Article What is your brain’s role in creating space and time? (physics & psychology)

[C C]

https://youtu.be/OV9MnAZLmMQ

VIDEO EXCERPTS (Matt O'Dowd): Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to conclusions that are in direct conflict

[...] In the “absolute” space and time view, championed by Newton, space exists on its own, with no regard to any objects or entities, and time also exists, its passage governed by a cosmic clock.

At the time, this was a hefty proposition. Many philosophers and scientists, such as Leibniz and Descartes considered space and time as “relational”, as a network of distances between objects or succession of events.

Ultimately, we saw that Newton’s pure vision of absolute space and time couldn’t be right.

But if the dimensions don’t ultimately “look like” our impression of them, what are they? Does our mental experience of space and time resemble the world external to our subjective experience?

Newton clearly thought that there must be a very close correspondence. Leibniz on the other hand thought that we build our experience of space through distilling positional relations that are inherent to the connections between objects, rather than space being a standalone container for those objects.

Another prodigious thinker who thought similarly was Immanuel Kant. He initially took Newton’s side on the reality of space and time, but after what he calls a Copernican revolution in his thinking, he came to believe that space and time are not physically real but are constructs of the mind--inborn principles by which we organize the world.

Last time we turned to Einstein as the ultimate tie-breaker. In his essay about the problem of space, Einstein wrote that “concepts of space and time are free creations of the human intelligence, tools of thought, which are to serve the purpose of bringing experiences into relation with each other.”

Uh. OK, so we don’t just believe Einstein because he’s Einstein. But we sure don’t dismiss something Albert says without thinking very hard about it.

So, are space and time, absolute and fundamental, or relational and conceptual?

There might be new clues in the mechanisms by which brains manage space and time... [long interval that ventures into brain science follows]

[...] OK, let’s regroup. We started all of this by asking if the space and time of our minds corresponds to physically real entities. Some pretty smart people, including Einstein, thought that perception of space and time are mental constructs. Now let me be very clear; they were not saying that the external world isn’t real.

They believed that there’s something out there that has an independent existence to us. That something exhibits regularities that our brains partition into space and time. Leibnitz, Kant, and Einstein felt that those regularities only take on our familiar experience of space and time within our minds.

[...] So does the neuroscience we learned agree with them? We can’t answer that directly, but we can try to say whether our brains are capable of such a feat. And the answer to that looks to be a yes.

[...] The fundamentality and primacy of space and time may stem from the fact that we have no alternative way of partitioning our experience. Many scientists are accepting the demise of spacetime as a fundamental entity.

In future episodes in this series we’ll get back to the implications of this in physics. What fundamental structures and processes give rise to external regularities that our brain represents as spacetime?

What's your brain's role in creating space & time?

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OV9MnAZLmMQ

[Magical Realist]

Space and time are constructs of the mind in the same sense that numbers and qualia and geometric forms are. They are not because of this less real. They are because of this MORE real, and omnipresently so, emerging from the very apodictic nature and substance of knowing itself. As Kant expounds, they are a priori to any conceptual or perceptual apprehension of our minds... the two great noumenal demonstratives of the great plethora of Being....IMO...

[confused2]

How deep are the concepts in what follows?

A>There's elephants near here.
B>How far away?
A>About half a days walk.
B>When did you see them?
A>About half a day ago.
B>What direction are they?
A>In the direction of the sun rising.
B>What direction were they heading in?
A>In the direction the sun at noon.
B>We might catch them if we head off in the direction of mid-afternoon sun.
A>Let's collect our elephant hunting things and leave immediately

Edit.. somehow I just can't get on board with "If nobody ever saw an elephant would elephants exist?" - maybe I'm just too stupid.

[C C]

How deep are the concepts in what follows?

A>There's elephants near here.
B>How far away?
A>About half a days walk.
B>When did you see them?
A>About half a day ago.
B>What direction are they?
A>In the direction of the sun rising.
B>What direction were they heading in?
A>In the direction the sun at noon.
B>We might catch them if we head off in the direction of mid-afternoon sun.
A>Let's collect our elephant hunting things and leave immediately

Edit.. somehow I just can't get on board with "If nobody ever saw an elephant would elephants exist?" - maybe I'm just too stupid.

 

As an imperfect analogy... Think of it like the problem I'd have if I declared to primitive natives that there's an elephant on a flashdrive, optic disc, videotape, or a television broadcast signal traveling through the air (with all of those mediums crudely corresponding to the abstract, non-conscious world of a physics or a particular materialistic view that had converted space/time to systemic quantitative values and relationships).

But what's not available to me is a device and a picture screen (both crudely corresponding to the brain) for processing those data patterns into such an elephant. I continue telling my audience that there's an elephant in one of the image files stored on the flashdrive (etc), but they simply can't find the beast.

Perhaps a better analogy would be an elephant featured in a video game (the screen corresponding to the brain, and computer as the objective world). Does the elephant exist in the applicable computer program like it does on the screen?

Ultimately it hinges upon whether one is a direct realist or an indirect realist. In contrast to the two indirect realist examples below, the direct realist considers the brain to be more of a passive object that does not do much of anything.

Anil Seth: I mean something rather simple. For me, there is an outer world – the world of objective reality, as described by physicists. The inner world is the world of conscious experience. Of course, conscious experiences include experiences of the world, as well as experiences of the self, but they are ‘inner’ in the sense that they depend on the brain. The world that we experience is an active brain-based construction, it is not the world as it really is. I’m with Kant here, when he claims that it doesn’t even make sense for us to directly experience objective reality. The world as it really is, is always, for all conscious creatures, hidden behind a sensory veil. Just to be especially clear: for me the inner world is all of experience, not only the experiences that we feel as being inside us, like thoughts and feelings... https://www.scivillage.com/thread-14336-...l#pid58703

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? --"What is Life? Mind and Matter"

[confused2]

We may have to accept that what we call 'consciousness' may not be the same for everyone. I have to bow out of a discussion about consciousness because what I have (or don't have) seems to be the exception not the rule.

[confused2]

B>We might catch them if we head off in the direction of mid-afternoon sun.

Something nagging .. something not quite right..
They won't catch the elephants if they go that way. It accidentally makes the point I would have liked to have made .. that consciousness kind'a ticks over in the background .. but I don't think that is what most people mean by it.