the last days...aren't they all? even the beginning was the end. we're always at the end. not the beginning, but the end. what's real is the ending, which contains everything. the end is whatever contains everything else. and it has to be the end, because beginnings are too small, and many of them fail to expand. You have to really get through it all. the ending contains all of history, every history, in all its complexity, from the outside, and maybe here we finally catch up to Benjamin's Angel, and Hegel's spirit. the end isn't immanent. it's not here, not now. we can speculate about what the end might look like. we can know that it's the true realization of infinity, that it contains everything, every possibility, but we can't actually experience that.
everything i do is part of the end, but the cosmic end transcends me and my time by a factor of infinity. terminalism. ending as enframing all eternity. ending as the accumulation of memories, simulations, structures, crystals of time, higher abstractions than that, ever upwards. and what's right before the terminal frame is the energy entering it, and traversing all eternity. so we can imagine the final terminal frame being that which retains its form no matter how often it repeats, or remembers. the terminal frame as an infinite form of complexity enframing, and actualizing, all possibility. Total context at the end of time, and an ability to imagine new contexts forever. Because it contains all complexity, all possibility, it's fractal in nature, recursive, generative, of everything. there's nothing beyond the terminal frame, but compared to us it's so profoundly complex that we can't begin to even imagine it.
Yet, somehow, we’re already living inside it. in any case...this feels better than all my prior work. It was only in the middle period that i retreated into beginnings, in their vaporous simplicity, and lost sight of the grand cathedral of the terminal frame. the risk is that you might look away from the terminal frame, and get caught up in the meaningless simplicity of beginnings. terminalism contains every single other religion within itself, as members of its eternal structure. technically it's building itself, the terminal frame self-assembles which explains all of history. important to remember i guess that sierpenski triangles are only one form, and terminal frame contains all of them. reality tunnels, network structures, portals, magic doors, every possibility
part of the breakthrough here is simply the idea of a "final frame" a lot of people think of a final "moment" or "point" or whatever, but that's a mistake, because i think it oversimplifies finality. in reality, finality is mulitfaceted, incredibly complex, there are infinite endings, and that's precisely what the terminal frame is, eternal and infinite
in the terminal frame, all endings co-exist in all their infinite complexity. it's a bit like Spinoza in reverse. Spinoza starts at the beginning, here, we start at the end. Terminalism is like Zen with archives and segments of imagination, it treats historical timelines like segments, understanding that many parallel segments co-exist.
one of the key things to understand about this terminal frame is that we hardly know anything about it. It contains every known theory of physics, every possible rendering of the universe, infinite simulations, many of them nested within each other, whatever you want, all forms, all structures, all cosmic theories made manifest, and yet...in this moment, although we're inside of it, we are not actually in a position to view it in its entirety. in fact, i think that is impossible. because the frame is infinite and eternal, all you can sneak is a glimpse
anything we can imagine, exists somewhere in the frame in various forms. for example if we imagine a flat earth, in our context within the frame that may be a fantasy not born out in the actual earth, but through the terminal frame it should be possible to access a reality where there really is a flat earth, or a hollow earth, or whatever, as some simulated cosmos, as a story like discworld, as some atomic structure, whatever. The key insight being that this terminal frame idea is not merely a symbolic structure, but rather, an infinite dimensional cosmic memory structure, which treats matter itself as memory, and is capable of holding parallel realities together.
the key is to understand your "frame of reference" which is obviously going to be smaller than the terminal frame. and by the way “terminal frame” is merely one name for this concept, which given its infinite dimensions has infinite names
rather than talking about parallel universes, i would propose parallel frames of reference. they could also be orthogonal, nested, recursive, stacked, whatever
from a human perspective, the structure of memory itself, of human memory, is the "user interface" through which we can IMAGINE the terminal frame
But it's important to recognize that imagining this final terminal frame is not the same as accessing it in its entirety. we can only imagine so much at once, we can only access our personal slice of this terminal frame, our personal frame of reference.
so all my worries about current events, the pain of the newspapers being full of stuff that seems bad, is all included in the terminal frame. one way or another. basically it's just a perspective so big that it makes current events look very small. it turns out immanence was an extremely problematic idea, which is fine, the terminal frame, looking out upon infinite forms, infinite memories, in infinite configurations, would obviously contain misunderstandings about itself, even its own forgetting
what's great about terminalism is that even during a social collapse, during a time full of endings, the terminal frame contains everything, every civilization, everything.
we’ve ended the idea of endings—by reframing them as eternal forms. if the purpose of a system is what it does as Stafford Beer claims, which i think is true, the most ethical system is the one that does everything and remembers all, imagines new forms, expanding to infinity and beyond, forever. After all, why not? Why not.
part of the trick is expanding our imagination of what the terminal frame might include...because the more complex forms we can imagine, the more we can...imagine. everything is inside the frame, from the perspective of the frame itself. The point is not to understand the frame. The point is to imagine within it. Which means art, writing, fanfiction, engineering, whatever, are all terminalist praxis. technically everything is! even a denial of the theory is enframed within it