Crusoe posted what I was going to say, in different words.
My version: Presuming there is no life after death, what does it feel like the moment before, and then the moment after, life stops?
(It is my belief that the inability to imagine this transition into not-ness accounts for the ubiquity of faith in its inaccuracy.)
Another thing I wrestle with whenever I read any serious treatment of the concept of Time is Time itself. The reading I’ve done suggests that Time is a manmade notion that helps us account for change and that our views of Time are psychologically founded. It makes it hard, therefore, to consider the absence of Time, since we have become so accustomed to past and present, and thus anticipate the future.
But is it possible to think about the absence of Time?
Many of my “impossible” thoughts are of cosmic proportions as others have noted in this thread. I have been watching the Science Channel and many of the programs I have seen talk about how before the Big Bang all the matter in the universe started out as a single point. I can’t imagine what it would be like for no universe to exist. They also talk about how the universe is expanding, so it has definite boundaries. If this is so, what would lie beyond the boundaries? I always thought the universe was infinite.
Black holes are also difficult for me to fathom. I have read the dozens of GQ threads on black holes and have also watched several shows on the Science Channel that talk about them. How all the matter from a star, much less several stars and whole galaxies, can be condensed into a singularithy the size of one atom, just boggles my mind.
I just thought of a new color but I’m not going to tell you what it is.
I just read 1984 and this thread is reminding me of the idea behind Newspeak - that by eradicating concepts from language, eventually the concepts themselves will be eradicated, as no-one will be able to express them. I found myself trying to work out if it seemed possible and came to the conclusion that it might, but could be resisted by simply giving new words to the concepts, if they could avoid being caught/punished.
I too have problems with extra dimensions and infinity. Another thing that really boggles me is wave-particle duality - the idea that matter is both a wave and a particle simultaneously. I understand the experiments that suggest this is the case, I just can’t visualise the concept.
On a more personal level I find the “it’s on the tip of my tongue” type of struggle to remember something often gives me a very definite “feeling” about what it is I’m trying to remember but not one that can usually be put into words to help someone else remember. Concentrating on the feeling sometimes brings it into focus enough for me to remember whatever it is though.
There’s a technique I have found to be successful often enough that I can suggest it to you. It’s based on the fact that our eyes have more sensitive “rods and cones” in the area of the retina that’s off to the side of the focal point. This means that when we’re trying to see a faint star (or other dim object) in the sky that if we look a little off to the side of it, it will be more likely to become “visible” in that we can see its light but just not at the point where we have it “in focus.” That suggests that if we’re using something like a telescope or binoculars to make its light “visible” to us we can then point the instrument to where we saw the light and then bring it into focus with the more powerful device.
This “averted vision” approach can work with poorly recalled things in a similar way. If you concentrate on the thing you’re trying to remember for a little while, then just “think away” from it for a bit, there’s a good chance you’re “relaxed thinking” will cause whatever synapses to fire to get you to what it was you were trying to remember. I’ve had this technique work often enough that I just go to it almost instinctively. No joke!
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God, and how he exists and what he really is, and how he interacts with us.
Along the same lines, if I start thinking about the total size of everything, my brain just shuts down. I can think about the universe and how we’re just one little tiny dot in some thing we know almost nothing about, but then trying to comprehend exactly what else is out there and where we fit into it all. Shutdown…
Oh, also, I can think about time travel and how it might be possible until I start thinking of the paradoxes, and then get my brain wrapped in circles… Again, brain shutdown…
I hope that my brain just doesn’t shut down one of these days while I’m thinking…
I just hope this doesn’t happen to me while I am trying to parellel park (a concept that also sometimes eludes me completely.)