Retrocarnation:

A carnation put on backwards

I have been taking an interest in what happens to fertility when gene pool size gets too big.  Fertility declines.  And given the amazing degree to which people have gone from marrying cousins just about all the time to just about never marrying them at all, the future does not look so good.  By now we all ought to know that. 

But I am not talking about next week.  That ought to be just about like this week.  Nor am I talking about next year.  But sometime in five to ten years, maybe four to nine years, I expect that the impact will become obvious.

The thing is that at my age it does not seem likely to me that I shall be around to be involved.  If there is a problem here, and I am absolutely sure there is, and there is a cure, and I think there actually might be, then it might not be too late.  So I work on this.

But why should I do it?  It isn’t going to affect me.  Nobody else cares.  So I am doing it for those who are now too young to understand.  And I do it because it needs to be done and nobody else is onto the issue.

But there just might be a rationale.  As I mentioned recently I have been made aware of the philosopher Zhu Xi, who held that the moral and physical world obey the same laws.  And that has led to a bit of a speculation – just that, nothing serious from me, but you might be amused.

Science teaches (and one must always remember that science is a book of questions, not a book of answers, just as scripture is a book of questions) that all electrons have the same charge, the same mass and, brace yourself, spin the same way.  Now I squirm when something with no external features is said to spin, but subjected to a magnetic field, the electron seems to be spinning.  And of course they generally are oriented at random.  But there is an exception called beta decay.  Sometimes a radioactive nucleus will give off a high speed electron.  And that electron always comes out spinning the same way.  It is hard to exaggerate how important that is.  It means the universe is not symmetrical.  Of course when exposed to charge and magnetic fields the electron changes its orientation so there is no way to know how it started.  But when an electron does appear from a nucleus, it’s always spinning the same way.

So why all these identical objects?  There are scientific theories, but the fact is that we have cookies without an obvious cookie cutter.  Now somebody once said that an electron is a positron moving backwards in time.  Maybe.  I’m not so sure, but there are certainly a lot more electrons in the universe than positrons, so if the electrons are changing their direction in time, they are doing it mostly outside of the universe.  So just maybe there is a condition, maybe when the universe is so big it is no longer a black hole, where things can go out, reverse time, hop back in time and then come back in at an earlier stage in the universe. 

In other words it’s all the same electron.  There is only one.

Similarly, we think we are aware of our surroundings.  But when we do scientific studies, that awareness, that ability to make conscious choice, becomes very elusive.

Now in the moral universe, the obvious inequities are generally resolved in our minds by thinking that eventually justice will be served.  But when justice is not done and enough time passes so everybody involved dies, it is hard to see how justice can be restored.  If there is an afterlife, very well.  That is logical.  Or maybe if one is reincarnated, the conditions of that reincarnation may balance the scales. 

But just suppose that consciousness is just like what I described as the electron.  There is only one.  This one consciousness runs back and forth in time until it has been absolutely everybody, and every animal for my money and maybe a lot of other things.  But at the very least, every person has the same consciousness.  Of course one can’t remember previous trips through life, but that doesn’t seem to bother those who, like Socrates, believe in reincarnation. 

Now the scales balance perfectly.  Do something decent for somebody, and if it results in that person being happy, well and good.  That person is you, just displaced in time.  Do somebody dirt and, guess what.  You did it to nobody but yourself.  And if humanity is to die out, the scales still balance.  I call it retrocarnation.  I doubt it will be popular.

For one thing it would mean I shall spend a lot of years being or have spent a lot of years being an absolute Jerk.  It remains true that hell is other people.

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