Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Timelessness

How should we read Wittgenstein, Tractatus' proposition 6.4311?

Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

Especially the last sentence?

Specifically, I'm wondering what happens if we say that our life is identical to our visual field. Could that doubling suggest that the death we do not live through is not an event in any world at all?

I've finally figured out, it seems, why I can't imagine my death. That my visual field has no limits, means I cannot incrementally abstract visible objects from it, without leaving the visual field, there all the same; and life! But then, treating the end of life as a mathematical instant, is somehow equally prolematic to my imaging.

Take an analogy from topology: If a curve lies in a plane, and then emerges from it, the path in the plane is an open set, not a closed one. The 'point' at which the curve exits is not in the plane, although the limit point of the trajectory up to that point is. If you exit observable time at the point of death, your timeline similarly would not includ the point of departure, only points arbitrarily close to it. Modernized and put topologically, Kant's argument in the antinomy is basically that Time is an open subset of spacetime, and cannot have a closed preimage under a continuous map. – jobermark Jan 23 at 0:29

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