The world mostly

 

So, to start out with a question, - what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the world?  Is it big? Is it small?  Is it too big or too small?  Is it flat or round or hilly or scary or fun or what are those things which comes to your mind when you think of your world, or their world, or maybe even an imaginary world?

One way you can think about it , when you finally decide what world you are in fact thinking about, is that it is elongated.  Mostly elongated in time.  If you can imagine that it would have to be quite diffuse at the ends, meaning distant past or future, and then becoming more focused at the meeting of those confluences.  It is also interesting to think about how that quite singular point, meaning in some ways the present, almost seems to have a controlling effect on both of those, perhaps, elongated concepts of the world and time. Of course you can think of it as elongated or perhaps you can think of it as a light cone, or even a time line.

Anyway, what the world really most means, in a practical sense is some kind of collective or shared experience where, in fact, many of these notions about what the world is, or is not, must in some fashion be meddled together, and the end result would have to be something, that might be difficult for a single individual to perceive.

So what does that mean ?  Maybe something about the whole, being greater that the sum of its parts, which does seem to defeat, in someway, our intuitions about arithmetic.