Johnny Cochran is dead and Jerry Falwell is dying. So it goes. Love live Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson. And the crowd went wild.

I'll bet Johnny Cochran shows up alive a couple of months from now, talking about how he proved to the Almighty that the brain tumor that killed him unfairly targeted him because he was black.

Tuesday night is my least favorite night of the week at work. We sell large 1-topping pizzas for $4.99 on Tuesday nights. I made something in the neighborhood of 600 pizzas tonight. Actually, it went relatively well...I ran a decent shift and it only took me two hours to shut down the store after close--at times it has taken four hours or more.

Customers are quite wonderful little creatures. "I was told on the phone it would be 15-20 minutes! I got here twenty minutes later and was told it would be another five minutes! What's your name?! I want to talk to the manager! You are the manager!?!? Well, I've never met anyone so rude! What's your name? Give me your supervisor's phone number! I'm too fat and southern to have to stand here for an extra five minutes to wait for my 1500 calorie order!"

It can be hard to recognize the infinite nature of the individual when you deal with these type of people on an everyday basis. I'd be willing to bet that food service produces more solipsists than any other industry, and not because those in the business are necessarily less intelligent--rather, it is almost impossible to believe that a lot of our customers could possibly exist and function in the world.

It occured to me as I re-read yesterday's post that I should probably outline my theory of time/life before continuing on with the "all possible worlds" theory, since the latter is kind of given rise to by the former. That said...

Imagine for a moment that the conception of time that we all have drilled into our brain by the process of being alive on this planet is completely wrong. Life on this planet moves in a linear direction----->forward. We are born, we grow up, we get old, we die. So it goes. The sun rises, the sun sets, the earth turns, the tides roll. Time necessarily moves forward in this world--the only way we can properly, logically experience life is to do so in this linear manner. The problem is that time cannot be thought of as infinite in this way--it is merely indefinite. (This terminology is, I believe, somewhat similar to what Spinoza, whose thought was propelled by Descartes, had to say, though I'm using it to other ends. (Just a sidebar: one of my philosophy teachers described Spinoza as a "stealthy Jew."))

Those of you whom I have spoken to about this sort of thing before may remember me talking about a "finite circle of infinity." The following is kind of what I mean by that.

Here is what I mean by the above (and where you might take issue with me): the infinite, in order to be so, must be finite in some loose sense. Otherwise, we cannot say that it is truly infinite, but only indefinite. This is more than mere semantics. Imagine a rope that you are following along through space. You can see it going on for as far as you can see in front of you and behind you. As far as you can tell, it might go on forever--but you'll never know. All you can say about this length of rope is that it goes on indefinitely. Someone might tell you that this rope goes on forever, but it takes a leap of faith for you to believe it--and even if you do believe it, you haven't said a thing about the rope itself. All you have said is what you believe, which exists independent of the nature of the rope. O.K....

Now, imagine another length of rope in outer space. This rope you are following makes a complete loop around Venus, Mars, Earth, and our moon. After a couple of trips around, you can make certain assumptions about this rope, namely: it loops around a few planets, it is finite in some sense in that it does not expand outwardly forever, or go on linearally forever. Another thing that you can definitely say about the rope, like any circle, is that it has no beginning and no end. This is a factual claim that you could not ever make about the length of rope in the previous example. The rope is therefore infinite in some very real sense. It exists beyond the linear plane, and it is not indefinite.

My claim is that this is the actual nature of time, instead of the linear way we conceive it on this planet. Time is a constant happening, something infinite, not indefinite. When people talk about existing outside of time, they're actually talking about existing in my conception of it, instead of the typical earthbound prescripted perception. When you accept my version of time, you realize that nothing could actually exist outside of it--it is life. In order for us to be infinite beings, we must exist all at once. By this I mean that if there is something about us that is infinite, it must all already be complete, or else it would go on linearally, indefinitely. I think this is clear...if not, tell me.

So. Each life is a finite circle of infinity. Each interpersonal relationship/interaction we have is a spot on our finite circle of infinity that overlaps or intercuts with someone else's. (Solipsism, as it turns out, might not be so far from the truth, and certainly not the butt of a joke as it commonly is.) We experience life linearally because that is how are phsyical bodies are best able to cope with time...our brains may well be the limiting factor keeping us grounded in linear time.

But Bob, doesn't this eliminate free will? Doesn't your claim that all instances of time are condensed into some sort of circle that we simply follow around do away with the possibility that we can change a thing about our lives? If life isn't linear, if we could step outside of it somehow and look at it as "infinite" in your terms, doesn't that mean that everything is predestined?

Umm. No. Think about a window. This window has in it a sheet of glass that will never be broken. This doesn't mean that the glass is unbreakable...it simply means that the glass will never be in the state of being broken. Just because you've already made the decision doesn't mean you couldn't have made another decision...you just didn't. Maybe I could explain this further, but right now I really don't want to. This has been much longer than I originally anticipated.

More to come....Comments are welcome! That's the whole point!

A message to the marginalized masses...

I am quite bad at communicating with the people I care about. That is not to say that when I actually talk to you people out there that I am not able to have intelligent and meaningful social interaction, but rather to say that I rarely place phone calls and never, under any circumstances, do I compose e-mail. Sorry. I have thought a lot about sending out an e-mail to family and friends on a monthly basis, but I'm pretty sure I would not keep up with it. But maybe it will work out with this blog thing. Probably not, though.

Things are going pretty well for me right now, in general. I expect to graduate from the University of Georgia in December of this year with perhaps the most practically inapplicable undergraduate degree this side of Recreation and Leisure Studies -- a bachelor's in philosophy. But that's O.K., because I also have an exciting career in the fastest growing sector of the U.S. economy -- food service.

But now to the meat of this post...reading through Uncle Gil's blog, it seems to me that most of what he's talking about is solved by the theory of all possible worlds. As far as I can tell, the theory of all possible worlds is the most likely scenario to be the case if you take the traditional notion of the Creator out of your personal philosophy. Basically it says this: every world that could exist does, in fact, exist. All possibilities are played out, all potential scenarios come to fruition. We just happen to be the product of one particular possible world.

More on why this doesn't eliminate free will, and how this plays into my theory of subjective-objectivity and the infinite nature of the individual later. Right now, it is time for bed.

Run!!! It's a bobblog!

Only the ancients know whether or not i will ever be posting here, and whether or not i will ever use the SHIFT KEY when i do so. For the record, my non-capitalization of the first person pronoun "i" is not an artistic decision, as in crappy seventh grade poetry. Rather, it is all the fault of Bill Gates and his Microsoft Word, for he has been capitalizing my "i"s for me for well over a decade.

This page has been created solely because I (!!!) would like to be able to respond to my Uncle's posts over at his blog, The Heart of Service (http://heartofservice.blogspot.com). If anything comes of this at all it will likely be mindless ramblings about my life, my patchwork philosophy, society at large and at small, my country, and my Atlanta Braves. I'll try to keep it as clean as possible, but then again i am but a product of my mother and father, and mom's got a mouth on her.

Thanks for stopping in, and i'll try to keep up with this on a fairly regular basis.