I find the concept of teleological time to be most relevant. Any given person’s life is most influenced by his own actions and not the actions of others or the random nature of the universe. This concept of time can probably be best represented by a flow chart, where each choice has a clear consequence. Of course, no one lives in a bubble so our lives and fortunes are affected by other people’s actions and natural occurrences. This idea often comes to mind when you experience an extremely unlikely event. Whether positive or negative you think of how many stars had to align for the resulting outcome to occur. This is of course stellar time and has 2nd biggest impact on our lives. The 3rd type, entropic time has the smallest effect in my opinion. Although the concept of entropy works in physics, it has little effect on our lives. We live in a very structured society, most of us have rigid schedules, and most people consider logic to be the basis for their actions and decisions. Hence, most outcomes are not random.
I find Twitter and many other types of social networks to be rather useless and a waste of time. I find myself bombarded with information that for the most part is useless and has not effect on my life. Sure, I care about what my close friends are doing and find Facebook useful for keeping in touch with friends I don’t speak to regularly. But here comes the problem of borderline friends and acquaintances. Most people I know have at least 200 Facebook friends. Such a high number would make the application unusable to me; to open the site and instinctively start reading all the statuses: So and so is “worried about midterms”, “tired”, “bored”, “got a score of 14321341 in farm wars”, etc. This may be interesting to close friends, if that.
I didn’t learn much from Tweeting. As expected, most people shared minor details of their day. Since I do not closely know most of my classmates, this wasn’t particularly interesting. I certainly appreciated people who tried to be funny, like Joseph. One of his tweets is particularly memorable and illustrates the concept of teleological time: “It’s Jung’s birthday. Jung had a couple of drinks. Jung can’t stand up anymore”. Funny, and insightful. I had trouble thinking of what to tweet since I believe sharing my mood or minute details of my day is a waste of everyone’s time. So I tried to tweet things that were unusual or somewhat funny; with moderate success.
“Garden of Forking Paths” was an interesting story. Deciding to kill a man who explained to you one your greatest questions, so the Germans would know which town to bomb is a great concept. The maze reminded me of parallel universes; in how all the actions and their consequences are tied together as a maze. Sometimes it is amusing to think back how different the outcome would be if only one little detail played out differently. It’s good to analyze past events but the relationships between unrelated occurrences can only teach you so much. In the future, the situation will never repeat itself identically, and you can only plan so many moves ahead. My view of time and the universe is to focus on your actions (teleological) but watch the trends around you (stellar).
Has a teleological concept of time. Because of this Alex is not interested in things like Twitter, Facebook etc. Someone with a teleological sense of time sees things moving from beginning to end in their life and so, like his of the post, sees things like checking Facebook and Twitter online as a waste of time. I would say his view of the time types is interesting, that teleological, the sequence of events of our own life is what affects us most, with Stellar and Entropic time having less effect.
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