An alternative solution to entropy

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I guess this is a natural theme for some of us writers to pick up on; B. Sanderson did it with Ruin and Preservation in his MISTBORN works, I feel like I've seen "the balance of life and death" metaphysics in other fantasy I've read, and then there's my own novel, where the protagonist suffers from an incurable terminal illness and has to decipher the meaning of a life defined by death.

So I wonder two things, here: first, why SRD didn't use my proposed solution to the moral problem of entropy; second, whether he even came up with a parallel hypothesis ever himself?

So what is this notion of mine? I wanted to reconcile eternity and time, to harmonize never ceasing to be conscious with never ceasing to be physically within time. Wherefore I conceived of miraculously or magically slowing time down infinitesimally, so that an objectively finite process requires infinity to be subjectively perceived. Thus we could be mortal and immortal simultaneously--we would not go through an endless sequences of events, but through a sequence with an end that we never absolutely reached.

Perhaps this is a stupid or unnatural idea, so perhaps Donaldson never thought of it as a way out of entropy's destructive impact on our moral abilities and hopes. Perhaps slowing the present down would have been irrelevant to stopping the Worm (though it seems as if it wouldn't be). Perhaps as a permanent solution to the entropy of Despite, it would have failed.

Now in my own story, though, what the protagonist does is use time dilation in dreams to simulate this compacted sempiternity, along with the emotional might of certain experiences (in which the "now" seems to come into absolute focus). I feel that it is a good "humanistic" or "non-transcendent" solution to human finitude or the inevitability and oblivion of death, one that yet does justice to our at least transcendental intuitions about what ought to be the truth after our lives. (I also have a less objectively justified faith in a sort of literal afterlife, but that's another story for another day or night...)

[Zarathustra]

Very interesting. Can't wait to read it. I'm also very interested in experiences in which the "now" seems to come into absolute focus. Emotion is one way to get there. But it can also be achieved through phenomenological introspection. And there's always 'shrooms.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I later got the impression on psilocybin that the chemical was modulating my conceptual brain functions with my visual perception, mediated by my musical/auditory awareness. Like, it converted the process of intellectual aggregation and synthesis of information into the warp of light that kept intersticing the space around me--synaesthetically, basically, only quite peculiarly.

And now indeed the recursive/fractal/what-have-you loopiness of certain functions is what I felt would allow for the compression of dilated time. Since we'd seen recursive magic from the Viles and I think elsewhere in the Land, it wouldn't have been too much of a stretch for the reincarnated Timewarden and his adopted son and second wife, with her own white-gold ring, to have looped the collapse of the Arch in on itself to form this infinitely magnifiable duration of some kind, some quasi-eternal structure physically consistent with yet morally defiant towards entropy.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Like, suppose the Worm were provided with an infinite source of EarthBlood? Then it could never reach the terminus of the Earth, and the sempiternal process of its feeding would even constitute a new Arch of Time, as it were--a restoration or translation of the Law of Death to its proper place in the order of Time. Weren't a lot of us expecting the broken Laws to be fixed somehow in the end?

For it would make sense if the Dead were converted into the infinite Blood of the Earth. It was through that Blood that the Law of Death was broken, after all. So all beings who Died in the world of the Land from the World's End on would become new sustenance for the Worm, ever drawing out the consummation of its rest.