So, in the fall I started working on a thesis for my philosophy, Coeternalism. After getting around four thousand words into it, I ran into a tautology that effectively destroyed the commonly held notions of the afterlife, thus rendering the soul obsolete. I ceased work on the thesis, I quit going to church, I sank into a depressive episode, yadda yadda. After some time people convinced me to resume work on my thesis but only to address it to people who believe in the soul and all that, so I did. It never sat well for me to write about a philosophy in which I no longer believed, but it appeased certain people so I wrote and wrote and wrote.
A month and a half ago I was whisked away to Madrid, were language studies and a flowering social life distracted me from any kind of philosophical meanderings for the most part. But now that I'm in France spending countless hours in an overpriced apartment with nothing to do except smoke away the time in a hookah bar, I've picked up philosophy once again. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and finally I realized something. I found a way for the soul to exist again. Huzzuh! Now I have to go to church again.
So yeah, at this point I'm very close to tacking on a conclusion to my thesis, and after that will commence the long task of editing the bejeezus out of it.
But anyway, the base of my philosophy is Plato's idea that the soul (if it exists) is an eternal entity, and along with that comes the properties Boethius outlined: it is simultaneously whole and complete in possession of endless life. Because time only happens within finite systems, the soul could only have sentience within the tangible universe. It is impossible to "feel" anything within eternity. With that in mind, I effectively abolished the classical notions of heaven and hell and thus rendered the soul useless, so I ditched belief in it. I had problems believing in a heaven or hell in the tangible universe because of its course towards some end, whether an entropic heat death or a big crunch.
What turned the tide was that I remembered that the density of the universe has so far been estimated to be within a magnitude of ten of such a density that after some time its expansion will decellerate towards zero movement, but will never reach zero and will never revert into contraction. I only recently realized the significance therein: time itself will slow down at some point but it will never end. I realized that this accomodates the Catechism's view of the end times in that the world will continue without termination but nevertheless it will approach a finite limit. Ergo, sentience may indeed last forever without violating the principles of thermodynamics.
Well, I had fun with that.
Linear Mode
