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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Author: unquarked   😊 😞
Number: of 84362 
Subject: Re: Not that again
Date: 12/05/25 1:56 PM
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I feel compelled to acknowledge awareness of an evolving experience of existence that includes perception of what appears to be an expanding spacetime environment.

Best scientific efforts to date indicate that this commonly observable spacetime environment is composed of about 5% matter comprised of increasingly complexifying nuclei, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, planetary systems and galaxies dispersed within a near empty cosmos thought by most physicists today to have originated in a singularity about 13.7 billion earth years ago.

At the most minute level of observation atomic matter is composed of persisting protons, neutrons and electrons that, in turn, consist of infinitesimal quarks ephemerally flickering in and out of existence below the limb of innate human perception. Physicists characterize this minuscule realm with quantum field theory and the macroscopically complexifying perceptual realm with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. It's noteworthy that within a spacetime context the atomic infrastructure of our material environment consists of infinitesimal quarks effervescing within a vast vacuum of erstwhile nothingness.

This all leads me to regard present perception of expanding spacetime evolution as eternally emergent within the infinite potential of erstwhile nothingness. That's tough to wrap one's head around. We know there's [b]not[/b] nothing or we wouldn't be here talking about it. Hence the reference to 'erstwhile nothingness'. This is surely epistemic, but it seems to me that the alternative to a vacuum of absolute nothingness is infinite potential (any and all possibilities), hosting all manner of organically evolving experience, inevitably including us. And, given the ephemerality of fundamental quarks underlying all of physical 'reality', experience is ubiquitously emergent now. Spacetime is a framework born of experience to make sense of it. To paraphrase Einstein, 'time is what keeps everything from happening at once'.

I see finite existence as organically evolving experience ubiquitously negotiating the infinite potential of erstwhile nothingness. Call it what you will. I prefer to avoid the term 'god' owing to its inclusion in widespread, largely antiquated, belief systems – a generic placeholder for absence of understanding.

Tom

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