John Brodix Merryman Jr.
2 min readMar 18, 2024

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The dialectic of the absolute is the infinite.

The frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler is closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The unmoving void of absolute zero. Zero to infinity.

Galaxies are the feedback between the energy radiating toward infinity, as the structure coalesces toward equilibrium. Both entropic.

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface the body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present going past to future, but the reality is activity and the resulting change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated coalesce and dissolve, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, as the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information and the circulation system is feedback in the middle.

So the flaw is to assume there is some omniscient omniscience, some total modeling or map of the information, because the maps and models break down over infinity and disappear at zero.

When we extract signals from the noise, it is what resonates and synchronizes with prior beliefs, maps, models. Yet if too much information/energy is included, the signal is lost back in the noise. Whiteout.

Different maps can be used to clarify different aspects of the same territory. Thus seem in conflict. Much as different peoples will have different histories of the same events and places.

Knowledge is information, wisdom is editing.

The fallacy of monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the core of every culture are ideals. The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. The light shining through and animating the film, than the narratives playing out on it.

Morality is not an absolute, because if it were, it could not be transgressed, like a temperature below absolute zero. Morality is the ideals, the codes and creeds, that sustain a healthy society.

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John Brodix Merryman Jr.
John Brodix Merryman Jr.

Written by John Brodix Merryman Jr.

Having an affair with life. It's complicated.

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