decides our standards of measurements?
Well our standard measurements committees of some sort of course.
How did they decide everything? Who decided that that committee was qualified to decide things? Who decided we needed a committee in the first place? How did we decide on whoever decided that we needed a committee for these things? When did it start?
Things get even funkier when we realize every single measurement is completely made up. What else is a measurement that is completely made up?
Time is completely made up
Let’s first reacquaint ourselves with time.
Currently, the international unit of time, the second, is defined by measuring the electronic transition frequency of caesium atoms.
However, there are multiple ways of measuring time (Global Positioning System, other satellite systems, Coordinated Universal Time and mean solar time— all of which differ in their results).
Why do we give so much weight to time when it literally doesn’t have any? We should accept it and love it as it is, weightless, and take off all of this weight we decided to put onto it and into it.
“Time is money” as they say. That’s why we put so much weight into it. Whoever decided to make that statement (Thanks for some of your inventions and quotes Ben Franklin, but that thought seed is not quite as useful) certainly didn’t have humanities greatest interests at heart.
Time is a measurement, time is made up. We can choose different ways to measure it to give us some sort of feeling of measuring our movement.
Why is one second not how fast Usain Bolt can run 15m instead?
Why is one day midnight to midnight instead of noon to noon or three to three? (for the sun, but we don’t have to go off of that if we don’t want to)
Why is one year measured into how many days it took to revolve around the sun and not how many times it took Saturn to do it?
Why are there seven days in a week? How do we know that it’s actually Thursday? What was the first Thursday ever? Are we actually able to confirm that today is indeed Thursday and not some other day of the week? Can we go back in time and make sure that it’s Thursday and that we just don’t all agree it’s Thursday without question? How do we know we didn’t lose track? Is it really 2021 or did we lose track of that at some point.
At the very least, no matter where you are, I believe we can all agree that time, is somewhat a cycle. The tick of a clock, the time it takes to revolve on our axis or around the sun. It time is an interval, time is a wave, which again, is cyclical and thus also a wave.
Time is also different depending on where you are and what you’re doing (I’m sure you’ve heard of Time Dialation). Basically, time is relative, time depends on where you are and what you’re doing. If you want to understand how time works there’s a bunch of movies/shows that do a half decent job of it (Interstellar, The Good Place, Donnie Darko, Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Arrival, Doctor Who, Planet of the Apes, 12 Monkeys, and plenty more not listed here) and of course Stanford Philosophy has at least ten entries regarding time.
This means that the time it takes to boil water varies based on where you are and what you’re doing.
So time is even more useless in my book because the time it takes to do something is entirely dependent on how it’s done. The resulting time is always a slave to what has gone into it.
For example, let’s consider how the time it takes for something to boil is dependent on the atmospheric pressure. Well, it’s also dependent on the container it’s in, the amount of water within that container, the purity of that water, the source of the fire (it would certainly take longer to boil if you’re trying to use one match at a time when compared to using a blowtorch), the current temperature/state (solid/liquid/gas) of the water there are SO many variables.
What’s even more fun is that a lot of science people say that in a lab that doesn’t matter. They say that within a laboratory environment things can be consistent because they are controlled and monitored under quite a lot of scrutiny but I’m here to tell you that this doesn’t matter.
It may matter enough for science, but it really doesn’t matter for anything else in the world.
Even if you are in the most robust and advanced laboratory in the world, there will be differences in every single experiment, however minuscule.
Nothing is ever exactly the same, no matter how you hash it out.
Even if you took the most exact manufacturing methods we have available today, if you made 1000 items, none of them would be exactly the same. They would be similar, probably similar enough to not be able to tell a difference, but it is a fact that they would not be exactly the same. The initial ones made would be the closest, but see here’s what happens. As the machine gets used it wears down, it is immediately not the same machine that it used to be, and thus makes a different product.
You can, possibly, duplicate something “perfectly” once (perfect doesn’t exist really). Let’s say, in theory, you had a machine that could copy the appearance of something perfectly (that would be cool!). But even so, it would NEVER be an EXACT match, this is because this new object that you have duplicated from an original on does not possess the same exact atoms that the original possesses. Different atoms different object, though it may look the same.
We are too obsessed with what we know.
We like to say we know things, and that’s totally fine, knowledge is power after all. However, we get off on all of this knowledge and all of these facts. When in fact (hehe), all of these “facts” are just snapshots of individual instants and these individual instants are only so within context.
For example, what would you say the hardest mineral is?
Well if you’re anyone with even a basic understanding of science I’m sure the mineral known as diamond came straight to your head and you are kind of correct. Can you understand why I said “kind of” back there?
If you’re not sure, go back a little bit and read everything again very carefully, you may see it. Look again till you figure it out or till you give up– the very next paragraph is gonna spill the beans.
I have to say that I’m sorry if I swindled you right there, I asked you what was technically an unanswerable question.
I said you’re “kind of” right because diamond is the hardest mineral on Earth, but see, I didn’t ask what the hardest mineral on Earth is– I asked “what would you say the hardest mineral is?”. And the hardest mineral will always be unbeknownst to us.
You were right that diamond is that hardest mineral out there, to YOUR knowledge. However, outside of your knowledge, in the infinite infinity that is the infinitely expanding universe. It an go further than this too, just think about it. There could definitely be a planet out there where the hardest mineral on it is graphite and just as possible, there is likely a planet out there with a harder mineral than diamond on it.
Why do we need all of this information anyway?
Don’t get me wrong– I LOVE science, I LOVE learning, and I LOVE knowledge. I am a HUGE proponent for science and learning everything we can about the absolutely magnificent existence around us.
But here’s what I don’t understand:
What are we doing with science? What do we hope to achieve? Why are we building nuclear weapons? Why are we colliding particles? Why are we searching the skies and the stars? Why are we pushing physics to its limits?
Again, I don’t mind and I understand that all of this study is contributing to humanity– but why do these things when we could certainly be doing something else that I think everyone would consider possibly more important: FIXING OUR REAL WORLD PROBLEMS
Why are we looking to stars and outward when we have plenty of things that we should probably attend to before turning our attention elsewhere?
Are we looking for salvation? Do we think that some higher civilization or some sort of knowledge will be our savior? Are we seriously expecting somebody else to be the change that we want to see in the world? Maybe we’re hoping to sit at some seat in the galactic federation because we’re so great? Or maybe we home to find someone so that we may be less alone.
No, we should look inward first. We should never look outward for the answer to our problems that sit next to us. We should attend to ourselves before we ever expect to ever be considered to be able to sit at the galactic table with the state of our world as it is and how we act currently like children. We may not even find a solution to our problems outwardly before our problems continue to swell beyond control.
What’s more valuable my friends and family– billion dollar particle colliders and telescopes to observe space OR making sure every human on Earth is taken care of like family?
For me, it’s the latter. I actually believe that we could have both of these things, however we need to take care of our fellow siblings/children of the Earth FIRST and then once we have a good standard we can begin re-prioritizing back to the EXPENSIVE (financially and with resources) science that won’t help humanity immediately.
WE ARE THE ONES WE’RE WAITING FOR. WE SAVE OURSELVES;
Anywho, I digress… I went on a tangent at the very end there, but now you know (or at least consider the possibilities of) what all “absolute(s)” really are/aren’t.
How does this knowledge provide any insight into how I think and the real meanings behind my words/thoughts when I think/speak?
Great question!
So, since I explained how I know (or at least it is my belief) there are no absolutes. However there most certainly absolutes!!!! Or at the very least they are required in conveying knowledge and thoughts with words.
As such, there will be times when I will be speaking in absolutes. I will use the words “always” and “never” from time-to-time. I do my best to avoid them, but there will be times where they will be unavoidable and/or necessary to properly convey an idea I’m writing about.
“Never say never”
Do NOT say that something is impossible, that it will never happen, or that you will never do it, because ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.
A: “I’ll never be good enough to make the team.”
B: “Never say never. Just keep practicing and see what happens.” I know you say we don’t have to worry about that scenario, but never say never.
— The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Great idiom/advice from sir Dickens, however, there most certainly times where we must say never, but that’s the whole irony/knowledge within the saying– you have to say “never” twice to make this point. Additionally as above, so below— so this also applies to “always”.
Conclusion
If you made it the whole way through this article, I deeply appreciate you taking the time to read this. This was not an easy subject to nail down within a few words, there are many concepts that required addressing.
I hope that I have successfully achieved my goals of broadening your horizons regarding the way the world works and what “absolute” really is/isn’t and that it brought you insight into how I think and the real meanings behind my words/thoughts when I think/speak. Though I may use absolutes to convey points, I certainly understand that there are situations where what I am speaking on may be incorrect/not apply.
There is no always. There is no never. There are no absolutes.
There are no limits.
Wishing you all the best,
FCP 🙃
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