At The Personalist Project: A Cat-shaped Carrot

Yesterday was my oldest son’s birthday, and it got me musing about the nature of time and the self, and how there is a continuity to the self from conception through into death (and, we Christians believe, into eternity).  

I look at my son, and because I have known him so well for so long, to my mind’s eye it sometimes seems like I can almost see him telescoped back in time, not like a series of still images superimposed upon one another, but as a smooth progression, as a continuous whole.

There’s a funny bit of description in one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, from the point of view of a recently deceased character:

“The living often don’t appreciate how complicated the world looks when you are dead, because while death frees the mind from the straitjacket of three dimensions it also cuts it away from Time, which is only another dimension. So while the cat that rubbed up against his invisible legs was undoubtedly the same cat that he had seen a few minutes before, it was also quite clearly a tiny kitten and a fat, half-blind old moggy and every stage in between. All at once. Since it had started off small it looked like a white, cat-shaped carrot, a description that will have to do until people invent proper four-dimensional adjectives.”

So what am I getting at? …

Read the rest at The Personalist Project

Image credit: Life Stages by Nazrul Islam Ripon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons