We're All Dead

We are all dead.

I don't mean that metaphorically, I mean it literally. However, perhaps the statement requires more explanation, as obviously you are reading this and probably don't feel dead. But you are.

I think, therefore I am.
Descartes

We have all heard the phrase and maybe even mulled it over a bit, yet it isn't quite as many people believe it to be. If anything, it is more aligned with simulation theory, as other than the thoughts in our own head, we can't actually prove that anything else exists. You all might be a figment of my imagination, a simulation. However, we needn't spend too long contending the statemen, and it really isn't connected to you being dead right now...

Unless you are being thoughtless.

I had an interesting discussion with a friend today who was making a case for duality, which I don't believe in, other than the construct of it for our own sanity. Because, there isn't actually any opposing force, any alternative, any yin and yang, there is just what is.

Impossible is nothing.
Muhammad Ali

I believe that this is another quote that is sorely misunderstood, where people use it in order to say that it is possible to do anything. But I don't believe that this is the true meaning of the statement, I think it is more literal. Impossible is truly nothing, because if something is impossible, it doesn't exist at all. And yes, technically nothing is impossible, given the right conditions, meaning that everything is possible, even if it doesn't exist now, it might exist in another time in space.

But it is time that I want to look at a little here today, because like the impossible, it doesn't exist. Sure, we think it exists because we have a clock that counts away the seconds, minutes and hours, but it really doesn't. Time is another concept, which like duality, we have created like a fantasy to make sense of our world, and what we experience. Time tracks movement, but things move without being tracked.

Perhaps time isn't a good way to track movement anyway. It works for our limited understanding of the universe of course, but it isn't actually granular enough to capture what is happening in the universe. You see, while there is movement apparently, there is no way we can measure the moment something moves. Yet they say,

Live in the moment.

The moment? Live there? But that is where death is.

You want to know an unsatisfactory definition? Actually two.

Alive

/əˈlʌɪv/
adjective
(of a person, animal, or plant) living, not dead.

Dead

/dɛd/
adjective
no longer alive.

Great work clearing that mess up! But it seems all so obvious doesn't it? Why would you need more of a definition than that. Because there is a problem with the moment we are trying to describe, because we talk about living in the present, we want to live in the now.

What is now?

Again, seems so obvious. It is happening as we speak, or write, or read or listen. Yet, that is not now, because now is a point in time, not a period of time. A moment of course could be a short period of lots of points, but the problem is, the point gives as a contradiction. because we can't experience the now.

That is crazy talk.

But really. Because if we are actually going to look at the instance of now, then it means that there is no time, because in that snapshot of zero time width, everything is absolutely still. Nothing is moving at all, not even the fastest and most volatile of particles. There is no blood pumping, no air flowing, no synapse firing in us. In fact, in the now the entire universe is utterly and entirely still. And when something is completely still, it is also dead.

We can only "approach the now" with time, but if we could improve the resolution of time to be able to actually experience the now, we could have no experience of it except in hindsight, because in that moment, our mind isn't moving, we aren't thinking, we aren't feeling, we aren't alive. The dead can't experience life.

But that raises the question of what life is.

Or instead, maybe we should reframe it all and think about continually being dead in the present, even though we existed in the past and are likely to exist for at least a moment more into the future. But you see, the universe has laws and can't be in conflict with itself. What this means is that the duality of life and death only exists in our human construct for us to comprehend experience, by making classifications of it in the same way we separate a tiger from an ant. But in the reality of nature, this classification doesn't exist, because there is, and that is all there is. There is no "is not" in nature.

It is singular.

And that then causes us a little bit of a problem. Because if there is no life in the now because everything is absolutely still, then it means we are living, but also simultaneously and constantly dead. We can describe life and death in order to make sense of our world, but the reality has to be that our description is lacking, because it suggests that one is different than the other, and in that zero-time sliver of now, one can't be both alive and dead, it has to be one or the other. Or, some other state completely that captures both as a singular expression of the universe.

What of it?

Nothing. Or everything. It is up to you. But I find it interesting when people are talking about living in a moment that is only touching experience in hindsight, like looking at a picture taken of your perspective a fraction of a moment before you opened your eyes. There is lag in our awareness, meaning that while we can say things like "live in the moment", we are actually experiencing the moment of now, when it is already in the past.

You might think me insane.

But actually, we are all insane, aren't we? After all, in order to be able to comprehend our experience, we have to build false frameworks and constructs like time and life and death. We have to create a fantasy because the "real world" is just too vast to handle, because we can't imagine limitless eternity, or the totality of all that is, was, and ever could be. We are in the whole, a part of it, so we can never now the complete picture, so we tell ourselves a story that we are more important than we are, and we are living a life of value in the moment, when in actual fact, we are completely still at all t-nows, meaning we are always dead.

Useless philosophy?

Maybe. But if I think therefore I am is true, and we can be alive and thoughtless at the same time, do we still exist? From the outside, a brain dead person can be seen as alive, but without thought, they do not exist to themselves and can't experience anything, because it can't be processed into thought. Electrical signals can still shoot around the nervous system, but the "person" who inhabited that body, gets no feedback from the body. They are gone.