The “rule of parsimony” is only a guide, not a requirement; yet it states that the simplest explanation of an event or observation is the preferred explanation.
From this, we may derive that life is not a spurt, beginning with birth and ending with death. Such an explanation is unnecessarily complex, as explained later.
Rather, life is more likely perpetual, in that it precedes birth and outlasts death. Birth and death are events that likely only affect the physical vehicle upon which a life is being carried for a time.
From a probabilistic point of view, it is remotely unlikely for life to be transitory. Such thinking imagines that time has progressed from earliest antiquity up to the present age, through several billions of years in time, until the present moment has been reached. While the probability that the “play head” would be positioned over any given moment is minuscule, yet, since it must be positioned somewhere, any location is as equally likely as any other, including the current moment.
But consider, in addition to the statistically small probability that time’s play head would find itself at the current moment and not someplace in the past or future, the notion that one’s own life occurs only once in all of that time, of which this occurrence just happens to be during the unlikely moment where the “play head” conveniently happens to be, is well beyond the rule of parsimony, given the simpler explanation of a continuous life that spans all of time.
…
Carlos Rovelli is a quantum physicist who writes for the general public, and suggests that gravity and time conform to quantum principles, just as sub-atomic particles do, where nature allows specific states of existence, without an infinite continuum of possible states between them. He calls this, the end of infinity because nature is finite (though exceedingly complex).
In “The Order of Time,” Carlos Rovelli offers these thoughts: “Time emerges from a world without time;” and “Time is ignorance.”
He doesn’t say what life is, but the terms cold be interchangeable: Life emerges from a world without life. Life is ignorance.
Hm…
Thwarticus 