May 6, 2023 03:28 PM
https://iai.tv/articles/solving-the-myst..._auid=2020
INTRO: Time is a paradoxical mystery. For example, the present moment is both infinitely short and infinitely long, at the same time! To resolve this mystery, Bernardo Kastrup argues that time and space are not objective scaffoldings of the external world, but rather an internal cognitive interface that we use to interact with a purely mental, atemporal reality. That is, we create time and space within ourselves to better organise the information we collect about the world.
EXCERPTS: We all experience something we loosely refer to as the ‘flow of time,’ so it clearly exists as such—i.e., as an experience of some sort—even if it is an illusion. But if I ask you to show me the past or the future, can you point somewhere and tell me, ‘there it is’? Can you hand me the past or the future so I can examine it? Can you tell me how to make a direct measurement of past or future states? Clearly not, so time isn’t there. Photographs and other things we associate with the past aren’t themselves the past, for any photograph you hand me is an element of the present.
[...] Nonetheless, if we try to pin down the present moment by saying ‘now!’, by the time we begin to open our mouth it has already vanished into the past. [...] The present moment is both inescapable and elusive, intangibly short; a vanishingly narrow slit forever squeezed in between the monstrousness of a receding past and an approaching future, both of which the present moment… well, contains! So we end up having to admit that, at the limit, everything—i.e., the whole of time—exists in the vanishing nothing of the present moment.
[...] Still worse, this mystery lies hidden at the very foundation of knowledge.
Take, for instance, the notion of causality: it underlies the entire edifice of science, for we invariably seek to understand nature in terms of causes and effects. Yet, causality unwittingly presupposes a particular understanding of time: effects are supposed to happen after causes, predictably following the latter along a linear, unidimensional arrow of time. As such, secretly built into our understanding of causality—and, therefore, into our understanding of nature herself—lies a face-value assumption about a mystery we don’t know even how to adequately think about.
[...] the good news bit is less trivial to see: it is precisely by recognising the yet-unsolved mystery at the heart of causality that we can see through the unsolvable dilemmas we are led to by habitual modes of thinking. Conceding that our understanding of time is merely tentative allows us to tap new degrees of freedom to approach otherwise challenging questions.
Take, for instance, the question of personal identity under analytic idealism...
[...] Dissociation is a clinically and experimentally established fact: whether we understand it or not, it does happen in minds; it does happen in nature. But while this brute empirical fact is sufficient to legitimise and substantiate the argument for analytic idealism, matters would be more satisfying if we could explicitly understand how one mind seemingly becomes many. After all, analytic idealism states that you and I are merely dissociated complexes of one and the same mind. In other words, ultimately you are me, at the same time that you are still yourself. How can we make good, explicit sense of this?
The answer is time, for the problem here is that of simultaneity. The same actor can play multiple roles in a play, as long as the respective characters don’t appear on stage at the same time. The difficulty arises only when one actor has to play multiple roles concurrently. And this is precisely the difficulty we have in understanding dissociation: clinical research done at Harvard, for instance, shows that ¼ of patients of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) can experience the same dream from multiple different but simultaneous perspectives. How can this be?
If we are open to new models of time, the problem of dissociative simultaneity becomes approachable. For instance, cosmologist Prof. Bernard Carr, of Queen Mary University London, has been working on a multi-dimensional model of time according to which several different timelines, curled-up upon themselves, may exist in nature. Under such a model, when two dissociated complexes of a single mind interact with one another, what happens is that one and the same subject interacts with itself across different timelines.
Prof. Carr illustrates this with a metaphor: if we regard an individual lifetime as a curled-up and closed timeline, at the end of it the subject ‘time-travels’ back to the beginning of the ‘play’ in the form of a different person, thereby playing a different role along a different timeline. At the end of this second go-around, the subject ‘travels back’ once again, playing yet another role, and so on, until the one universal subject plays all roles in the dance of life by interacting with itself across closed timelines... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: Time is a paradoxical mystery. For example, the present moment is both infinitely short and infinitely long, at the same time! To resolve this mystery, Bernardo Kastrup argues that time and space are not objective scaffoldings of the external world, but rather an internal cognitive interface that we use to interact with a purely mental, atemporal reality. That is, we create time and space within ourselves to better organise the information we collect about the world.
EXCERPTS: We all experience something we loosely refer to as the ‘flow of time,’ so it clearly exists as such—i.e., as an experience of some sort—even if it is an illusion. But if I ask you to show me the past or the future, can you point somewhere and tell me, ‘there it is’? Can you hand me the past or the future so I can examine it? Can you tell me how to make a direct measurement of past or future states? Clearly not, so time isn’t there. Photographs and other things we associate with the past aren’t themselves the past, for any photograph you hand me is an element of the present.
[...] Nonetheless, if we try to pin down the present moment by saying ‘now!’, by the time we begin to open our mouth it has already vanished into the past. [...] The present moment is both inescapable and elusive, intangibly short; a vanishingly narrow slit forever squeezed in between the monstrousness of a receding past and an approaching future, both of which the present moment… well, contains! So we end up having to admit that, at the limit, everything—i.e., the whole of time—exists in the vanishing nothing of the present moment.
[...] Still worse, this mystery lies hidden at the very foundation of knowledge.
Take, for instance, the notion of causality: it underlies the entire edifice of science, for we invariably seek to understand nature in terms of causes and effects. Yet, causality unwittingly presupposes a particular understanding of time: effects are supposed to happen after causes, predictably following the latter along a linear, unidimensional arrow of time. As such, secretly built into our understanding of causality—and, therefore, into our understanding of nature herself—lies a face-value assumption about a mystery we don’t know even how to adequately think about.
[...] the good news bit is less trivial to see: it is precisely by recognising the yet-unsolved mystery at the heart of causality that we can see through the unsolvable dilemmas we are led to by habitual modes of thinking. Conceding that our understanding of time is merely tentative allows us to tap new degrees of freedom to approach otherwise challenging questions.
Take, for instance, the question of personal identity under analytic idealism...
[...] Dissociation is a clinically and experimentally established fact: whether we understand it or not, it does happen in minds; it does happen in nature. But while this brute empirical fact is sufficient to legitimise and substantiate the argument for analytic idealism, matters would be more satisfying if we could explicitly understand how one mind seemingly becomes many. After all, analytic idealism states that you and I are merely dissociated complexes of one and the same mind. In other words, ultimately you are me, at the same time that you are still yourself. How can we make good, explicit sense of this?
The answer is time, for the problem here is that of simultaneity. The same actor can play multiple roles in a play, as long as the respective characters don’t appear on stage at the same time. The difficulty arises only when one actor has to play multiple roles concurrently. And this is precisely the difficulty we have in understanding dissociation: clinical research done at Harvard, for instance, shows that ¼ of patients of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) can experience the same dream from multiple different but simultaneous perspectives. How can this be?
If we are open to new models of time, the problem of dissociative simultaneity becomes approachable. For instance, cosmologist Prof. Bernard Carr, of Queen Mary University London, has been working on a multi-dimensional model of time according to which several different timelines, curled-up upon themselves, may exist in nature. Under such a model, when two dissociated complexes of a single mind interact with one another, what happens is that one and the same subject interacts with itself across different timelines.
Prof. Carr illustrates this with a metaphor: if we regard an individual lifetime as a curled-up and closed timeline, at the end of it the subject ‘time-travels’ back to the beginning of the ‘play’ in the form of a different person, thereby playing a different role along a different timeline. At the end of this second go-around, the subject ‘travels back’ once again, playing yet another role, and so on, until the one universal subject plays all roles in the dance of life by interacting with itself across closed timelines... (MORE - missing details)
