I'm thinking, not sleeping!

Another 8am Collective Journaling morning... Thank you, Peter Limberger!

Quote of the Day:  "If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week."
~ Harry Crews

Prompt: The “world don’t want you to do that.” Sometimes you have to just force the issue. What’s yours to do, big or small, that presently has no external encouragement?”

Or: write about what’s alive for you now.
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“World don’t want you to do that…”

I read a comment about the lifetime of an electron. You know, those tiny fireflies that zip around at near-light speed, always busy, orbiting the sedentary nucleus. Electrons are what I call “morning people”: those who are blessed/cursed with energy, awake at the crack of dawn, ready to go. My mother was a “morning person”. I am not.

The comment about electrons referred to a paper published in 2015. (You see, it took me 11 years just to find out about the paper!). The paper [ https://borex.lngs.infn.it/papers/articles/a-test-of-electric-charge-conservation-with-borexino/ ], done by scientists at the Borexino liquid scintillation detector (I want one of those!) tried to estimate how long an electron existed. They got tired of waiting, and said that the lower limit, the estimated lifetime of an electron was at least some five quintillion years times the life of our universe (τ ≥ 6.6×1028 years at 90% C.L.).

Now, I don’t know how long our universe is expected to live, nor how folks go about even guessing such a time, and I have to look up what a quintillion is (it’s a billion billion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000). I get tired just looking at all those zeros! But that’s a long, long, long time!

And all that time that electron is zipping around…

I like philosophers. They spend more time sitting around. Or as a poster from the 1960’s so aptly reminded me: Buddha says, “Don’t just DO something, SIT there!”

OMG! Where am I going with this? So many distracting lines of thought…

Oh yeah, time…

I was sitting around, thinking about the difference between these busy, beyond eternal, electrons, and me. I was trying to imagine what an electron might be thinking (or more precisely, do electrons have “choice”). You know, it comes from that long-discussed philosophical topic, “does choice exist”? Or is the world determined to be determined?

So, there I am, sitting, looking out my window, a wall of trees, oaks and maples and sourwoods, rhododendrons and mountain laurel… a typical window in the Blue Ridge Mountains at the edge of the southern Appalachia Mountains of North America… and I was wondering, what is it like to be a tree? A rock? An atom? An electron? Would I have “choice”? Would I be able to look into the future, see two options, and choose between them in a way that wasn’t determined by all the electrons flying around in my brain?

Buddha realized the advantages of NOT having choice, of just being in the moment. There is no suffering.

So there I am, a rock, maybe on the edge of the creek bed, the creek that is less than a 100 yards from my window, yet invisible, unheard, because there is such a wall of plants. I’m a rock, perched on the edge of the slowly eroding creek bed… Should I go for a swim? Roll down the hill and plop into the creek? Maybe go surfing (though, I am pretty heavy, and might just sink to the bottom). Shall I go? What shall I do?

And it occurred to me that the rock, an atom, an electron, doesn’t “think” like that, isn’t conscious (even in a panpsycho way). To be able to have “choice”, there must be memory (recording the past), and imagination (recording the future). Choice adds two dimensions to the universe: the past and the future. We humans tend to call these two dimensions “time”. But “time” doesn’t exist, really. Time is just a side-effect of observing the difference between “now” and “then”. Time doesn’t exist if there is no memory, no recording of “then”. And the future only exists in my mind, in my imagination. The future is only a virtual reality.

I’m starting to wake up… Just a few more moments in bed, Mom, please, I’m not sleeping… I’m thinking...

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I still haven’t read Philip Goff's Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019). Maybe tomorrow, when I have the time...