Greenland sharks have existed for hundreds of millions of years through their ancient lineage while Saturn’s iconic rings are believed to have formed far more recently, possibly only 10 to 100 million years ago.
That means sharks were already swimming in Earth’s oceans long before Saturn wore its most famous feature.
The epic stories of history and prehistory that were never recorded and we will never know make me cry. Who lived the happiest life? Who endured the most pain? What was the most deserved comeuppance? Who got away with the most devious conspiracy? People have been around for hundreds of thousands and years, and these questions have answers, but we’ll never know them.
There’s a cool relationship between event and interpretation, which seems to dissolve the idea that any of those actually have answers.
If there were no life in the universe, what then exists? Is there still a meaningful distinction between a lake and a sky, when in fact the same molecules make up both the atmosphere and the lake? Without intelligent interpretation, doesn’t the difference of things become arbitrary because scale becomes arbitrary? Everything starts and ends with equilibrium — for example from the Singularity to Heat Death. What’s in between is just a noisy decomposition process.
To me, it seems like the act of interpretation is vital for anything to be meaningful in the first place. If you play that to its end, it should also mean the interpreting agent plays a role (via its process of interpretation) in assigning meaning to the arbitrary. In effect, it takes what is arbitrary and makes it non-arbitrary. It creates the foundation of knowledge.
So you could also argue, we didn’t actually miss anything. There was nothing of meaning occurring. Any meaning to past events would have to be assigned post-hoc, to an interpretation of past.
Or you could argue, the significance of a human-event is nonexistent if it were never interpreted. I.e., interpretation would have given it significance, though would have probably been phenomenologically interpreted as recognizing significance.
There were a lot of experiences that were experienced, but never recorded. If a tree falls in the woods, and 100 people witness it and die without speaking a word of it, does it make a sound? Yes!
Yeah, actually. Take the person who lived the most suffering. Let’s call them person X (pX).
It’s actually not fair to say nobody interpreted pX’s suffering, because pX did. However, I also notice that this isn’t solely dependent upon what the person “goes-through,” in a physical, social, or other external sense. This is true because we all suffer in different ways with varying degrees of tolerance or perception of the things which might cause us to suffer. For example, how would you compare the worst physical versus mental ways to suffer, loss of limb or loss of loved? It’s tough.
So, what I imagine you have to end up with is, what matters is how events are internalized. That’s where you gauge suffering. Yet also true then, what you’re left with here is the subjective interpretation of events by pX. It’s just their interpretation.
Yes! I want to know how bad the worst life was. Taking into account pain tolerance, perception of time, everything.
Doing a little bit of thinking here…
Do you think it’s possible to suffer while believing that you’re not suffering? Perhaps, to be in agony while wholly believing that you’re in euphoria?
No, it’s subjective. It would have to be dysphoric to be suffering.
Would you think it’s possible that someone could exist in permanent dysphoric state, born and until death with truly having experienced no state beyond that? Or would you perhaps think there must be contrast with nondysphoric states for the effect to truly be meaningful?
Those 100 people did interpret the tree falling, though.
Better might be: if a tree falls in the forest and only a protein was present (yes, a protein), did it make a sound? No — because sound doesn’t exist. Air ripples propagate and are interpreted as sound by ears, and there were no ears present to do the interpretation.
Similar if there was a human present. Did the tree make a sound? No — because the didn’t do anything different based on whether the human was present or not. The tree didn’t all of a sudden make anything. New information was interpreted, dare I say even curated, by the interpretation itself.