(May 26, 2017 05:12 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]http://www.zmescience.com/science/news-s...nesthesia/
Welcome to my world. Do I think I really see space or time? No I don't but some people claim they do. Do I see the world differently than most? I'm certain of that. Maybe my visualizing is an evolutionary trick, a genetic mutation, an ancestral throwback or for all I know, normal. It makes me question things, like is my red your red, as in seeing it differently. I figured that since I still get around normally that whatever or how we see things basically leaves the same result.
I can't play sports without noticing very visual patterns that sort of guide me through the contest. Time appears as something similar to a road or track. Hours, days, months and years are like a convoy of trucks moving towards and away from me, my own Doppler effect. Mind you, it doesn't blind me from everyday activity. I just assume that's the way my brain interprets sight and for whatever reason makes space and time seem like real tangible things.
Change is "real" in terms of our extrospective experiences (the sensory related manifestations of the external world -- whether visual, aural, tactile, etc). If certain things and occurrences seem to be simply "given" to you (intuition rather than falling out of the language processes of reflective thought) and those are also inter-subjectively available / confirmed by others -- as well as not controllable by personal will or wishes -- then they are "real" in an empirical / phenomenal context.
Whereas "time" is an organization or framework for structuring changes (whether the easily grasped artifacts of calendars and time-keeping devices, or the esoteric mathematical constructs and abstractions of physics). The term is also often used to refer to some supposed flow or flux from one moment to the next (what would be "flowing"?), but that notion stems from change.
Historically in the West, it was the Eleatic School (of philosophy) which began the trend of shifting the status of "real" from the commonsense appearances of the extrospective world to the abstract objects / principles of a metaphysical territory that could only be apprehended by intellect, reasoning, or inferential activity. ("Experiment" might also be tossed in there with the advent of modern science, but that also involves "thinking" to derive a conclusion from the research, as well as the prior planning / motives to devise an experiment to interrogate nature, in the first place).
Thus today there is this preoccupation of whether or not such and such time framework, and change, is "real" in the context of an invisible manner of existence (or provenance / cause for our experiences). "Invisible" from the standpoint that even the experience-independent domain or kind of existence sported in scientific realism does not present itself except when there are processes traditionally referred to as "mental" generating its "showing" as images, sounds, odors, etc (or converting its otherwise conceptual style of existence to such phenomena).
Immanuel Kant tried to reverse the trend that the Eleatics began, of the latter's shifting the classification of "real, truth, and the like" solely to an absolute level devoid of the relational contingencies and of the mutable, extrospective / sensible world. Unfortunately, that particular nuance escaped many of his reviewers as well as the later post-Kantians.
KANT: The dictum of all genuine idealists from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in this formula: "All cognition through the senses and experience is nothing but sheer illusion, and only, in the ideas of the pure understanding and reason there is truth." The principle that throughout dominates and determines my Idealism, is on the contrary: "All cognition of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth."
Kant's influences are historically applicable to these synesthetes (and you also, Zin?) who claim to "see" a time framework as something sensible or intuitive. Since he pointed out that even our conventional everyday experiences are conforming to prior in rank forms or formulas for producing such manifestations. Which is stay, our sensations are regulated by underlying templates for space / time.
In retrospect, that should have been kind of obvious for any anti-panpsychism materialist schools of philosophy, since it's usually taken by them that everything disappears when we die (when the brain / body ceases functioning). There's not even a cognition of "nothingness" that's expanded spatially and enduring temporally. Again, the matter (and world) of that ideological context doesn't even show itself (have evidence for itself) when minus its arrangement as a mind (see Schrödinger quote below, as example).
KANT: By transcendental idealism I mean the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only[*], not things in themselves, and that time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition, not determinations given as existing by themselves, nor conditions of objects viewed as things in themselves. ([*] When assuming there is a phenomena-independent level slash things-in-themselves or the Eleatic tradition's "ultimate truth realm", as in popular anti-panpsychic materialist doctrines or worldview stances.)
ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER: The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?
KANT: No doubt I, as represented by the internal sense in time, and objects in space outside me, are two specifically different [types of] phenomena, but they are not therefore conceived as different things [substances]. The transcendental object [ultimate provenance], which forms the foundation of external phenomena [extrospective half of experience], and the other, which forms the foundation of our internal intuition [introspective half of experience and personal thoughts], is therefore neither matter, nor a thinking being by itself, but simply an unknown cause of [both divisions of] phenomena which supply to us the empirical concept of both.
Not for one minute do I think time is an illusion. (Always try to work in a pun where possible)