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Steven Hawking on time

He says there's no beginning or end of time, for we move in a circle: we are always coming back to where we (or one of our dopplegangers) have been before.

Okay, this is all hearsay, but I still want to mull over it.

This eternal return provokes a question:  is the same "I" here that was here eons ago?  If one replies yes, then it seems that time as we conceive it normally is illusory. A more adequate grasp of time recognizes that there is nothing new under the sun.  Or rather, it is only because we are limited to seeing things "under the sun" that anything seems to be new. 

Ironically, Hawkins, a materialist, attributes to science a God-like grasp of nature, a perspective through which he sees -- rather abstractly -- every actuality that will be and/or has already been as if it is present to him.  Wow! What an irony: a man who claims that you and I are nothing but dust in the wind also claims to have a kind of infinite gaze. 

Might not the very fact that he is able to make the latter claim count as evidence against the former?

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