Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
Entropy, arrow of time, irreversibility? At any rate, whole and parts.
Conceptual limits, example would be the notions of "whole" and "parts." Humpty Dumpty story.
We don't actually grasp what these concepts really mean, but they help us talk about something. Say, this "air" blowing through the window now. Do we mean air as a whole, all air in the universe, or a part of air? In fact, neither. We can never really speak of wholes and parts, but that they allow us to say something in between. "Time" is also treated in whole and part, as when we speak of it in philosophical terms, or say "Last two minutes."
These conceptual limits are abstractions whose real meaning eludes us, but they allow language to happen and become useful in everyday life. This reminds me of Plato's levels of reality. It is the notion of ideal entities that gives everyday things their meaning. Although reduced to being shadowy copies of their ideals, material and everyday realities are able to participate in language because of this relationship. In this case, the ideal and the real are both conceptual limits, each one essentially indescribable without the other. The real reminds us of the ideal, and the ideal reminds us of the real. Yet, neither pole has any real autonomous value, as if we can isolate the "ideal" from the "real."
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Story idea: a man condemned to die, survives. say electrocution. he wakes up after the first cut of the mortician. however, he barely remembers who he was. This has divided his country. The religious claims him as a miracle of God, like Lazarus. Others say he should be put to death again for his heinous crimes. Others say he is evil, possessed by a new spirit. Law makers don't know what to do with him, if it is lawful to place him back under arrest. Is he a free man now? He becomes famous, everyone wants an interview. There is an order to arrest him. He is kept in a special cell. Some want him freed, since putting a man to death for his crime is same as a man fulfilling his sentence. He gets a default state lawyer. Whether alive or dead, a convict who already died once after execution has already paid for his deeds.
He is studied. The damages to his brain and organs are healing. His brain has reformed. Like a new birth. He barely recalls his relatives. He has almost absolute amnesia. Doctors say they are not sure if he will be able to recall anything.
If he is freed, he might be killed by those related to his past victims. What is his past? Maybe he was a killer, a terrorist, a rapist, a drug lord, or all of the above. What else has he forgotten? He has a language. Or some of it? Maybe he starts off with little, then gains language skills along the way. But his language is different, unknown... Some say a seraphim language, others say of fallen angels, or aliens, or other supernatural, uncategorizable thing.
The whole situation is the opposite of fairy tales where animals are given the gift of understandable speech.
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Speed is an event beyond sense, but affects as most directly, altering our destinies before we even register the shifts. In this kind of uneven frames of acceleration where our organs are tortoises versus Achilles, the arrow of perception can only target the heel of death.
