A Rational Cosmology: The Distinction Between Age and Senescence

The popular use of the words "old" and "age" may have, thus far, impeded some readers' understanding of the ideas in these essays. Thus, it is fitting to dispel certain undue equivocations employed in mainstream culture regarding these terms.

Let the reader recall that philosophy rightfully belongs to the realm of science, though it is a foundational rather than a specific-observational science. Thus, the terms employed within a philosophical treatise must each refer to one concept and one concept only, making distinctions between different cultural uses of the same word and correcting them by giving one of the uses a different name.

"Age" and "aging" are often used in the mainstream culture to refer to senescence, or the progressive decay of bodily mechanisms. The same words can also be used in the manner hitherto employed in these essays, to describe the measurement of the quality, "time," accumulated by an entity.

However, aging and senescence are in fact two distinct phenomena that happen to correlate in human beings, some of whose internal functions deteriorate over time. One of these is purely an issue of the accumulation of numerical age, the other, a deleterious alteration in some of the physical qualities of cells, organs, and tissues.

The mainstream culture has committed the error of considering the two phenomena one and the same, and becoming "old" has become synonymous with becoming feeble and incapacitated.

A real consequence of this is a widespread perception in the contemporary culture that senescence is a necessary part of the natural order, and cannot be cured or reversed. According to this mindset, it is inconceivable for an eighty-year-old to have the robustness and vitality of a physically sound adult, and the very idea of a future procurement of indefinite longevity is scarcely allowed by this confusion of terminology.

Just as the conceptual errors of contemporary science ultimately reduce to the crippling notion that "we can never fully understand the secrets of the universe," so does this conflation of terms ultimately reduce to the paralyzing superstition that man must somehow be permanently enslaved by the forces of death and decay.

Moreover, the false equation of the terms "numerically old" and "senescent" has rendered Einstein's idea of the "relativity of time" attractive in the general culture, as, according to this confusion, a physically robust astronaut who has traveled at near-light-speeds for 50 years cannot possibly be considered "old"!

Rather than recognizing every particular entity asaccumulating age uniformly, as happens in reality, the relativists either render the concept of time meaningless by treating the spans defined by its units as entirely open to fluctuation, or elevate time to the status of some mystical entity-in-itself, which is what must have changed if human qualities did not behave as predicted during some interval of it.

The latter is tantamount to a senescing man claiming that, because he had shrunk in height over the past years, all of space is relative, and it was in fact the entity, "space," which had grown!

Entities may change in their qualities, but units of measurement must ever remain uniform, if qualities and changes therein can ever be gauged in any meaningful manner.

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