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Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 09:14:53 -0600
From: James Jordan 
Subject: (urth) Silk Out of Time?

At 04:19 PM 12/16/2002, Blattid wrote:
>Don Doggett wrote:
>
> > So again I ask, why did time stop on the Whorl?
>
>Ummm ... I don't think it did. Silk had an experience which
>took place outside of Time, i.e., in Eternity, the perspective
>from which the Outsider (==the Christian God) views spacetime.
>Thus, while he experienced the passage of time in his personal
>consciousness, the "time" that passed for him had no meaning
>on the Whorl or, presumably, the rest of spacetime.
>
>Think of it like this. Silk (like the rest of us) watches
>spacetime occurring in an orderly fashion, rather like someone
>particpating in an interactive computer game, one where the
>player participates _as_ a character. Then the phone rings --
>the Outsider "calls," and the game goes into "pause" mode,
>while the Outsider tells Silk a number of things -- including,
>as it happens, some "spoiler" information about the game
>itself. When the call ends, the game comes out of "pause"
>mode, and continues exactly as it had been. No time has
>passed in the game, but no time has been skipped or lost in
>the game either; the time the player has spent on the call
>has nothing to do with the internal time of the game. Similarly,
>the seeming duration of Silk's enlightenment has nothing to do
>with the "passage" of "time" in the spacetime universe.

I'm not sure we're supposed to think time "passed" for Silk either. He had 
an instantaneous and transcendent "moment" that sorted itself out in his 
mind afterwards into its various components, some of which he could not 
remember. This may not be correct, but I don't see any reason what it is not.
         Moreover, if something happened to the ship at this moment, like 
dipping through a black hole and coming out a white fountain (or whatever), 
and everyone went "out of time," then everyone should have had a 
transcendent moment.
         Time did not "stop" for anyone. Silk had an transcendent moment, 
and the only way a temporal being can understand such a thing afterwards is 
to sort it out into various pieces and temporal events.

Nutria


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