Derivations on a Theme -- Everything Is Recycled

Trey Smith

Usually when I do one of these derivations, I quote a snippet of another person's writings and then go off in a slightly different direction. This time, however, I did little more than peruse the article -- the heading itself is what caught my eye. On Thursday, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts posted, Nature’s Capital Is The Limiting Resource, and it is this title that motivated me to write this post.

Nature is limited because everything that it can be is already here. What we call "new" merely is a reformulation of the already present constituent elements. Every new being is made possible by those beings who came before and, if we go back generation after generation to the first beings, they came to life via the elements that were already present.

It is the same with ideas. When we prance around because we've had one of those seminal eureka moments, all we truly are doing is recycling old ideas into new forms. Today's ideas are built on the backs of previous ideas and every idea owes itself to the first one.

When we die, we don't actually go away. Yes, it may be true that our specific self-conscious ego is no more, but all the innate components that make you, you, or me, me, simply are released back into the realm of existence to be utilized by nature in some way.

I guess I'm trying to say that it seems to me that we exist in a closed system. Everything that was, is or will be is present at all times. It simply is reconfigured in innumerable ways.