WHAT IF we are nothing but memories?

Here I am sitting at my desk at work on december 30th with nothing to do. Since my company works for brazilian city governments and they dont work on holidays or on days around the holidays, I am left with nothing but ATS and a creative mind, so here it goes.

There are many theories about TIME and some people say that the Present the Past and the Future occur simultaneously. If that is so and if we will die in the future, that means we are already dead in the future. Wouldn't that make us living ghosts? Wouldn't we be nothing but memories? As far as we know, the Earth one day will be swallowed by the Sun's gravity... in a few billion years. But if past, present and future occur simultaneously the Earth has already been swallowed whole. So our planet wont exist and doesnt exist, making us nothing but a present memory from what isn't anymore...

Maybe I need more coffee...

EDIT: For some reason I thought Origins and Creationism was the best forum for this topic. Anyway, sorry if it is not. Will try to be more careful next time. Sometimes it is hard to find the right forum since there are so many...

[edit on 30-12-2009 by henriquefd]

Ok I'll bite.

Once a long time ago when I was a teenager, a friend told me this.

What if the year is 34000 AD? And "Earth" that we live in and see now, is a complete recreation of the Earth of history, and they set up everything in this "simulation" to recreate history in order to determine "what happened" when everything was destroyed.

Or something like that.

There is no way to know is there?

Hell, the real date could be 1960. There is no way to know for sure.

reply to post by henriquefd


I like this theory. We are memories flashing through the mind of the Universe

It depends on whether you think the Universe if finite or infinite, will things follow an infinite Big Bang-Big Crunch-Big Bang pattern? If so, and it's infinite, that means time is meaningless, making the Universe, in my eyes, one INFINITE INSTANT.

One moment of NOW spread out by our minds and perceived as time, but really there is no time, no past present of future, just that one instant. And in that one infinite instant every incarnation of the Universe exists.

So everything that can and everything that can't happen did, will and is happening in this infinite instant. Every single infinite possibility. I like to think of it as an Infinite Instant in which Nothing and Everything exist simultaneously.

But your theory on us being memories is interesting. In some ways we may be merely echoes of the Big Bang. Echoes of the Universe, like shadow puppets on the wall dancing for a few moments only to soon disappear. Or are we the memories of some all-powerful consciousness that has conjured us from it's imagination? In the end what are we if all we leave behind are memories that fade after a few generations. Will any of us be remembered in 100 years, 1000? And 1000 years in the eyes of the Universe, on a cosmic timescale, is like a nanosecond...

Much to be pondered

[edit on 30-12-2009 by Titen-Sxull]

reply to post by Titen-Sxull


Ooohh, that infinite instant idea is nice! That means more coffee to me!

reply to post by henriquefd


Also means that in some reality you're fabulously wealthy and married to a supermodel. It mandates every scenario you can imagine, indeed infinite realities, have to take place. So it's not just that in another Universe you might be married to that model but that it's automatically mandated by the infinite system.

I use it as cart blanch to go around saying all sorts of things about how I'm a king, a space pirate, etc.

Silliness aside though I'm glad you like the idea, I had that epiphany some years ago while in the throes of boredom doing dishes and it's been one of my favorites ever since.

reply to post by Titen-Sxull




hmmm... so in some reality im gonna get out of work in about half and hour and go home and find Cameron Diaz waiting for me....

yeap! im all for it nice thread! S&F for op , makes you wonder
Cheers

[edit on 30-12-2009 by zoomer72]

I once, in my boredom (seems to be the time to get some "thinkin'" done) pondered the possibility that we keep repeating our lives over and over.....but maybe with certain differences in outcomes as a result of making different decisions and going opposing directions in each different "telling" of the stories of our lives....I also thought once that we live the same life but as another player in the movie....for example...instead of being ME, the me I am today and in this reality....I would be my mother....or a co-worker.....or something like that....and after a certain amount of "livings" or incarnations...we get to go through a discussion group of sorts and figure out what we learned......
Oh well....crazy, I know...maybe I too have had too much coffee....
d(-_-)b

"Nothing BUT" memories doesn't make sense, of course: if all time exists at once, then everything "in" it EXISTS, all at once.

But I think I am familiar with the feeling you're describing.
You may want to have a look at my very first thread here, on ATS.

Time: looking back?

reply to post by Vanitas


Read your thread, Vanitas. That's one nice trip there, dude! I dont think I ahve experienced something like that, but I used ot have a LOT of deja vus. I also used ot have deja vu of a deja vu.

Life is crazy.

Originally posted by Cornczech
Oh well....crazy, I know...
d(-_-)b

It's not crazy.
Or if it is, then I am crazy, too.

I have been thinking more or less the same thing for a few years now, ever since I had that experience described in my thread.
(And there is a bit more to it, but I don't have the time or the inclination to go into that right now.)

Oh, and by the way: Friedrich Nietzsche also thought something very similar (only much more pessimistic).

Then again, he WAS crazy.











[edit on 30-12-2009 by Vanitas]

reply to post by henriquefd


I am glad you found it useful.
And I'd be interested in developing these thoughts further, either in my thread or this one, or both - it doesn't really matter.

What DOES matter, in my opinion, is that people who have actually something (constructive) to contribute participate in it.

How about this one...

Right now your mind and body are moments away from death, and what you are experiencing as reality is actually your life flashing before your eye. What you experience as de-ja-vu is actually your mind connecting experiences between your real life and your flashing life.

How about that, Ooooohhh....

Memories as "reenactings" (like 'to replay from a recording') is the best definition of the Biblical Hebrew word NePheSh "soul" if it can be thought of as either remembered by "GOD" or thus perfected ('mastered')...
the ancient idea was that we are all embued with the deposit of Lifes Breath from the Source and thus are remote sensors (but more than just observers actually interactive), and yet there is a ID aspect to it;

A human life's experienced "memories" shape the memory's capacity and by continuity they become the quality of Identity shaped.

In this is the real meaning of "Heaven" as Heavened/heaved-up (offered for glory) and "Hell" as Held/Helled-in (witheld for shame), these ideas have since been amped unto cranked up since the medieval idiom being a blissful paradise in the clouds and a dungeon of torture in a firepit.

First to be established (except how would we do that) is whether or not 'our' memories are ours at all ?

Next, are we moving 'into' the future with every nanonsecond --- or are we simply moving further and further into the past ?

Precognitive dreams first caused me to play with such thoughts

My precognitive dreams 'came true' in reality

To me, at the time, this meant that the future had already been determined by someone or something

Precognitive dreams implied to me that 'our' lives are not ours at all and that we are simply actors/puppets in someone/something's script or imagination or movie or computer-game or whatever

Didn't seem fair. If we have no say in what happens, our lives are meaningless

Which led me eventually to wonder if dreams/visions of the future are instead memories of the past ?

Deja vu, for example: when we experience it, are we seeing a future event miliseconds before it occurs here in reality ?

Or, instead, are we remembering the past event, miliseconds before we believe we're re-enacting it ?

Instead of being 'alive' in the here and now, are we simply echoes --- aftershocks, spreading ripples --- of the past ?

Is the mental condition known as 'depression' actually a realisation of all this ? Are depressed people actually more 'real' than others, insofar as they grasp our actual pointlessness and the meaningless of our 'echo' status ?

[edit on 6-2-2010 by Dock9]