Apr 22, 2023 06:13 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 23, 2023 12:40 AM by C C.)
https://iai.tv/articles/ethics-death-and..._auid=2020
EXCERPT: . . . Toby is hesitant in pinning down the details of the block universe—and rightly so, since it’s a complicated view to get your head around. The underlying idea is that time is like space. When it comes to space, we readily believe that places that aren’t ‘here’ are nevertheless real. Whilst I am in the United Kingdom, that doesn’t mean that France or Mongolia or Pluto don’t also exist.
So, if time is like space, then times that aren’t ‘now’ exist. Dinosaurs roaming the Earth and the Battle of Hastings might not be currently happening but, if the universe is a block, that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Given the block universe theory, those things exist, although they are removed from us, albeit in time instead of space.
The same goes for the future: every future event that will ever come to pass is as real and existent as anything you see around you right now. My not knowing what will come to happen is basically the same as me not knowing what Julius Caesar’s shoe size was—it is a failure of knowledge, not of a failure of reality to have fixed the facts.
You might think that this sounds nuts. But this idea that the past and future are as real as the present has been around for a long time. Moreover, it became academic orthodoxy around the time of Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity is often read as saying that the universe is a block.
It’s not hard to see why we might believe that the block universe has radical ramifications on how we live... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED:
The occult roots of higher dimensional research in physics
https://aeon.co/essays/the-occult-roots-...in-physics
Other late-19th-century mathematicians began to imagine the fourth dimension as something far more familiar: the passage of time. The pages of "Nature" and other scientific journals featured speculations about a four-dimensional amalgam of the three-dimensions of space along with an additional dimension of time. These notions eventually received a concrete mathematical treatment in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which enabled physicists to reclaim higher dimensions from the spiritualists. Long before then, though, they left their own imprint on popular culture.
Minkowski space
https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachin...spacetime/
In 1907 the mathematician Hermann Minkowski explored a way of visualizing these processes that proved to be especially well suited to disentangling relativistic effects. This was their representation in spacetime. Quite puzzling relativistic effects could be comprehended with ease within the spacetime representation and work in the theory of relativity started to be transformed into work on the geometry of spacetime.
That mysterious [supposed] flow of time (Paul Davies)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...w-2006-02/
In daily life we divide time into three parts: past, present and future. The grammatical structure of language revolves around this fundamental distinction. Reality is associated with the present moment. The past we think of as having slipped out of existence, whereas the future is even more shadowy, its details still unformed. In this simple picture, the now of our conscious awareness glides steadily onward, transforming events that were once in the unformed future into the concrete but fleeting reality of the present, and thence relegating them to the fixed past. Obvious though this commonsense description may seem, it is seriously at odds with modern physics...
[...] The most straightforward conclusion is that both past and future are fixed. For this reason, physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety--a timescape, analogous to a landscape--with all past and future events located there together. It is a notion sometimes referred to as block time. Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist does not pass or flow.
A number over the years have arrived at the same conclusion by examining what we normally mean by the passage of time. They argue that the notion is internally inconsistent. The concept of flux, after all, refers to motion. It makes sense to talk about the movement of a physical object, such as an arrow through space, by gauging how its location varies with time. But what meaning can be attached to the movement of time itself? Relative to what does it move? Whereas other types of motion relate one physical process to another, the putative flow of time relates time to itself. [...] Although we find it convenient to refer to time's passage in everyday affairs, the notion imparts no new information that cannot be conveyed without it.
What is a block universe?
https://youtu.be/d17U0Bgj0lk
We ask Marina Cortês, cosmologist from the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.
The illusory flow and passage of time within consciousness: A multidisciplinary analysis
https://brill.com/view/journals/time/6/2...anguage=en
ABSTRACT: Flow and passage of time puzzles were analyzed by first clarifying their roles in the current multidisciplinary understanding of time in consciousness. All terms ( flow, passage, happening, becoming) are carefully defined. Flow and passage are defined differently, the former involving the psychological aspects of time and the latter involving the evolving universe and associated new cerebral events. The concept of the flow of time (FOT) is deconstructed into two levels: (a) a lower level ― a perceptual dynamic flux, or happening, or flow of events (not time); and (b) an upper level ― a cognitive view of past/present/future in which the observer seems to move from one to the other. With increasing evidence that all perception is a discrete continuity provided by illusory perceptual completion, the lower-level FOT is essentially the result of perceptual completion. The brain conflates the expression flow (passage, for some) of time with experiences of perceptual completion. However, this is an illusory percept. Converging evidence on the upper-level FOT reveals it as a false cognition that has the illusory percept of object persistence as its prerequisite. To research this argument, an experiment that temporarily removes the experience of the lower-level FOT might be conducted. The claustrum of the brain (arguably the center of consciousness) should be intermittently stimulated to create a scenario of discrete observations (involving all the senses) with long interstimulus intervals of non-consciousness and thereby no perceptual completion. Without perceptual completion, there should be no subjective experience of the lower-level FOT.
Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (Hermann Weyl)
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...al-science
The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.
EXCERPT: . . . Toby is hesitant in pinning down the details of the block universe—and rightly so, since it’s a complicated view to get your head around. The underlying idea is that time is like space. When it comes to space, we readily believe that places that aren’t ‘here’ are nevertheless real. Whilst I am in the United Kingdom, that doesn’t mean that France or Mongolia or Pluto don’t also exist.
So, if time is like space, then times that aren’t ‘now’ exist. Dinosaurs roaming the Earth and the Battle of Hastings might not be currently happening but, if the universe is a block, that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Given the block universe theory, those things exist, although they are removed from us, albeit in time instead of space.
The same goes for the future: every future event that will ever come to pass is as real and existent as anything you see around you right now. My not knowing what will come to happen is basically the same as me not knowing what Julius Caesar’s shoe size was—it is a failure of knowledge, not of a failure of reality to have fixed the facts.
You might think that this sounds nuts. But this idea that the past and future are as real as the present has been around for a long time. Moreover, it became academic orthodoxy around the time of Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity is often read as saying that the universe is a block.
It’s not hard to see why we might believe that the block universe has radical ramifications on how we live... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED:
The occult roots of higher dimensional research in physics
https://aeon.co/essays/the-occult-roots-...in-physics
Other late-19th-century mathematicians began to imagine the fourth dimension as something far more familiar: the passage of time. The pages of "Nature" and other scientific journals featured speculations about a four-dimensional amalgam of the three-dimensions of space along with an additional dimension of time. These notions eventually received a concrete mathematical treatment in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which enabled physicists to reclaim higher dimensions from the spiritualists. Long before then, though, they left their own imprint on popular culture.
Minkowski space
https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachin...spacetime/
In 1907 the mathematician Hermann Minkowski explored a way of visualizing these processes that proved to be especially well suited to disentangling relativistic effects. This was their representation in spacetime. Quite puzzling relativistic effects could be comprehended with ease within the spacetime representation and work in the theory of relativity started to be transformed into work on the geometry of spacetime.
That mysterious [supposed] flow of time (Paul Davies)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...w-2006-02/
In daily life we divide time into three parts: past, present and future. The grammatical structure of language revolves around this fundamental distinction. Reality is associated with the present moment. The past we think of as having slipped out of existence, whereas the future is even more shadowy, its details still unformed. In this simple picture, the now of our conscious awareness glides steadily onward, transforming events that were once in the unformed future into the concrete but fleeting reality of the present, and thence relegating them to the fixed past. Obvious though this commonsense description may seem, it is seriously at odds with modern physics...
[...] The most straightforward conclusion is that both past and future are fixed. For this reason, physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety--a timescape, analogous to a landscape--with all past and future events located there together. It is a notion sometimes referred to as block time. Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist does not pass or flow.
A number over the years have arrived at the same conclusion by examining what we normally mean by the passage of time. They argue that the notion is internally inconsistent. The concept of flux, after all, refers to motion. It makes sense to talk about the movement of a physical object, such as an arrow through space, by gauging how its location varies with time. But what meaning can be attached to the movement of time itself? Relative to what does it move? Whereas other types of motion relate one physical process to another, the putative flow of time relates time to itself. [...] Although we find it convenient to refer to time's passage in everyday affairs, the notion imparts no new information that cannot be conveyed without it.
What is a block universe?
https://youtu.be/d17U0Bgj0lk
We ask Marina Cortês, cosmologist from the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.
The illusory flow and passage of time within consciousness: A multidisciplinary analysis
https://brill.com/view/journals/time/6/2...anguage=en
ABSTRACT: Flow and passage of time puzzles were analyzed by first clarifying their roles in the current multidisciplinary understanding of time in consciousness. All terms ( flow, passage, happening, becoming) are carefully defined. Flow and passage are defined differently, the former involving the psychological aspects of time and the latter involving the evolving universe and associated new cerebral events. The concept of the flow of time (FOT) is deconstructed into two levels: (a) a lower level ― a perceptual dynamic flux, or happening, or flow of events (not time); and (b) an upper level ― a cognitive view of past/present/future in which the observer seems to move from one to the other. With increasing evidence that all perception is a discrete continuity provided by illusory perceptual completion, the lower-level FOT is essentially the result of perceptual completion. The brain conflates the expression flow (passage, for some) of time with experiences of perceptual completion. However, this is an illusory percept. Converging evidence on the upper-level FOT reveals it as a false cognition that has the illusory percept of object persistence as its prerequisite. To research this argument, an experiment that temporarily removes the experience of the lower-level FOT might be conducted. The claustrum of the brain (arguably the center of consciousness) should be intermittently stimulated to create a scenario of discrete observations (involving all the senses) with long interstimulus intervals of non-consciousness and thereby no perceptual completion. Without perceptual completion, there should be no subjective experience of the lower-level FOT.
Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (Hermann Weyl)
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...al-science
The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.
