Metaphysics (4): Possible and Something

Note: This is the fourth and final instalment in my comprehensive summary and an opinion piece of this book.

Possible

Possibilities are simply events that could’ve occurred but did not. We are not talking about how things went down this timeline but rather what could have possibly happened.

Team A winning over Team B is an event that occurred as it is but the vice versa is the possibility we are looking at.

This is certainly a realistic possibility but for that possibility to take place not as a thought but in reality means introducing parallel worlds.

If this is true however, it means that they are concrete possible worlds but spatiotemporally separate.

That being said, taking the possibility of these possible worlds being possible means that we are dealing with an infinite possible world for every literal instance.

As long as a particular and a property exist, it can be redistributed or rearranged.

If I typed ‘this’ instead of other English letters for some reason then all of the other ones must have their own possible world no matter how small that possibility may appear to be.

Obviously, if this is true, it is not very economical. While it may feel absurd and counterintuitive, that does not negate the fact that it might be very well true.

But this also proves an interesting point from David Armstrong (A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility, 1989). If all the world elements are in a grid then ticking off all the grids means we know every fact about the world.

Coming back to the topic, there are two distinctions between possibilities: logic and the natural possibility.

Something logical can be naturally illogical but not vice versa.

A man can be logically of red color but not within the confines of the laws of nature/science.

However, if we do indeed add another property or particular then the original one must be of different origin by default.

This proves a major weakness to possible worlds.

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Does Greatness Matter?

Everyone wants to be great in their lifetime. They want to achieve something and be someone.

There’s nothing wrong with this per se. After all, what is life if you don’t have anything to prove right?

But why does this matter though? What would happen to yourself if you lived in a parallel universe where you achieved nothing?

How would that make you feel?

Perhaps you feel bad about it since you base your self-esteem around your achievements, not your character.

But it’s also a good question to ask ourselves what are achievements exactly.

Since we are going to answer this question, I think it’s also important to realize and admit that different people have different achievements.

It makes sense. After all, it’s not like the world decided to give a feeling of achievement if you cleared a milestone set by life. It’s all in your perception whether you achieved it or not.

It may be defined by external awards or accolades but ultimately, it’s because you gave permission for it to be defined as such.

Of course, it’s also important to consider that someone’s achievements are not yours either.

A runner may consider running 100 meters in nine seconds as an achievement but for you, that just may be impressive but never on your goal list.

Whether that’s because you have no incentives or you know you can never do that is a question to ask yourself.

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Metaphysics (3): Time and Person

Note: This is the third instalment in my comprehensive summary and an opinion piece of this book.

Time

For a change and its cause to occur (discussed in the previous instalment) time is an element definitely involved.

Not only in this but nearly everything that has to do with reality so it only makes sense to include it under metaphysics.

How fast does time pass though? Does it go in reverse? Or since time exists independently of events, can nothing occur while time passes?

Bringing back temporal properties has some value regarding these questions. An event yesterday has a temporal property of past while an event now has for present.

But the order does generally seem future, present and past.

Shifting gears, believing in the present moment as real is called presentism and this view is getting popular through meditation these days.

But the problem of this is obvious: how long or short is present exactly? A millisecond? A second? An hour? People say a moment but that doesn’t exactly tell how long.

We can only roughly gauge a moment to be one till the period we acknowledge as so.

But another problem also lurks. Is it possible for two spatially separated events doing simultaneously such as getting sunlight and the sun taking over eight minutes to reach you? Is that still the present ‘moment’?

Coming back to tenses, why is the past acknowledged as real while it would be considered false to say the future is real as well?

The rational answer for it: since the past was present and thus, a real event occurring in the timeline whereas the future is not present yet thus only a probable possibility that is to occur but is this true?

The ancients also had opinions on these and these might seem appealing compared to what has been discussed so far.

Aristotle would start from the genesis of change (big bang theory), changes and finally construct it into time. This is called Eternalism.

It simply means that the clock started ticking from genesis.

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Being Alone and Pleasures

Society tells us being alone is bad. It’s considered to be synonymous with laziness, carefree, introverted, useless and so on.

Being alone to many or rather by society is seen especially as something we were forced into, not something we actively chose.

I mean, who would want to be intentionally alone right? After all, having friends is fun. We can talk, joke, socialize and do a lot of fun activities together.

Compared to being alone by ourselves where we are silently doing one activity that no one really knows nor is involved in.

You read a book on crime in your leisure time from your bedroom and no one knows. Of course, you can create a reading group and read together but you get my point right?

Sure, we can extrapolate activities done alone into a group event but they are still largely alone.

After all, even in a reading group, you still spend the majority of your time reading and comprehending the book after which you socialize the remaining finite time.

Being alone is often seen as the last option in a multiple choice answer.

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