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05:08:2006 Entry: "Ann : Hypercube and Point"

Hypercube and Point

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and Stan and I had a discussion about it the other night.

Sometimes I think about the possible paths one could take and how that affects your life, like you decide to buy one house instead of another, take one job instead of another, but is there a part of you that does take option b instead of option a? I picture this in my head, and it looks like a tree, or I should say a tree looks like a simplified verion of it, branches diverging, branches with branches. With a tree, the branches always diverge into smaller branches, but these smaller branches never converge, never meet up with other branches from another larger branch. If this analogy is accurate then if you choose option a instead of option b, then no matter what you will never meet up with the same pathway ever again.

If this was geometry, then it would be a hypercube. So many people live on a line segment, going from point y to point z. That's all they see is the line, past and present. They can't even envision their life as 4 dimensions, the hypercube.

Sometimes I find the past so very tedious and irrelevant. I am here, at point X, and that's all there is. Even something that happened 15 seconds ago, although fresh in my memory, is irrelevant. It is gone forever. I like to think about being on point X, living very much in the moment. That's how animals live, in the moment. I also like to think about the hypercube, different paths, different mes out there, somewhere, different Stans. That I will never meet. But I don't like the 2 dimensions, the line.

I haven't figured out what three dimensions, or a cube, could be in terms of a life metaphor, though.

10 Comments

This is some wonderful material.

Life somehow appears to be - only choices.

Sometimes I feel like I've taken to longest possible way to find the path in this life which I am on. It is difficult to think about the choices we have made in a frame of mind beyond judgement.

With judgement though, it appears that no matter how much I may want to change any past choices now - the only thing worse than any mistakes would be being able to go back and choose another choice.

Posted by stanley @ 04:28:2006:08:25 PM CST

That would be like Groundhog Day with Variations. Who wants to go back in time anyway? It's tedius, and it allows no growth. One needs to get on with their life, even though they feel they feel they took the wrong path(s).

Posted by Ann @ 04:28:2006:08:55 PM CST

I sometimes feel there is still a me who never moved from dickinson, or where ever, still living out my life with my family. One wek before I had Austin, my stepdad took my brother and sister and moved to NY, then my aunt and uncle moved to Helena, and sometime before all this my grandmother moved back to NY also.

Nice huh? Anyway, I imagined they were still living there, going to school and work- we were just to busy to see each other. I thought I couldn't deal, but what you are saying makes more sense to me.

Posted by Dawn @ 04:28:2006:11:07 PM CST

It's mindbending to think about, isn't it? That there is a possibility of all these "selves" living out life somewhere, although not on this plane.

Something that Stan told me the other day is that mathematicians figured out that the infinity of irrational numbers is greater than the infinity of whole numbers because there are an infinite number of irrational numbers inbetween every two whole number as you count them towards infinity, meaning that no matter how far you go towards infinity with whole numbers, there will always be more irrational numbers. Thus it appears that infinity is not equivalent to infinity.

The thing is, we've always thought of infinity as a two-dimensional line, but in fact it is a multi-dimensional hypercube, branching out everywhere.

Posted by Ann @ 04:29:2006:09:50 AM CST

that actually makes sense.

Posted by Dawn @ 04:29:2006:11:45 AM CST

I was thinking that the relationships we have like parent - child, friend - friend coworker - supervisor etc... (these human relationships) could be like whole numbers, and then all of the choices made in these relationships would be like irrational numbers. This way no matter how many relationships we count twards infinity there would always be an infinite number of choices between each human relationship.

Posted by stanley @ 04:29:2006:08:09 PM CST

Agree with Stan's first comment, about life being choices, or a continous chain of choices, that again lead to actions, and that the individual meaning of life is the sum of actions, which are consequenses of choices, which again are not always the assumed consequenses, because life is more rhizomatic than a line, and other humans is part in creating the situation you have to act within. And I agree that there is only a now, because past does no longer exist and future isn't yet, and both these terms only exist in the now, whitin our thoughts.

Posted by Nikolas @ 04:30:2006:07:51 AM CST

I just thought that an interesting rhetorical philosophical exercise would be to prove that the past existed, because everything you would need to prove its existence exists in the present, therefore it exists now, not in the past.

Posted by Ann @ 05:01:2006:09:19 AM CST

Is it possible that - a memory could both be becoming older and younger than itself at the same time?

It could be the case that the past seems illusive because it is recognized by memory, and the nature of memory is difficult to comprehend.

Every time we think of some event from the past our time line is going in both directions at once. We think back to an image which is moving in our minds. From our point of view we think we are contacting the same point in time, but we are always getting older. The memory imagery is moving in time just as we are and it is both older an younger than itself each time we recall such a memory.

Posted by stanley @ 05:01:2006:08:52 PM CST

Yes, you have no bananas.

Posted by N. @ 05:05:2006:08:18 AM CST

By Ann @ 10:23 PM CST:05:08:06 ..::Link::..

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