Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Blog Post 11

The Tralfamadorian concepts of time and death are that time is a physical dimension like forwards and backwards, and can be viewed from multiple angles and as single moments, instead of a continuously advancing line. Since every moment happened at some point in time, its permanent, instead of temporary, as it will always have existed at some point, so from a non linear perspective of time, everything lasts forever. This ties into their perspective of death, since although everyone dies, since they were alive at some point, from a non linear perspective they are always alive at some points, and death is just another point. There is no meaningful difference or order to the points, so to them it is equally valid to say someone is still alive even after they have died. 

The Earthling understanding is that once someone has died, they are gone forever, since the moments in time when they were alive have already past. This makes sense from an Earthling perspective as humans cannot travel backwards through time, so once a person is dead there is no way to reach the moments when they were alive, so for all intents and purposes they are gone for good. 

Billy thinks proliferating the Tralfamadorian perspective helps because it makes people understand that even though they may not be able to access the points in time when a person who is dead was alive, the moments when they were alive still exists from an objective point of view, and is not gone. This way no one is ever truly dead. This would help people get over grief and give them a more positive understanding of death, as people who are dead still are alive technically.

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