Does the future exist in a knowable form ?

 Does the future exist in any knowable fashion?If so can it be known in any absolute way ?If not why do so many people believe it can ?
(Ask Philosophers.org)

The future exists no doubt but can it exist in a knowable fashion is the question. To begin with ,the past and the present exist and the future has necessarily to exist as continuum of the present.But there is no certainty of the future existing as a projection of the present because one is not sure of the existence itself. That brings to the question of whether Time can cease to exist because only if Time exists can future continue to exist. Time is the framework within which all space has to exist together with all that exists in space. If time can exist without  space (for example there is no universe) then future can exist without being tied up to space. Space defines the  existence and provides a referential framework for Time.(whatever happened to space is past ,happening now is the present and will happen is the future).Without space Time is continuous and is not broken into the divisions of the past,the present and the future. In that case there is no distinct identity of the future ,which means the future does not exist and is not in a knowable form.
amherst.edu

The idea of identity

 The question that is asked of the philosopher is “if a window is broken ,will it continue to be a window ? The answer given here (Ask philosophers) is that it depends upon how much broken it is. If the damage is not substantial it can still be called a window.If ,on the other hand, the glass is broken and the wood has come apart , Will it still qualify to be called a window ? Here the question is one of identity. A caterpillar ceases to be one and becomes a butterfly .
The butterfly

Stinging, stinking caterpillar
Ate beauty-holes in our cheekoo leaves
And disappeared into
The rainbow outside our compound. 

If the water becomes ice ,the H2O will still remain and in several transformations the original qualities may still persist although the identity has undergone a change. Einstein’s E=MC2 would imply that the transformation means that the original identity will remain in some form.

My own perception is that the window ,if broken, will not cease to be a window. When we are talking of the window we are not talking of the mere wooden frame or the glass pane .We are dealing with the idea of a gap or a crevice within the opacity of a wall which gives us a view of the world outside. Thus even a hole with no wooden frame or glass pane will qualify to be called a window as long as it functions as a window.

Consciousness

 

With respect to the nature of consciousness, do you agree with the phrase ‘You cannot be that which you observe’, or can you point at yourself and say ? this is ME??

(The question is from the website:Ask philosophers )

Here the gentleman is talking “me and them” ,meaning I am the observer and them is the observed. The world is the thing which I observe without participating in it .The moment I participate in it I become “them” and “me” merges into it. Yes .You cannot be that which you observe .For example you are watching the circus girl perform and your consciousness embraces her existence on the stage but when you are on the stage along with her and performing as a troupe member you become “them”.You cannot point at youself and say this is me,Jagannath because that presupposes that for a moment Jagannath has come out of himself and started observing himself as a distinct organism separate from Jagannath,the observed. In a near fictional situation in a poem ,this gentleman called John Donne ,the17th century poet imagined a situation in which both he and his beloved pulled themselves out of their mortal bodies and their souls had their lovers’ union in the vast wild wastes of the firmament.But that is an unreal situation.

Coping with inner silence

My mother ,confined to her room mostly,keeps enquiring from the inner space  , at regular intervals whether I have gone to the office or whether I have come for the lunch or whether I have come back from office.My wife gets understandably annoyed having to reply to her from the living room from time to time.Why  she does this is at first difficult to understand .Today I have understood her .Suddenly it  has occurred to me that when time hangs heavily on her she has found her own way of marking time .In the twilight years a person loses a sense of time and becomes disoriented because he is no longer in the mainstream.  You not only do not participate in the drama of life but lose your spectator status as well . The world goes on without you and is not even aware of your existence.

My wife says my mother raises her voice even when the listener is close by .Where is the need to shout when somebody is within a close range, she asks.It has again occurred to me why such a thing happens with my mother all the time.She seems to be trying to break the inner stillness within her , the lack of steady hum in her consciousness .The silence is  indeed terrifying and it is only by raising the pitch that one could break the silence.

My online being

A very strange thing that I have lately become aware of is the nature of the dialogue that takes place in my online existence .It is as though the dialogue is an ongoing one with interruptions accounted for only by my absences from the computer. I am not sure if I have clarified my thoughts enough. Let me explain. I have a running dialogue with god knows who and it is not the same person all the time but as far as my consciousness goes the dialogue is a mere extension of my earlier one irrespective of who or what I interacted with in my earlier computer sessions. In other words ,on the other side there is a faceless persona with whom I carry on the dialogue which seems to stretch interminably as though there were just the two of us and we carry on with this dialogue from session to session .

Just like it was in my childhood when there were me and God who carried on the dialogue , in a sort of pantomime in which He showed me bits of the world which had appeared briefly and vanished as soon as the experience was over. I had to use this example because it is only through an image that I could explain what I have experienced. My consciousness was like a flimsy mosquito net which enveloped me and broke down every time it changed the space and flowed through time .Just now this computer ,the table and the walls together with the hum of the air-conditioner and the smell of the room spray constitute my consciousness of space which breaks down quickly changing to another envelope of consciousness. In the dialogue I carry on in my online existence it is as though the dialogue never ends and has only breaks such as one would find in a T.V. programme at the end of which I resume the dialogue.

Class

There is something in us which makes us believe that we belong to a particular class of people.This is ingrained within us probably because we have this habit of classifying things and unless we know we belong to a particular class we do not feel secure enough. By classifying ourselves we become predictable and our behavior assumes lack of rough edges and absence of those wonderfully delicious angularities arising out of not belonging. You know in my transactions with people I always look for the people lumped together by way of congenital classes or societal divisions behaving as though they belonged together. I do not know why, while I deal with two women I believe that both of them are together in this thing and that is, a secret bond exists between them which is apart from me and away from me. These are a secret society and a common fate binds them together excluding me from that circle. When I see two economically less privileged people dealing with me I suspect there is something between them which binds them together and I become their common foe. When I see my gardener talking to my driver outside of my transactions I begin to feel they are actually conspiring against a common enemy ,that is me. That is ridiculous and anybody who listens to this will say I am a dirty capitalist pig who is imagining things out of a class hatred borne out of an insecurity that their belongingness is supposed to evoke in me.Actually that is not the real thing .In point of fact I want those guys to stick together and my uneasiness about them is their not sticking together .I expect them to belong to the class in which my mind has slotted them in the background of their own social or intellectual class.I know that the script is already written and precious little will evolve out of the transactions apart from the most banal events in the whole drama . But the burden is so much on the mind and why the hell am I responsible for this -is a certain doubt that wracks my mind.Actually I want my microcosm to exist the way I have designed it, not the way it will evolve through several unconnected events . That means the problem lies essentially with me , my microcosm or the reflection of the world within me. I want everything to fall into place and it suits me to have these guys to belong together in a strange silky bond of friendship

Coming back to the need to belong , it bothers me no end not to belong but at the same time it bothers me equally to belong where everybody belongs. I want everything to fall into a category purely for ontology purposes because if I come across a strange thing which does not fall into a class I feel my comprehension challenged.

The senses

Our perception is largely based upon the senses,their impressions forming the chief source for our experiences.The visual experiences form the major part of our experiences and since it is so a person who does not have a vision has necessarily to use the other senses to compensate for the lack of visual experiences. The question that crops up is whether you cannot do without  at least one of the senses helping you to garner experiences. Too often it is a combination of two or more sensory impressions that forms the experience. Let us examine if pleasure giving experiences in our life are only those drawn from sensory experiences. I find that apart from the direct sensory experiences which give us pleasure ,a recollecting of the earlier sensory experiences often gives the same exquisite experience as a sensory impression. Perhaps William Wordsworth’s definition of “poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility” falls into this kind. For me it is not exactly the sensory experiences recalled that give pleasure but only the haze around those experiences which were not necessarily pleasure giving at that time .Thus perfectly ordinary experiences of the olden times get recalled sometimes giving me a quality of experience truly enjoyable  and this does not happen in moments of tranquility alone but is triggered by a repeat occurrence of one of the sensory impressions of that event which is being recalled.A notable thing is the predominance of the olfactory impressions in the recalling.I have often found that a whiff of a fragrance associated with an  earlier experience in the remote past gives rise to an exquisite experience ,which was not necessarily a intensely joyous experience at that time.

I have often experienced the power of the sense of smell in recalling exquisite experiences. Some times ,I pass the streets lined with fragrant jasmines on the foot path and re-experience the beauty of an earlier experience which was not necessarily a pleasure giving experience at the time.It is the haze and the etherealness of the recalled experience that enhances your experience now .I had often roamed the busy shopping streets of Baroda aimlessly merely to take in the fragrances of the agarbattis(incense sticks) wafting from out of the shops . Now anywhere in the country when I re-experience fragrance from similar incense sticks I experience an intensity of pleasure which is fleeting no doubt but wonderful while it lasts.

Faith

 

These flowers would not talk to us

About their previous night’s growth pain

The pain of their petals unfolding

When the stars sprinkled dust on our roof

And the night’s queen whitely bloomed.

All the while our pleasures stuck to us

There was déjà vu in the night’s smell

The left over one of the previous day

That had mixed with tar and hot sun

Which had in turn mixed with bodies.

That night was hope and some angst

While nothing ever happened , it would.

 

 

 

 

We were talking about faith, which helped fight despair in the face of a crisis. While things have always happened in a most unexpected fashion we have always believed that this thing is not going to happen to us . Yes ,other things have happened to other people but we have a long unhappening future ahead. Against all these unhappening things there are a few things which our faith prompts us to believe ,will happen.

These are the miracles which ,we have always believed ,will happen.Somehow these miracles will happen . In yet another way of speaking, I don’t believe they will not happen

 

Miracles
The leaves felt disconnected on the sudden earth
The sky was broken in parts, teasing through
Tiny leaf-spaces full of squirrel tails and red ants
For some reason all our prayers were held up
On tiled roofs and history’s banyan treetops
We squatted on the cement steps, waiting for miracles
The neighborhood thatched hut sat immobile
The gold of its last summer turning to weary grey.
The grass walks tired of several days’ soundless feet
Between us arose questions of unspoken skepticism
Our eyes shone with wet anticipation behind their lids
In the evening the rain obliterated our foot-prints
It is as though we have never existed under the sky.

It is as though these things will never happen to us.

 

The scepticism here is only a fleeting thought. Actually ,deep within us we believe that miracles do take place and to that extent we are often willing to “suspend our disbelief” . Other wise we have to grapple with this problem of continually carrying transience with us like the Buddhist monk who, when asked if he has seen a pretty princess passing by in the jungle ,has said, ” I don’t know if it was a woman or it was a princess or a human being or an animal ; I saw some bones and some flesh passing by ” .

 

We do not carry such a feeling of transience with us because that strikes at the root of our existence whose continuance is assured only by the survival instinct ingrained in us. Actually we believe, deep within ,in our own immortality .As the belief goes against the human logic which tells us in unequivocal terms that whoever is born shall die ,as has been the emprical evidence so far, we invent our own miracles which enable a temporary suspension of the logic inherent in our thinking. Actually faith is a way of insuring ourselves against uncertainty which dogs us at every step.We do not know what lies ahead and the future is filled with too many possibilities. The birth is itself a massive accident being a product of millions of possibilities and sustaining the existence is a matter of innumerable parameters .Continued existence is subject to all these parameters even a single one of which can bring about cessation of existence.The unpredictability has to be fought in our own way ,not certainly with the puny logic system we have inherited from the human race. A more comfortable survival mechanism lies in the wiping off of what we have learnt from the logic system at least for the time being .

 

 

 

 

Dream

 

Dreams

Several flimsy images are played
Behind the opaqueness
Of my heavy-lidded eyes .

I am not at the centrestage.
They are nothing,not even existence
Just fragments of a fractured reality.

Today morning I got up with a dream-the dream which has been the most cohesive of all my dreams of the recent past . The dream was nothing extraordinary in terms of what it is supposed to convey (as is believed by many people) nor was it an entirely disagreeable thing ,kicking up a storm in my mind .I believe that the dream is a kind of pastiche of several images arising out of one’s own subconscious. What has kept me thinking was the amazing logical coherence that the dream possessed as though it is a well-scripted story which followed a carefully designed structure like a real life incident. In real life there is a chronological sequence or a logical sequence of cause-and-effect governing the different activities or events in a single episode .In a dream such a sequence does not exist as disparate images fuse loosely to form a single episode. There is no beginning, middle and leading -up to the end in a dream-script .In mime or play acting we impose such a structure on the entire “plot” as it unfolds because there the script imitates life. Effectively we cannot think of a story-line in a dream because the inherent structure in a real life incident or play assumes that consequences flow out of actions in a rather predictable fasion .The plot ,if you can call that ,flows in a dream with no predictable pattern and in an entirely linear fashion unlike in a play where there is a beginning ,growth,denouement and resolution.

This dream of mine ,absurd no doubt it was, followed an amazing unity of construction as though it had all been thought up in advance. Since there is no “human” intervention in the design ,(if any), of the dream it is difficult to understand how the dream can be so logically structured . Does this mean that the same human logic governing the actions flowing through the mind during wakefulness also operates during sleep ?

Shared consciousness

There is something here about our common pool of consciousness to which we keep adding from the time of the first human onwards . This fascinating concept can be explained with an analogy which has come to my mind several times when I have tried to grapple with the subject. Imagine each spacial existence consisting of the organic lives and shared consciousness of a generation of people as a single disk and although the spacial existences which can be imagined as horizontal planes overlap they can be imagined as piling on one another ,each of them representing one layer of horizontal existence. Now to explain the overlap as well as the continuity and building up on human thought we may imagine a hole at the centre of each of these discs through which a common thread is running . The thread is better understood as time-space continuum ,that is the vertical existence of the human race which explains the vast amount of collective conscious which keeps piling up on the passing of each generation.

Looked at this way time is also space .We can imagine ourselves as existing at the intersection of two planes of existence .Imagine the x-axis as horizontal space in which we exist and the y-axis  as vertical space which represents  the height of the pile of the spacial existences of different times.On the same logic we say that nobody who is born dies because while he disappears from the horizontal space he continues to exist in vertical space as a part of the shared consciousness.Here is a poem which says the same thing :

Existence

Here a talking man is sleeping,
His arms akimbo, feet in the air.
Then were wild gesticulations,
Sweat on brow, fire in the eyes
Now vacant and unconnected.
He no longer exists in space
But he had happened in time
Whatever begins shall remain.