Tag: Immortality
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 6: The Lotus Gambit
Welcome back to this series on immortality and perfection! If you haven’t read the previous articles, check them out below: Part 1: The Paradox of Perfection Part 2: Fractals & Infinity Part 3: Swordsmanship & Perfection Part 4: Alchemy & the Magnum Opus Part 5: The Horrors of Eternal Life In Part 5, we talked…
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 5: The Horrors of Eternal Life
Welcome back to this series on immortality and perfection! If you haven’t read the previous articles, check them out below: Part 1: The Paradox of Perfection Part 2: Fractals & Infinity Part 3: Swordsmanship & Perfection Part 4: Alchemy & the Magnum Opus In Part 4, we conceptually linked the attainment of perfection to the…
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 4: Alchemy & the Magnum Opus
Welcome back to this article series on perfection and immortality! In Part 3, I talked about the link between swordsmanship, self-cultivation, and perfection, with a particular eye toward paradox. If you haven’t read Parts 1-3, click on the links below. Part 1: The Paradox of Perfection Part 2: Fractals & Infinity Part 3: Swordsmanship &…
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 3: Swordsmanship and Perfection
Welcome back to this article series on perfection and immortality! In Part 2, I talked a lot about fractals, repeating, self-similar patterns that have a complex relationship with perspective and infinity. I noted that the more one delves into fractals, the more often one encounters paradoxes, such as the Coastline Paradox. As you might remember…
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 2: Fractals and Infinity
In Part 1, I talked about the overlapping ideas of eternity, perfection, and immortality and the seeming paradox of making something perfect: “…making perfection a reality seems to evoke the mathematical concept of the asymptote— ‘a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it.’ One can approach perfection, but the closer…
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 1: The Paradox of Perfection
Immortality is a recurring thing in the fantasy genre—liches, elves, gods, and so on. I wanted to write down some of my thoughts on immortality, both in terms of fiction and more generally. It’s a fascinating topic, because it naturally intersects with so many other things—mathematics, metaphysics, and the limits of the human body and…