bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2007
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When philosophers philosophize about science, why are their philosophical conclusions invariably informed by the very latest developments in 19th-century science?The greater finding in Psychology corresponds to me.
My discovery makes the former ones look like findings by amateurs.
This is the greatest finding: we and our instruments can perceive solely the present of the universe.
This is a law, and is a law without exceptions.
On a clear night, take a look at Andromeda. The electrons in your eyes will be exchanging photons with thousands of dead stars.
But you are not perceiving the dead stars of the past. You are only perceiving the photons that are reaching your eyes in the present.
You are merely inferring the past and the now dead star as the source of what you perceive now and what you recall perceiving in previous moments. And that is more than mere "semantics". There is a real and important difference between the acts of perception and the acts of inference.
Granted, that is not any kind of "problem" for science unless one tries to define science as pure empiricism rather than the empirically grounded inductive process that it is.
There is no objective present. In the reference frame of the photons, the journey time from Andromeda is zero, and the electrons in the photosphere of the star in Andromeda interact simultaneously with the electrons in the retina of the earthbound observer.
Assuming, of course, that we don't wish to reject relativity.