Perspective

A Greek soldier fires an arrow at a target. It travels halfway there. From that point, it travels halfway again, and so on and so forth. How does it ever hit the target if it's continuously travelling halfway there?

This question, first posed by Zeno of Elea, sat around for a long time. About a couple of thousand-year periods passed by before it was properly accepted as a mathematically resolved issue, even though the solution was there the whole time and not particularly troubling for the scores of millions of people who heard of and conceptualized the shooting of arrows at targets (not to mention the many fewer who were actually doing it). Of course, you already know the answer...

It just does. It's not a satisfying answer, when expressed in English, and the mathematical reasoning of recognizing the convergence of the infinite sum of 2-n as a limit toward which an infinity is approached is sort of just another way to say that. Leibniz and Newton independently demonstrated a basis for this kind of thinking, at around the same time, though, so it seems like a little bit of an historical inevitability that we were ready to get over the problem and move on, like an arrow that reaches its target halfway.

Who else had the solution? Everybody. You did. I did. It's right there. Has someone said this before? Probably. So did Newton invent The Calculus which resolves the paradox? Sure. Did Leibniz? Yuppers. Did Zeno already know and was just being a provocateur for asking it in the first place? Pretty likely. But it's a question that really grabs your ear and refuses to let go, and you'd have to be some sort of tyrant to demand that it be ignored.

Infinity. It's a problem. If it exists, how could we know for certain? We figure it must, but at the same time, we can't prove it. There's a reason for this: proving that infinity exists is as paradoxical as Zeno's arrow, which shows both that infinity exists between any two instances and that motion toward anything is an illusion. You can't prove otherwise... but you can *experience* otherwise.

Here's a question: if you started randomly banging at the keyboard and kept going for eternity, what would you write?

The answer: everything.

Everything possible to have ever been written would you type. Because it's eternity. Of course, it's a problem to conflate eternity and infinity, because the former is really just the application of the concept of the latter to time, and there are really different types of infinities (convergent, divergent, countable, uncountable), but the idea is that the solution to that old chestnut about the monkeys and the typewriters and Hamlet is not only an affirmative, but that literally everything possible to be written will be written.

And it's already been written: https://libraryofbabel.info/

The monkeys are numbers, and the letters can be represented that way, and therefore there's an algorithm which can calculate everything able to be written within 3200 characters, representing each segment thereof by a series of references to their position within a structure of hexagonal shelves of books with a set number of pages and lines per page (reading the short story on which it is based, accessible from the above hyperlink, may be helpful, but may not be either). Since any written message can be broken down into segments of 3200 characters, everything is there than can be communicated in English.

But here's the killer paradox: you will die. You can understand infinity and eternity at this moment, and you are experiencing it presently, but the moment you draw a limit around that through numbers or representation, or attempt to communicate your experience of it to another, then you instantiate a boundary wherein you cannot overcome the inability to transmit this information in a way sufficient to supersede your own inability to communicate it in linear time.

Good thing it's written, then, isn't it?

There's a lot of talk about ego-death, and what it means and how it's a step toward overcoming the constraints of a pedantic existence, and people seek drugs to trigger it and meditation to foment it, and nobody can qualify when and how, exactly, it happens. But here's the truth that you need no authority to accept, because it's something you already know: all ego is a construction whose boundaries define your physical death.

When you perceive your self as a body, you allow yourself to die. When you construct your influence as that which you can control directly around you, you limit it on a fundamental level to the dimension in which you have an effect. When you accept the narrative of being as wholly consisting of stimulus and response, you end the experience of infinity and, in that moment, you die.

You die every day. You die every moment. You just died reading that sentence because you imagined yourself doing the thing it said, and thus experienced it.

You are imagining yourself at every moment.

Of course, there's a caveat. Your imagination of yourself is limited to your memory of the possible points of agency and influence you have maintained as a consistent narrative thread that leads to this moment.

If the monkeys type Hamlet, then everything that can be experienced by a human body will be, given a long enough timeline.

There is a phenomenological limit to this, because human bodies have necessary boundaries that are determined by physical laws of the universe which prevent them from affecting their environment beyond a certain degree.

No matter how many times you rewind and play the tape, there's very little chance that you will be a god-like emperor, whose every whim is considered as an important item to consider. No matter how many times you fast-forward and imagine it, there will be some part of you that desires to exist in such a state.

This is the human condition - or at least part of it.

We learn the limits of our physical bodies very early, and soon determine that our influence over others reaches far beyond the grasp that our meager hands can reach.

Our existence is lived through our communication with our environment, and when no others share that environment, it becomes a self-reflection.

We remember together, and we remember alone.

When uncontested by the voice of the other, we tell ourselves the story of our perspective.

Our crises are borne from the fact that the boundaries of the effects of our actions extend beyond the limits of our bodies.

We are never alone.

We are always alone.

The tension between these simultaneous truths forms a paradox worthy of Zeno.