Ontology
“In essence, we are self-reflective information patterns that momentarily assemble the universe’s atoms into consciousness.” F.C. Quiles
Presto!
“When we say of things that they are finite, we understand thereby that they not only have a determinateness, that their quality is not only a reality and an intrinsic determination, that finite things are not merely limited . . . but that on the contrary, non-being constitutes their nature and being. Finite things are, but their relation to themselves is that they are negatively self-related and this very relation drives them beyond their being. They are, but the truth of this being is their destruction. The finite not only alters, as anything does, but it ceases to be, and it is not merely a possibility that it ceases to be, as though it could be that it might not cease. No, the nature of the being of finite things is that they have within them the seeds of their own destruction; the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
In other words [as often as not], Birth —> School —> Work —> Death.
“What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also ‘is’? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends toward non-existence.” Augustine of Hippo
No, really, what exactly is time?
Teleologically, in particular.
“It is wrong to oppose to objects an isolated ego-subject, without seeing in the Dasein the basic constitution of being-in-the-world…” Martin Heidegger
On the other hand, being in what particular world and being there when?
This part:
“Never forget, an argument isn’t wrong by line 1,000. It is wrong by the end of line 1. It is wrong in the first, defining claim it makes.” Thomas Stark
So, grow a pair and own up to this, okay?
“I say ‘I am free’, but what I really mean is ‘I feel free’;
I say ‘I am unfortunate’, but what I really mean is ‘I feel unfortunate’;
I say ‘I am powerful’, but what I really mean is ‘I feel powerful’;
I say ‘the World’ , but what I really mean is ‘my world within the World’.
What ‘I am’ will always be a mystery to me.” Giannis Delimitsos
But never a mystery to you.
Right, Mr. Objectivist?