Logic Beach: Part I

by Exurb1a

Is the universe fundamentally logical, or isn't it? Is physics an expression of a deeply rooted necessary geometry that could be deduced from first principles?

Liu Cixin's trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past.

I reckon love is really confirmed in disgust. There comes a moment when the apple of your eye does something just absolutely hideous; rolls over to kiss you in the morning with Satan’s breath, says something a little mean about you at a party while you're standing right there, leaves the stench of shit in the bathroom unsuspectingly. And that is when love is either born or stillborn. The propagandised lover you’ve been sleeping

with suddenly turns into a real, shitting person. In that moment you either plot a path out of the arrangement or give yourself over completely.

What a lovely thing utopia is when you were too young to remember the horror that came with it.

This is how people are convinced by new ideas, I decided. Not with logic and decent arguments, but by someone being pretty and compelling enough, or sufficiently older than you, or smarter, or wiser. What dumb monkeys we all still are, huh.

If someone told you about heaven, wouldn’t you want to go?

That which is abandoned in the name of efficiency was often an essential part after all.'”

You told me once that all of time was ‘simultaneous’, mathematically speaking, that as far as the universe was concerned, everything was happening all at once.

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

“Well, imagine it like this. If you knew every position of every atom and all of their velocities, you could predict where they’d all go, couldn’t you?” “Isn't that impossible, to know both at the same time?”

In fact this is where we get the term solip, from solipsist, or one who believes the world and the entities within it are merely delusions constructed by their own mind.

Autonomy is only true autonomy when you allow others to go in directions you don’t condone. All else is just ethical masturbation.”

Is that what this is all about? Darting from thing to thing, experience to experience, like a thirsty beggar getting a sip of water here and there and still always coming away never quite fully quenched. What an awful game. Did I have my daughter for this? – to merely feel whole? Was there ever any other motivation in the history of procreation? It isn't a selfless act at all. How can one sacrifice themselves for a thing which doesn't yet exist? It's selfish. It's fucking selfish,

“What really interests me,” Einstein said once, “is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.”

What about life? Imagine if the days of your life were all fantastic. Imagine if there wasn't a single drop of boredom or despair, every ice cream delicious, every fuck explosive. They call

that paradise. In fact the word is hell. The world would cease to mean anything. It would all be fantastic, and as a result none of it would be fantastic.