Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Gone...

The famous "Cogito Ergo Sum" of Rene Descartes seem incomplete to me. Somehow, I am tempted to conclude it this way, "I Think Therefore I Am...Gone."
Today, I was reminded of our fleeting existence via this quote from Buckminster Fuller, "What you see is not a hand. It is a pattern integrity, the universe's capability to create hands.”
In a way, our brain itself is a pattern integrity, the universe's capability to create brains. As a matter of fact, Buckminster Fuller puts it more succinctly, "Each individual is a pattern integrity."
Thus I remember, how a physicist/philosopher named Ludwig Boltzmann stumbled upon this concept, which was later called "Boltzmann Brain": It is a fleeting pattern that is briefly given a chance to ruminate "Hey, I exist!" then fades away. In 1906, Boltzmann committed suicide.
How we all are in a sense, like Boltzmann brains is accented when you compare the lifetime of humans to the lifespan of stars. How we are like Mayflies that live for a day and then...gone.

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