One of the interpretive themes of LOST was heaven and hell. Some fans felt that the main characters were in hell, symbolized the by the island and its various monsters, sinners and punishments. Others thought that the characters found their heaven in the sideways world, which ran concurrently in the Season 6 series - - - but if you look at Alpert's back story, it had been running for eternity.
The concept of duality - - - two different planes of existence - - - is also a reoccurring theme. Many scientists believe in the time-space continuum contains multiverses, where each action creates a new and slightly different universe based upon those probable effects of an action.
But there is a simple way of looking at the LOST's split story personality.
From a spiritual perspective, each living person has two states: an awaken state and a sleeping state. When you are awake, you are living and experiencing the good and bad of real life. Over time, daily routines like work and family become grinds. The repetitive nature of living is a drain upon one's creative, adventurous curiosities. In order to fulfill that need, people tend to have deeper, more complex dreams when they sleep. Sleep is a person's way of repairing and re-energizing their body. But it can also be a needed fantasy diversion to a person's "perfect world."
In fact, people sometimes can get "lost" in their dreams. They may not be able to tell what is real and what is fantasy. The illusions in dreams become delusions in real life. And this creates personality disorders and mental mistakes, deep problems at work or with family. A prime example could be Locke, who drifted fantasy games into his real life to the point where he gave up his normal existence to join a commune in the hope of finding a "family"
It can be said that when people are awake in their boring, rotten, habitual work world, they are living in hell. For most of us, we cannot change the relentlessness of this existence. We are trapped by circumstance and obligation.
But when we totally get away from the daily routine, our dreams can appear to be heavenly. Our fantasies make us the star of our own movie. We can be the hero, the lover, the protector, the superhero, the leader, the greatest person in the world.
LOST's island world could be considered the collision of both the heaven and hell aspects of a person's existence. It contains fragmented bits of both worlds which cannot exist together. The show rarely showed anyone sleeping - - - insomnia was rampant. It could be a clue that the characters were trapped in a limbo between being awake and being asleep - - - a place ruled by their nightmares.
Showing posts with label duality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label duality. Show all posts
Monday, February 29, 2016
Friday, March 6, 2015
GEMINI SYNDRONE
There is a philosophy that each person is born with a duality.
Gemini is the ‘twins of the zodiac.’ That itself kind of captures the whole concept of duality, but on a philosophical level; you have yin-yang, positive and negative, day and night, and left and right. These are principles that we created. We made words for those things to help us understand the world that we live in. Bringing those two sides together, everybody has good and bad days, good things and bad things, and even we have good shows and bad shows. It’s just trying to balance those two things to make your life more fulfilling and trying to make it the most positive experience you can.
Each person could be said to contain two individual characters.
There is the conscious self as opposed to the unconscious self. In the light of day we have a public self, while at night we can have a private, dark self where societal rules do not apply.
There is the good behavioral person as opposed to the evil persona. Each person has within themselves to do evil. It is how we check this bad twin is what keeps normal people from becoming criminals.
We have split personalities of the work ethic and the procrastinator, where there is a moving slide mixing the two elements to determine the course of our daily lives. Some days we are work horses, other days we are lazy bums.
We also have various emotional states that are constantly in flux. Love-hate relationships. Kindness versus cruelty. Extroverted energy to introverted paralysis. There are various shades of the emotional self that has many variables based upon cultural and environmental cues.
LOST had various themes which included a duality principle.
The mirror is a reflection of one's self. It also could be considered to represent the other side of your personality (usually a darker one).
Duality is a central principle in Egyptian burial mythology, where a person's soul is divided into parts which are reunited if the person passes final judgment.
Several main characters went through drastic phases in their lives. For example, Ben was a shy, introverted school boy who deep inside hated his father to the point of being an evil mass murderer and dark tyrant. But even then, the story twists unbelievably to Ben as a sympathetic nice guy waiting to cure his sins in the sideways purgatory. Fans were drawn quickly to the evil Ben more so than the redeemed Ben.
And the fact that LOST was set in two different dimensions is still a cause of great concern. Was the sideways world purgatory, heaven, dream state or alternative universe? Likewise, was the island time line real, imagined, science fiction worm hole or psychotic?
The series raised duality concepts but failed to clearly address them in a coherent fashion.
Gemini is the ‘twins of the zodiac.’ That itself kind of captures the whole concept of duality, but on a philosophical level; you have yin-yang, positive and negative, day and night, and left and right. These are principles that we created. We made words for those things to help us understand the world that we live in. Bringing those two sides together, everybody has good and bad days, good things and bad things, and even we have good shows and bad shows. It’s just trying to balance those two things to make your life more fulfilling and trying to make it the most positive experience you can.
Each person could be said to contain two individual characters.
There is the conscious self as opposed to the unconscious self. In the light of day we have a public self, while at night we can have a private, dark self where societal rules do not apply.
There is the good behavioral person as opposed to the evil persona. Each person has within themselves to do evil. It is how we check this bad twin is what keeps normal people from becoming criminals.
We have split personalities of the work ethic and the procrastinator, where there is a moving slide mixing the two elements to determine the course of our daily lives. Some days we are work horses, other days we are lazy bums.
We also have various emotional states that are constantly in flux. Love-hate relationships. Kindness versus cruelty. Extroverted energy to introverted paralysis. There are various shades of the emotional self that has many variables based upon cultural and environmental cues.
LOST had various themes which included a duality principle.
The mirror is a reflection of one's self. It also could be considered to represent the other side of your personality (usually a darker one).
Duality is a central principle in Egyptian burial mythology, where a person's soul is divided into parts which are reunited if the person passes final judgment.
Several main characters went through drastic phases in their lives. For example, Ben was a shy, introverted school boy who deep inside hated his father to the point of being an evil mass murderer and dark tyrant. But even then, the story twists unbelievably to Ben as a sympathetic nice guy waiting to cure his sins in the sideways purgatory. Fans were drawn quickly to the evil Ben more so than the redeemed Ben.
And the fact that LOST was set in two different dimensions is still a cause of great concern. Was the sideways world purgatory, heaven, dream state or alternative universe? Likewise, was the island time line real, imagined, science fiction worm hole or psychotic?
The series raised duality concepts but failed to clearly address them in a coherent fashion.
Monday, December 30, 2013
UNIVERSAL ILLUSION
Nature News had a recent article which poses the question of whether the Universe is merely a holographic illusion. There is scientific debate on how the universe operates, with string theory being one of the explanations. But science has trouble verifying its various theories.
A team of physicists has provided some evidence that our Universe could be just one big holographic projection. In 1997, theorical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that in his model of the Universe, which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.
Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.
Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues reported evidence that may prove Maldacena’s conjecture is true. Hyakutake computed the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence. He and his collaborators also separately calculated the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.
“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who did not contribute to the Japanese team's work. “(The findings) are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory," Maldacena adds. The two papers, he notes, are the culmination of a series of articles contributed by the Japanese team over the past few years. “The whole sequence of papers is very nice because it tests the dual [nature of the universes] in regimes where there are no analytic tests.”
“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.
Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.
Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory.
The concept of "duality" was present in the LOST series. In fact, duality has been a theme of mankind throughout its history. Ancient people thought in terms of a dual system: heaven and earth, gods and man, fire and water, time and space, good and bad, etc. There was also duality taught in religious believes between the two worlds: material and spiritual. Ancient Egyptians took the concept further to state that after death, a person's soul splits into different forms, the ba and ka, to journey through the underworld. So it is not surprising that human beings view the world around them through the concept of duality.
The LOST story structure wound up to be in two dual planes of existence: the island and the sideways worlds. Was one real and the other a projection? Were both real but in different time space? Or were both projections of the same universe but reflected back as illusions? The parallel that cutting edge science is still cannot figure out the universe, and LOST fans still cannot agree on what the show's main premise was is somewhat comforting and troubling at the same time.
A team of physicists has provided some evidence that our Universe could be just one big holographic projection. In 1997, theorical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that in his model of the Universe, which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.
Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.
Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues reported evidence that may prove Maldacena’s conjecture is true. Hyakutake computed the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence. He and his collaborators also separately calculated the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.
“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who did not contribute to the Japanese team's work. “(The findings) are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory," Maldacena adds. The two papers, he notes, are the culmination of a series of articles contributed by the Japanese team over the past few years. “The whole sequence of papers is very nice because it tests the dual [nature of the universes] in regimes where there are no analytic tests.”
“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.
Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.
Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory.
The concept of "duality" was present in the LOST series. In fact, duality has been a theme of mankind throughout its history. Ancient people thought in terms of a dual system: heaven and earth, gods and man, fire and water, time and space, good and bad, etc. There was also duality taught in religious believes between the two worlds: material and spiritual. Ancient Egyptians took the concept further to state that after death, a person's soul splits into different forms, the ba and ka, to journey through the underworld. So it is not surprising that human beings view the world around them through the concept of duality.
The LOST story structure wound up to be in two dual planes of existence: the island and the sideways worlds. Was one real and the other a projection? Were both real but in different time space? Or were both projections of the same universe but reflected back as illusions? The parallel that cutting edge science is still cannot figure out the universe, and LOST fans still cannot agree on what the show's main premise was is somewhat comforting and troubling at the same time.
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