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The philosophy of time is one of the remaining bulwarks of a philosophical position called 'dualism', which holds that minds are completely separate from our bo

by drostie 12y ago

The philosophy of time is one of the remaining bulwarks of a philosophical position called 'dualism', which holds that minds are completely separate from our bodies: if you view us as being big ropes of particle-worldlines in a 4-dimensional fixed universe, you are basically stuck with describing us as "souls" who have latched onto this rope and are traveling along it, living the experience even though the future is as set in stone as the past. It makes relativity really easy to understand, but it makes entropy comparably harder (since the premise of entropy is that our uncertainties multiply due to particle collisions until things end up in more and more uncertain states). It almost sounds like there's no free will in this perspective, but that's not quite true. Instead you get a model of free will which is a lot like you see in the movie The Matrix: "Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it." Relativity does not necessarily compel this. It is true, the relativistic "present" is a space between two light cones, and not just one plane. But that's not necessarily a huge obstacle: we can just pretend that there is one plane which is the "true present" and accept that the laws of physics make it impossible to know if we're truly right about which it is. As long as one of the planes is the true present you can lift up the Newtonian way of looking at time to the special-relativistic whole. It turns out that black holes aren't really so interesting as this article claims, because there is a 'co-moving' metric which falls into the black hole's event horizon in a finite time. What happens with a black hole is, you see someone slow down more and more to a standstill as they approach the event horizon, appearing to "merge in" with that surface, redshifting into the quantum noise of the Hawking radiation there. But from their perspective, you're just seeing their "last moment in this universe"; they'll keep going on past that horizon. But general relativity is still a problem. It describes the causal fabric of the universe as warped by the energies that inhabit each part of that fabric, and that makes it really hard to deal with time. Some of the interesting stuff here comes either from (a) alternative descriptions of relativity (like spinors/twistors, where you describe the entire world-line of a particle as a point), or (b) quantum mechanics (where you can do multiple-universe-splitting). The combination of relativity and quantum mechanics, for example, seems to give us the Wheeler-de Witt equation, which time famously "falls out" of (it plays no final role in the equation). Some physicists, notably Julian Barbour, think that this means we've got to fixate on a static universe. I'm totally undecided on this but I find it fascinating.

lg 12y ago
I don't think the frozen block view of time necessitates a belief in anything traveling along a world line (how would you express the speed at which it travels?) At any given point on your world line your brain is in some state and your 'mind'/conscious experience at that instant is what it's like to be that state.
- drostie 12y ago
  The "speed" of consciousness would just be in terms of the subjective rate of experience. But yes, that's a significant problem with appealing to this sort of attitude outside of this 4D world (you have to invent some notion of time which applies to souls but not matter). It is true that you can "step back" from the world-line and insist that every part of it is conscious, but that takes a really radical position on our own conscious experience of the progression of time, one that's actually distinctively Buddhist, if you can believe it. (There's a lot of Buddhist speculation about how the mind is a series of "aggregates" rather than one temporal whole; the idea is that you are no more identifiable with the you-of-twenty-seconds-ago than a candle's flame as it has exhausted a new quantity of vaporized oil: in a metaphorical sense we say that both "are the same" but we don't really mean much by it. In general though, saying that "the whole worldline is conscious" abdicates our notion completely that time progresses, and instead says it's all illusory (we have a local sense of progression even though nothing progresses). I think that the reason that this is unpopular is simply because if such an illusion exists, it has an interesting asymmetry with other illusions: you can't actually shake it. (It has some other problems, like: it's hard to see why natural selection would assemble those world-lines into something which have these feelings, given that they don't seem to do anything -- and of course natural selection becomes just a metaphor to describe a pattern in how the lines are structured, rather than a force which changes the world, so it's hard even to phrase the question much less answer it.)
Lambdanaut 12y ago
I have almost no experience with philosophy like this, but somehow have come to a very non-dualistic worldview of my own through a lot of thinking and writing in my personal journal. The whole "universe is a static 4D object" idea. I've never heard of anyone else talk about it before except myself. Are there any books that you can recommend that delve into the philosophy behind this?

by drostie 12y ago

lg 12y ago

I don't think the frozen block view of time necessitates a belief in anything traveling along a world line (how would you express the speed at which it travels?) At any given point on your world line your brain is in some state and your 'mind'/conscious experience at that instant is what it's like to be that state.

drostie 12y ago
The "speed" of consciousness would just be in terms of the subjective rate of experience. But yes, that's a significant problem with appealing to this sort of attitude outside of this 4D world (you have to invent some notion of time which applies to souls but not matter). It is true that you can "step back" from the world-line and insist that every part of it is conscious, but that takes a really radical position on our own conscious experience of the progression of time, one that's actually distinctively Buddhist, if you can believe it. (There's a lot of Buddhist speculation about how the mind is a series of "aggregates" rather than one temporal whole; the idea is that you are no more identifiable with the you-of-twenty-seconds-ago than a candle's flame as it has exhausted a new quantity of vaporized oil: in a metaphorical sense we say that both "are the same" but we don't really mean much by it. In general though, saying that "the whole worldline is conscious" abdicates our notion completely that time progresses, and instead says it's all illusory (we have a local sense of progression even though nothing progresses). I think that the reason that this is unpopular is simply because if such an illusion exists, it has an interesting asymmetry with other illusions: you can't actually shake it. (It has some other problems, like: it's hard to see why natural selection would assemble those world-lines into something which have these feelings, given that they don't seem to do anything -- and of course natural selection becomes just a metaphor to describe a pattern in how the lines are structured, rather than a force which changes the world, so it's hard even to phrase the question much less answer it.)

Lambdanaut 12y ago

I have almost no experience with philosophy like this, but somehow have come to a very non-dualistic worldview of my own through a lot of thinking and writing in my personal journal. The whole "universe is a static 4D object" idea. I've never heard of anyone else talk about it before except myself. Are there any books that you can recommend that delve into the philosophy behind this?