The reason I created this thread is about that eternal property of things. — elucid

There are no permanent temporary things but just the permanent eternal. What's thought of as a 'thing' is series of events, as a hub of relations, a process.

What is the basis of the semblance, you might ask. Nature is kind of a ‘possibility gestalt’, the whole world occurring anew each moment; however, the deeper reality from which the world arises, in each case, acts as a unity in the sense of an indivisible ‘potentiality’, which can perhaps realize itself in many possible ways, it not being a strict sum of the partial states. But… who really knows.

Launch yourself into deep space and see if you keep on going?

your simple poem above took me two or three reads before I really understood all 4 lines — ZhouBoTong

I had to first look up the Zhou Botong character on Wiki so that the poem would make a little bit of sense.

Suppose, you are something that exists at time 12 pm. Once it is 12:01 pm, the guy (you), which existed at 12 pm is non-existent now. — elucid

There are no objects that are identical with themselves over time, although it appears to us that the world consists of parts that have continued on from “a moment ago”, and thus still retain their identity in time. There are little deaths of parts as well as little births of parts happening all the time, as atoms coming and going, and more changes.

The self is thus not so rock solid as it seems.
The moment-to-moment changes differ from Death
Only in degree. In essence, they are identical,
Although at the opposite ends of the spectrum.

Crazy people trust their beliefs enough to jump off of buildings singing "I believe I can fly". — Sunnyside

I jumped off of the Empire State Building one time, and lived to tell about it because, luckily, I was only on the first step when I jumped. Geronimo!

do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. — Serving Zion

Yes, for there can be no 'taking' in what is freely given with no conditions.

So how would or should this play out for a physicalist or someone who thinks that the paranormal or the supernatural - as used as categories, not that they are named well - do not exist? IOW how should they attempt to find counter-evidence? — Coben

Someone, I think, Randi, offered a lot of money to whomever could show something, and though a lot of people tried no one showed anything.

Faith is an example of a belief held without knowledge, faith is often held only by personal experience and hope. — Sunnyside

Trust' is a step up from 'faith', meaning that you have at least seen something happen, such as morning dawning. 'Faith' adds zero to what is wanted.

I just have a general aversion to poetry. — ZhouBoTong

Zhou BoTong, trapped in a cave by a poem,
As by the writing on the wall stranded,
Was martially both right and left handed;
Such he slashed rhythms and rhymes from the stone.

It's a product of the brain and nervous system, — Swan

Consciousness/mind is a brain process, then, a product, with the objects in the mind also a product/result, making the mind to be a reflection of what's already been figured out a split-second ago, all this not allowing for the mind to figure anything on its own, and thus not a soul.

Hammurabi had a code of morality and rules in 1700 BC.

What manner of phenomenon is Sin?
An independent entity, akin
To noxious fumes, which God resolved to clear
By proxy, through his Son in human skin?

Or is it just a property, possessed
By people who have willfully transgressed?
If so, a scapegoat proves of no avail;
The remedy lies in the sinner’s breast.

“I love this detective school, Sherlock.”

“Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.”

“This class of opium is great, too!”

“High school, Watson.”

Sherlock Holmes — TheMadFool

Sherlock, the great logician, even as a baby just born in a dark cave could infer the universe from a grain of sand, and in the next moment derive the existence of Niagara Falls and the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans from a drop of water.

Do you find your stuff on the internet — Sunnyside

No; it's mine.

or just make it up as you go? — Sunnyside

Only sometimes.

Happy to see that you're not from the dark side.

Perhaps one may at first obey out of fear, but later get used to obeying, and even later reflect on what good it does, and then just be morally good about it. Kind of like how some discipline their children.

I just got a letter asking me to pay the toll for the Whitestone Bridge.

'tension' between 'chatter' on the one hand, and 'ineffability', — fresco

'Ineffability' is all there is for believers to push forward with, which doesn't really do anything, no matter how much babbling. Some, then, push back, such as against science. They want what they want, and so they repeat their wishes a zillion times in a zillion ways over and over again. That's human nature.

On and on they say of Who paved the way,
Then even tell the nature of such Theity,
And on and on they presume further upon,
In that support group: ‘On and On Anon’.

Laudable it certainly is, this is one of the most interesting discussions I have ever seen here or elsewhere. — Sunnyside

The reasoning spurred by investigations into 'God' even gives us the outline of The Theory of Everything:

TOE Bound

The philosophical strides leap and bound,
For the causelessness of All must be found,
Along with the unfree will that dooms a Mind;
It’s staggering: All goes round and round!

NDE tunnels of light and such can be explained by neurology, and OBE’s by a condition called sleep paralysis. They can also be induced, resulting in full blown episodes. Neither, then, are proof of a beyond, but of an altered brain state.

It is also the case that people of different religions see different religious figures during NDE’s, an indication that the phenomenon occurs within the mind, not without.

OBE’s are easily induced by drugs. The fact that there are receptor sites in the brain for such artificially produced chemicals means that there are naturally produced chemical in the brain that, under certain circumstances (the stress of an trauma or an accident, for example), can induce any or all of the experiences typically associated with an NDE or OBE. They are then nothing more than wild trips induced by the trauma of almost dying. Lack of oxygen also produces increased activity though disinhibition—mental modes that give rise to consciousness.

What about the experience of a tunnel in an NDE? Well, the visual cortex is on the back of the brain where information from the retina is processed. Lack of oxygen, plus drugs generated, can interfere with the normal rate of firing by nerve cells in this area. When this occurs ‘stripes’ of neuronal activity move across the visual cortex, which is interpreted by the brain as concentric rings or spirals. These spirals may be ‘seen’ as a tunnel.

We normally only see clearly only at about the size of a deck of cards held at arm’s length (Try looking just a little away and the clarity goes way down)—this is the center of the tunnel which is caused by neuronal stripes. I am not really dying to go down the tunnel…

Which Calendar is More Accurate: The Pope’s or Omar Khayyam’s?

Tropical year:                 365.242190 days
Jalil Calendar:               365.24219858156 days (Khayyam)
Gregorian Calendar:     365.2425 days
Justinian Calendar:       365.245 days


Austin's New Calendar



(The new last month of the year is ‘Remember’)

The last truly major revision to the calendar occurred over eight hundred years ago, when Omar Khayyàm realigned the Moslem calendar so that the seasons would arrive at the same time each year. Back then the year started in March, with the spring, the more logical time for a new year to start, I would say, since nature is new in the spring. It took Europe a long time to pick up on the changes. I suppose they got tired of celebrating Christmas in July-type weather or shoveling snow in the summertime.

Omar also revised his philosophic calendar to suit his mental outlook, by advocating that dead yesterday and unborn tomorrow be removed from the calendar; thus, he could truly live for Today. Later on, he refined this theory further by also removing dead and unborn minutes, so that he could live for the moment. My calendar revisions are more along those lines.

So, it’s high time for another major revision to the calendar, one that’s reflective of modern times, for the only improvements made during the last few hundred years have been to skip leap days in years that are evenly divisible by 400, and, more recently, to add a few insignificant leap-seconds every few year or so (”Wow, that seemed like a really long weekend!”).

First of all, I am eliminating the months of January (Bran-new-airy), February (Feb-buries), and March (March!) because, 1) They all contain cold and rotten weather, and 2) They totally lack holidays on which we could get time off with pay from work. It’s a heck of a long wait for a holiday between New Year’s Day and Memorial Day (we used to get Good Friday off, but now even that day has been eliminated, for it’s a religious-ethnic holiday and other religious-ethnic groups could then have proposed other such holidays, and so there’d be no time left for actual work days). Note: don’t worry, Valentine’s Day is being retained and moved elsewhere, as is New Year’s Day.

I am adding a whole new month, called Remember, which comes right after December. That way you will have some extra time to do all of the things that you meant or forgot to do during the year. Just think, there will be not as much need to say “Wait until next year!”.

My revised year starts in the spring, in April, which, as I’ve said, is much more appropriate, since it is a time for renewal and rebirth. By the way, it is easily proved that the year once started in spring by noting the Latin numbers from which the months got their modern names, i.e., 7-sept, 8-oct, 9-nov, 10-dec. We, of course, have now adopted these Latin numeric prefixes into general English, as well, for example, septuagenarian (age 70-80), octagon (8-sided), octave (8 musical degrees), novena (9 days of devotion), decimal (base 10), decimate (to kill one in ten), decathlon, decade, etc.

I also discovered that the old names of July and August were Quintus (Latin 5) and Sextus (Latin 6), but Julius and Augustus Caesar changed the names to suit their own. As for May, June, and April, those were the names of the Caesars’ girlfriends. So, anyway, what all this means is that since December used to be the tenth month (dec), the year obviously once started in March. I am generally readopting this policy, except that, since I’ve eliminated March, my revised year must now start in April, on April’s Fools Day, in fact, which will have to share the honor with New Year’s Day, an appropriate combination considering all of the foolish things that we do on New Year’s Eve.

So, since my year as so far constructed is only ten months long, I must now distribute the excess days that made up the two missing months. I would like to make all the months thirty days long, since people have problems with the current variations. So, I am introducing a new, unnumbered day into the week, called Funday, a day which does not have to be numbered or accounted for in any way whatsoever.

Funday occurs between Sunday and Monday. On Funday you can do as you please. Funday doesn’t even have a numerical date, and so it cannot possibly count against schedules, deadlines, or bills. Weekends, as we all know, have always been too short, but now, with the introduction of Funday, weekends become three days long.

I have, as have many others, already pioneered  the concept that led to Funday: I get up late on Saturday and Sunday to recover energy spent during the work week, and then, by Sunday night, being so well rested, I go to sleep quite late or sometimes not at all and stay up all night reading or doing you know what. Of course, I pay for all of this by being very tired on Monday, but naturally it’s much better to be tired on company time than on your own time, and who ever expects much of Monday anyway.

So, this is what led me to the idea of a Funday on which you could do whatever you want; you don’t even have to visit your relatives. Funday is totally dedicated to fun, and a new law will make it a crime for you to do anything else, although shopping and home chores are allowed if you whistle while you work or sing a happy song. Yes, people are so harried these days that we have to force them to enjoy life.

So, thanks to Funday there will be no more rush-rush or hectic feelings when the work week starts. People need no longer waste short weekends of great weather by doing silly and ridiculous things like going grocery shopping or doing the laundry.

Well, you might say, instead of lengthening the week why not just get people to do all their weekend chores during the week, but, of course, they can’t, since they’re so stressed out and exhausted when they get home from work that they just collapse and can’t even do the simplest thing.

Yes, yes, I know that this is simply a matter of attitude and style, but, believe me, personal changes, even such common sense changes, seem to take huge amounts of effort; whereas, I can simply solve the problem more easily with the introduction of Funday.

But, ten months of thirty numbered days plus five undated Fundays each month equals only 350 days, so there are still fifteen more days that must be dispersed into the new calendar. I am solving this by adding a special summer and winter festival period of seven days each, the winter festival being no more really than a re-establishment of the old Saturnalian pagan festival held in olden times, before the Christians put a damper on it. This winter festival is added between Christmas and New Year’s Day so that we can have a vacation from our vacation of visiting relatives and feasting and pigging out. The summer festival is inserted between July and August, and centers around the true midsummer’s day. Naturally these festivals do not count against anyone’s vacation time.

There are just a few minor alterations left. There is still one day left to be accounted for, and I am inserting it between May and June as Valentines Day. I am removing a day from June, so that the saying “Nothing is so rare as a day in June” will actually be true. In the old calendar, a day in February was 4.2% more rare than a day of June, but, of course, February is gone now. The day removed from June will be called World Day. On this day we should try to get all the world’s peoples to coexist in perfect harmony. This day occurs between June and July. I am moving the Fourth of July holiday to the first Monday in July so that we will have yet another extra long weekend.

Monday mornings and Friday afternoons are to be designated as home/work transition adjustment-recovery periods, during which one need not be present at work, thus reducing the work week to only four days!

Yes, the computer age has arrived and it’s time that we reaped its benefits and gained more leisure time, for this was the promise of the computer age: that computers would free us, so why do I feel like they have become our masters?

Furthermore, the nebulous day called Someday is being removed from the calendar and from everyday conversation, because what it really meant was “Noneday”, as in “Someday we’ll go out to lunch”.

Also, just as a matter of information, note that the days of the week were named after the sun, the moon, and all of the known planets of the time, although some of the days derive their names from French or Latin: Sunday (sun), Monday (moon), Tuesday (Mardi in French, or Mars), Wednesday (Mercredi, or Mercury in French), Thursday (Jeudi in French, or Jupiter), Friday (Vendredi in French for Venus), Saturday (Saturn). However, this still leaves Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune unrepresented, but I’ll probably leave those for my next revision.

My new names for the days of the week are: Onesday, Twosday, Wedsday, Thirstday, Fryday, Satday, Sundae, and Funday, and are for, respectively, self, relationships, marrieds, drinking, frying fish, sitting around, ice cream and fudge, and fun.

Or, we could just forget all of these revisions and go back to Omar’s great idea about having a calendar with only one day on it: Today.

The word "particle" is ambiguous. — TheMadFool

A particle, as a field quantum, is spread out, as kind of a lump.

Definitely causeless, but it may be that something that lacks a cause can, in some sense, also be said to be its own cause. — Bartricks

Either way, where/when does it get its information?

But we - the conscious things - are not physical things. — Bartricks

I, as the conscious thing, am my own cause, or causeless?

There's no delay to consciousness and I doubt you've read the Libet article. — Bartricks

So, the speed of light is infinite and any processing time is infinitely fast? OK. Time to go mental.

Address the argument. — Bartricks

Hello argument!

Less powerfully supported, by powerfully supported nevertheless, is this premise: — Bartricks

Now, really, who's going to notice a slight tape-like delay to consciousness?

But we can be informed by brain-consciousness correlation experiments and neurology…

Therefore we are not physical things. — Bartricks

Shush… they're listening. Too late; here come the white coats; we're all mental!

A change is always a song sung by the same, it's an event performed by something which is the same. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes, it's like transmutation or topological formation; whatever transmutes can return to its previous form. The Eterne remains, always, conserved, as the only permanence, all else being so temporary that it never stays as anything particular even for an instant, for the Eterne transmutes continually.

Quantum mechanics is probabilistically deterministic. This means there is not one discrete possible outcome; rather, there is a well-defined probabilistic distribution of possible outcomes. — Relativist

That's a good way of putting it, for the probabilities add to 1, this being what is called 'unitary'.

it could be you know
something against the flow — TheMadFool

Good poem!

Who's the scribe of my slab written upon?
I ask myself whether I’m stylus or slate,
Or both the dancer and the danced upon?

Belief is necessarily not a virtue over consciously knowing what not to believe. and/or is this statement already obvious enough to grant as self-evident? — A Gnostic Agnostic

It's not good to have or state a belief when the object isn't known to be so, as it might ingrain itself, as well as that others might pick up on it as true, especially concerning invisible realms proposed.

Note also that in general what many believe can become their 'goods', in both of its meanings, prompting opposing beliefs to be labeled as 'bad' or 'evil'. That there even are opposing beliefs out there can seem to some to lessen the credibility of their own, and then might wish to wipe out the other believers, as nonsensical as that would be.

How long did it take to originate? — ZhouBoTong

It was fast, for there are sites on the internet for making anagrams.

something existent always existent, — elucid

The Block Universe?

Something existent is never the same as something non-existent. Therefore, something existent is something that is never non-existent. — elucid

Since non-existence can never be productive, much less be, Existence is eternal, as ever, and so it is not anything in particular, as random, given no possible inputs to it—that has no beginning, and so Existence is Everything, although about as unmeaningful as a Library of Babel of all possible books.

Sin is fun's evil twin.

If there is any logic that can be constructed — A Gnostic Agnostic

Never mind belief and the virtue of it or not, but rather let us get to a logic that undermines a belief in 'God'. Not a proof, mind you, but an undermining via probability, reason, and logic:

Probability for no ‘God’

0. Note: It is not a factor herein that the Biblical and thus necessarily fundamentalist ‘God’ has been demolished by evolutionary science and self-contradiction, for it still remains to size up what’s left.

1. All that we see goes from the simplest to the composite to the complex to the more complex, where we exist, which will continue into the future, where we can expect being higher than ourselves to become. The unlikely polar opposite of this is an ultra complex system of mind of a Designer 'God' being First as Fundamental, but systems have parts, this totally going against the fundamental arts.

2. (1) gets worse, given that there can be no input for any specific direction going into the Fundamental Eterne—the basis of all, this bedrock having to be causeless, having random effects, like those shown in quantum mechanics.

3. So, (2) indicates that there is no ultimate meaning, not that a built-in meaning would be great, for it would be restrictive, but at least, as ‘liberating’, there’s anything and everything possible that could become from the basic eternal state of not anything in particular—our present Earthly life path being one that is being lived now after 13.57 billion years, much of which can be accounted for.

4. On top of the preceding unlikelihoods, and given that obviously that no Designer made everything instantly, it is unlikely that all eventualities could have been foreseen by a Deity in starting a universe suitable for life. It more seems like we were fine-tuned to the Earth.

5. It’s more OK if the ‘God’ Deity is like a scientist who throws a bunch of stuff together that is balanced and energetically reactive enough but not too much so that it races along too fast, etc., but, again, really, what is a fully formed person-like being doing sitting around beforehand, this also being all the more of a quandary that enlarges the question rather than answering it. If life has to come from a Larger Life, then a regress ensues, making this not to be a good template. As for a Deity trying to put workable stuff together, this is much like the idea of a multiverse.

6. Even worse, existence has no alternative, given that nonexistence has no being as a source and that there is indeed something, and so existence is mandatory, there not being any choice to it. It's a given.

7. We see that the One of Totality continually transitions/transmutes, never being able to remain as anything particular, which matches its nature supposed due to no information being able to come into the Eternal in the first place that never was, for the One Fundamental Eterne has to be ungenerated and deathless.

8. Aside from the trivial definition of free will being that without coercion, that the will is free to operate, and the useless definition of the harmful random will equaling ‘freedom’, the deeper notion of ‘free’ as being original and free of the brain will is of a currency never being able to be stated and cashed in on, leaving ‘determined’ to continue to be the opposite of ‘undetermined’.

While eternalism can’t yet be told apart from presentism, the message from both is of a transient ‘now’, whether pre-determined or determined as it goes along. All hope is crushed, both for us and the Great Wheel having any potency. This is the great humility; all hubris is gone.

It is enough, then, that we have the benefit of experiencing and living life well, sometimes, more so given this modern age, although still with sweat, tears, and aversive substrates of emotions that those of the future might consider to be barbaric.

It doesn’t seem like a smart God’s world, and so fundamentalist literalist Biblical ‘reasons’ cannot apply here, for those went away already. The pride of being special and deserving of reward and avoiding punishment is a nice wish, though, for us electro-chemical-bio organisms who appear be be as organic as anything else that grows in nature.

9. God’s operations, curiously restricted to be the same as nature’s has us not being able to tell them apart from nature's, but which is more likely, the natural or the supernatural? Earth is where it ought to be, in the Goldilocks zone, not impossibly out near Neptune. And why must there be a distinct transcendent, immaterial, intangible, super realm when it would still have to give and take energy in the physical material language, talking its talk and walking its walk?

10. So, sit on a fence and go to church half the time or estimate the probability either way; there can be no blame for not knowing what can’t be shown for sure.

Let us have wine, lovers, song, and laughter—
Water, chastity, prayer the day after.
Such we’ll alternate the rest of our days—
Thus, on the average, we’ll make Hereafter!

idol worshipers — A Gnostic Agnostic

The idol house is as the mosque, a shrine.
And chime of striking bells service divine;
Gueber’s belt, church and rosary and cross,
Each is in truth of worshiping a sign.

I don’t much mind what Idol they adore,
Nor what structures all the more they implore;
But, when they state it all as truth and fact,
This misleads, at best, and’s dishonest more!

The ancients found themselves here of nowhere,
Yet to fathom earth, fire, water, and air,
Asking why life was not square, as unfair,
So invented the Bad Role Model’s Care.

They looked unto their calamities,
Their powerful rulers and enemies,
Toward their olden family structure’s way,
Of strict father, and mother with no say.

The Christian concept of reward and punishment
Handed out by an omnipotent, omniscient God,
Is derivative of the family experience,
The child and parent, a conception of our world.

This Father Notion they based on themselves,
As the best answer that was ever delved:
The demanding Male Mind who was called ‘God’,
An idea for some to this day, well trod.

Answers were needed for them to persist:
They extended the Notion with more myths
And legends into lore layered upon,
Inventing all the scrolls of scripture on.

‘God’ brought both fear and comfort in those days,
Making people better through fearsome ways,
Although worse for some—the unchosen tribes,
Protecting their notions, as taught by scribes.

A wasteland of superstition plod,
Instantiates a meaning for ‘God’.
Emotion e’er sets up a firm blockade
When thoughts fired more build a stockade.

A hundred trillion stars and countless shores
Were built to light their universal nights explored;
Forty million other lower species too, the All-Might
Placed about our world, merely for their delight!

A trillion lights shine through, of depths of the deep,
Stars afire, with us the souls from their keep.
Man oft spouts the ‘truth’ of a Creator,
As did proto-men, near the equator.

Scrolled into scripture, ‘God’ brought rapture,
Enough for sad hearts to wholly capture;
Yet, there can’t be First Complexity’s shove,
As there wasn’t such to make the Thing of.

There were various modifications,
Yet the Creator concept remained one;
But natural understandings progressed,
Leaping ahead of the dogmatical rest.

Thousands of years came to pass, in stories,
But then we solved much of the mystery,
Irrefutable now, as gone beyond—
Utterly not of God’s magical wand.

The basis is forever, no creation—
Energy being the primest potion,
And Entirety is seen that it can be
No way but than it is, eternally.

Claims of Revelation in Genesis
Of all of Nature’s species made, as is,
Have been demolished, obliterated,
By evolution and data liberated.

Nature finds no requirement for a ‘God’,
Growth naturally forming in the sod.
The organic ‘comes of the mud and slime,
Formed within billions of years of sweet time.

Not sure what you mean there — enqramot

It's 'merely' a summary of the derivation of the ultimate Theory of Everything, which would conclude with Totality/Existence being causeless. Yes, it's simple and almost boring, as not what was expected, but still the answer to the most often asked question.

Really? Wikipedia says they have a statue of him in Iran — TheMadFool

Yes, and a kind of a shrine/memorial, too. It's paradoxical or perhaps it's more for his other work.

What do you think the Rubaiyat, the only work of Khayyam I'm familiar with in a very superficial way, is about? — TheMadFool

It's about the human condition, pleasure, anti-Allah, and the suppression of reason and philosophy by the Islamics near and in 11th century Persia. It's the greatest poem in history in the exquisite form of it as transmogrified by Edward Fitzgerald in 115 quatrains, as the story of a day/life. See the first three videos for the quatrains.

Mid Afternoon at the OK Club—Part 2—On the ‘Now’



Ruby Yacht comes over to my table and introduces herself, “Ruby I am, as the color of wine, and I just sailed through the front door.”

“Happy to meet you; have a seat. Is it still snowing?”

“Yes, and it’s sticking, and it’s windy, and getting darker earlier now; but, at least we gained an hour by setting our clocks back.”

The weed flowers came, marking autumn’s track,
The blossoms that almost brought the spring back,
But winter’s white death wrap was drawn over,
Smothering the earth’s last warm sweet odour. 

Such then comes the end of summer’s dreams,
The blanching of the grassy banks of streams,
But all fragrances the elves remember
Through their sleep during the winter embers. 

“Oh, I’ll set mine back now; that will give us an hour!”

“It’s about time, and speaking of time, what makes for time’s rate of change, anyway?”

“It likely has to with how quickly the smallest monads at the Planck level can change, this rippling upward, which makes for information arriving at the finite speed of light, or less, depending on what else goes through changes higher and higher up, which then informs us, after going through our senses and brains.”

“So, we live behind the times?”

“Yes, slightly behind, from light's finite speed, but more so because the subconscious brain takes from 300-500 milliseconds to to do its neuronal analysis that culminates in conscious qualia as a unified result, along with continuity.”

“So, wow, that's a lot more behind; we live in the past.”

“Yes, it’s like a tape-delayed broadcast of the game of life, but our brains are fairly quick, due to parallel processing by different modules, such as example for vision for color, texture, intensity, direction, edges, semblances to memory objects, cross-associations, and much more.”

“But we still call our present as the ‘now’, as close enough?”

“Sure, as a psychological version of ‘now’, or whatever, it seeming to us what it always did, regardless of our scientific insight.”

“If in traffic we change lanes and pull in just behind a car, it’s lucky that the car is really slightly ahead of where we think it is.”

“Yes, true, but our own car is also slightly ahead of where we think it is. It evens out.”

“And if we switch lanes and pull in just ahead of a car?”

“That’s a bit more dangerous, maybe, but at least our car is really still a bit ahead of where we think it is.”

“I’m a would-be philosopher, Austin.”

“Good, and Omar’s ‘now’ can best be taken as enjoying and savoring the moment, never ignoring it or ruining it by too many mostly needless worries about the future fogging and clouding the present, even the virtual present past that we talked about not withstanding.”

“The other implication is that the universe does us!”

“Yes, you’ve hit on one of the more seemingly unpleasant truths at first, until we realize and accept that things could be no other way. Some people hate that one, regardless.”

“If I look at my watch at any given second, it stands to reason that the longest we’ll have to wait for the seconds digit to change with be one second, but, …”

“Sometimes 1.5 seconds will pass before the digit changes.”

“Aha, you’re up on this!”

“I’ve explored the ‘now’.”

“Wonderful.”

“In our ‘Hall of Now’, only the present tense can be spoken. I’ve been practicing this in all of these Club posts.”

“You did? I mean, you do?”

“Yes, I do."

"That's the longest sentence in the English language!"

"Ha, yes, marriage is not a word; it's a sentence."

"Twenty years to life!"

"A movie about time’s two possible modes is playing in the Hall now, with some Omar quotes at the end; it's called ‘Now Here — No Where’.”

“Ah, both of the same letters in a row. Or could be ‘Every Now — All Where’.”

“Yes, either. For all our science, we still don’t know time’s mode, whether there’s only now, with the past gone and the future not yet, per our intuition, called Presentism, or whether the past, now, and the future all exist right now and always, eternally, per Einstein and Parmenides and their Block Universe, called Eternalism. For all purposes, we're stuck in the present, either way, not being able to jump into the future or the past even if there is a long world-line along which we're traveling through the Block.”

?
There’s naught else but lone, resultant Nows.
No matter how one tries to shake from boughs
The fruits of time’s truth from the Tree of Knows,
Computation has not yet made the morrows.