Does the future influence the present?
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"The greatest weight --
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you:
'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?
Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine'?
If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you" (The Gay Science, 341).
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Alan wrote: A related (to the video above on infinity) idea is Nietzsche's Thought Experiment: The Eternal Return of the Same.
"The greatest weight --
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you:
'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?
Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine'?
If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you" (The Gay Science, 341).
I wonder, does this mean that the mind can not be new as well? That would mean that we experience our minding (theoretically) the same to. It would result in an new experience every time without knowing it? But how can we know that we have a new feel of experience within the same experience of repeating due to the demons doing? What if we do not know we do repeat? How could that be possible? What if..
I think that the demon explains that it is not our life memory that matters. But the way how we deal with it?
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