In a quiet moment this afternoon I started to watch The Matrix before I fell asleep. And it got me thinking about existance. That is not to say that I believe that the film is actually true, it is simply a vehicle for expressing concepts and ideas to see what happens.
So, what is life? Life is about 'scope' and the choices we are allowed to make within that scope - essentially 'control'. Scope is what we see, hear, understand, have the mental capacity to manipulate. It is often said 'the scope of ones knowledge', 'knowledge' being a collection of known facts and the ability to manipulate them to suit a given purpose.
There are lots of 'scopes', a Government has a scope of influence over the lives of the people it governs - control, power and rules. If we choose to break those rules then there are consequences, a certain reduction in choice, or at least the reduced probability of a choice option being taken. Our 'control' of our scope is reduced. How we choose to live our lives is up to us, at least to a certain extent. We can believe in the authority and rules of the scopes around us and the entities that define and maintain them. This is why the concept of a 'God' / 'Gods' or 'Godesses' exists - an entity that controls the scope of our existance that we have no control over. This is why there is infinity in mathematics - to expain the unexplainable. Now as time advances and Science progresses our understanding of our existance increases and so does our knowledge of the facts that govern the universe we exist within - that is to say the 'rules' by which the universe governs itself - in this statement the words facts and rules mean the same thing. There, I have just defined a scope of a sentance - something with boundaries.
Now I have learnt a meaning of the word 'scope' from being a Software Engineer where it is a critical component of understanding methods, classes and instantiated objects within an Object Orientated (OO) programming language such as C++ or Java. In these languages scope defines what you can 'see' withing an object or one of its methods (things it can do). If an object cannot 'see' a piece of data, then it cannot manipulate it. Scope in this sence is a very powerful facility. It prevents lots of code changing data at odd times and making the program hard to debug and more likely to crash or at least not do what you thought it would do. In the past this used to be the case. Scope only applied to the whole program or a single function. With the Object Orientated methodology bits of code can only do so much to the program as a whole. This means that they are slightly less likely to fail as an extra degree of data protection has been put in place and once a problem is found, easier to fix as more often than not the impact of the fix is contained within the scope of the method or object requiring attention.
Within OO there is the concept of 'inheritance' where Objects can inherit the behaviour of other Objects and add more abilities (functionality), additionally they can choose not to allow some functionality. This is similar to two things. One, Children, it is always said that Children should surpass their Parents. Two, Delegation, in Government and Management there is deligation of responsibility, the way of allowing other persons to perform a certain function that you can do but do not have the time.
So, what is existance? Ultimately it is our ability to understand our scope, make the right choices for our own progression within the environment utilising the knowledge we have ascimilated to provide a means for successful inheritance of the entities we create. We should not worry or get stressed about the things we cannot control outside of our scope of influence unless we can make a choice that allows that thing to become within our scope. And that choice has to be made within the rules of the larger scopes that govern our lives.
All of this sounded alot better when I was thinking it through in my mind earlier. I should have written it then before I fell asleep.
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