Theories of Time

[fromderinside]

No time. No change. No wavefunction collapse.
Time is, essentially, an illusion; an artifact of a focused, steadily "moving" consciousness.

Time is as real as an explosion that wipes out your family. Before family; after only you. Was your family an illusion?

 

[Valjean]

Yes, it was -- at a metaphysical level, which is the level I judged this thread to be exploring.
Observed, subjective reality is a brain-generated abstraction, bearing little resemblance to what's really out there.
Like the instruments in an airplane cockpit, it's sufficient to navigate, even to land in the dark, but is not what you'd see if you looked out the window.

 

[DBT]

Perception is not abstract. Mental representation is based on actual information that is gathered by the senses: wavelength, pressure waves, airborne molecules, etc. Information that's neither abstract or arbitrary. Which makes the brains mental represention, if proven reliable, a valid perspective of the external World, albeit limited to a narrow band.

 

[ontological_realist]

Yes, it was -- at a metaphysical level, which is the level I judged this thread to be exploring.
Observed, subjective reality is a brain-generated abstraction, bearing little resemblance to what's really out there.
Like the instruments in an airplane cockpit, it's sufficient to navigate, even to land in the dark, but is not what you'd see if you looked out the window.

If all you can know is your subjective reality, that means that you can not know what is really out there. Then how can you compare the two?

 

[Mageth]

Observed, subjective reality is a brain-generated abstraction, bearing little resemblance to what's really out there.

Then how can I recognize someone or something or somewhere when shown a photograph of them or it?

Why does a 2D captured image of my dog in my yard look like my dog in my yard, and how can it be instantly recognizable to me?

It seems to me that a photo must capture a sustantially accurate 2D representation of a 3D scene and the objects in the scene, and that I can recognize the scene/objects from the photograph because my mind's representation of reality is substantially accurate as well.

 

[Valjean]

Then how can I recognize someone or something or somewhere when shown a photograph of them or it?

How do you recognize people and things in dreams? How many dimensions are you working with there?

Reality is structured in consciousness and is processed differently in different levels of consciousness.

Why does a 2D captured image of my dog in my yard look like my dog in my yard, and how can it be instantly recognizable to me?

It seems to me that a photo must capture a sustantially accurate 2D representation of a 3D scene and the objects in the scene, and that I can recognize the scene/objects from the photograph because my mind's representation of reality is substantially accurate as well.

Being able to recognize the whole from parts would be an essential survival skill, something you'd expect your reality generator to be able to do.

Your dog, of course, is not Really what your mind represents it to be. It's a convenient abstraction, like a symbol in a technical drawing or a company logo. Your Real dog is more like a quantum field perturbation; a twist of cosmic string. Moreover, Rover's not Really an entity separate from yourself or a teapot, as you'd see if you could observe him in all 10 or 11 dimensions.

 

[Mageth]

So how does a camera know to capture that "convenient abstraction" that my mind constructs from my dog in a photograph?

 

[Juma]

So how does a camera know to capture that "convenient abstraction" that my mind constructs from my dog in a photograph?

It doesnt. It just creates a entity that provides the same light structure.

 

[4321lynx]

How do you recognize people and things in dreams? How many dimensions are you working with there?

Reality is structured in consciousness and is processed differently in different levels of consciousness.

Why does a 2D captured image of my dog in my yard look like my dog in my yard, and how can it be instantly recognizable to me?

It seems to me that a photo must capture a sustantially accurate 2D representation of a 3D scene and the objects in the scene, and that I can recognize the scene/objects from the photograph because my mind's representation of reality is substantially accurate as well.

Being able to recognize the whole from parts would be an essential survival skill, something you'd expect your reality generator to be able to do.

Your dog, of course, is not Really what your mind represents it to be. It's a convenient abstraction, like a symbol in a technical drawing or a company logo. Your Real dog is more like a quantum field perturbation; a twist of cosmic string. Moreover, Rover's not Really an entity separate from yourself or a teapot, as you'd see if you could observe him in all 10 or 11 dimensions.

What you're saying, I think, is that what, or perhaps all that, matters to us is our subjective perception of the world. If in that you include our mathematics and all our physics which appear to us to be objective, then I agree. And I think DBT's "narrow band" covers this when he says:

Perception is not abstract. Mental representation is based on actual information that is gathered by the senses: wavelength, pressure waves, airborne molecules, etc. Information that's neither abstract or arbitrary. Which makes the brains mental represention, if proven reliable, a valid perspective of the external World, albeit limited to a narrow band.

But I may be subjectively reading too much into what is said here.

Spengler covered all of it saying

We ourselves are time, in as much as we live.

 

[4321lynx]

Going on from my last post it appears to me that the "objective" , "narrow band" view of the world, causing their actions and reactions towards it, is very different for an ant, a bee, a rhino, an antelope, a dolphin, or a fish-eagle etc.

We may just hope that the objective view of any extraterrestials that may contact us, in the to some non-existent future, approximates our objective/subjective view.

 

[Mageth]

So how does a camera know to capture that "convenient abstraction" that my mind constructs from my dog in a photograph?

It doesnt. It just creates a entity that provides the same light structure.

So it captures an accurate representation of reality, as the same light structure that would strike my eyes if I was viewing the scene strikes the camera, and is captured by the camera, which does not capture a "convenient reconstruction" but instead captures millions of numerical values we call "pixels". And the image the camera captures, when displayed, corresponds to what my mind constructs, since I can recognize my dog from an image of my dog. Therefore, what my mind constructs must be an accurate representation of reality. I think; I may be wrong...

That said, I'm dropping out of this with this comment, as I think we're talking on (or of) two different "planes" of reality. My objection was to your comment that what our mind forms as a representation of reality bears "little resemblance" to reality ("what's really out there"). On the level of reality I'm talking about, and interpreting "little resemblance" as "inaccurate", I don't think that's true; I think our view of reality is generally quite accurate. E.g., it generally agrees with what our instruments (e.g., cameras) capture. My take is that what you are saying is that it would be better said as what our mind forms as a representation of reality is incomplete. There is a lot more to reality than what we perceive. I can agree with that. But being incomplete is not the same as being inaccurate.

 

[4321lynx]

It doesnt. It just creates a entity that provides the same light structure.

So it captures an accurate representation of reality, as the same light structure that would strike my eyes if I was viewing the scene strikes the camera, and is captured by the camera, which does not capture a "convenient reconstruction" but instead captures millions of numerical values we call "pixels". And the image the camera captures, when displayed, corresponds to what my mind constructs, since I can recognize my dog from an image of my dog. Therefore, what my mind constructs must be an accurate representation of reality. I think; I may be wrong...
That said, I'm dropping out of this with this comment, as I think we're talking on (or of) two different "planes" of reality. My objection was to your comment that what our mind forms as a representation of reality bears "little resemblance" to reality ("what's really out there"). On the level of reality I'm talking about, and interpreting "little resemblance" as "inaccurate", I don't think that's true; I think our view of reality is generally quite accurate. E.g., it generally agrees with what our instruments (e.g., cameras) capture. My take is that what you are saying is that it would be better said as what our mind forms as a representation of reality is incomplete. There is a lot more to reality than what we perceive. I can agree with that. But being incomplete is not the same as being inaccurate.

Agree with that (my emphasis). It is absolutely accurate within DBT's "narrow band". But it ignores, as do we all in everyday life, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and various not so dark radiations that exist and can be accurately measured. Some of these eg radioactive substances, if in sufficient concentration in your dog's body or his vicinity, may show up on the photo, whereas you remain otherwise quite ignorant of them. And the photo ignores your dog's fleas, of which you may soon be acutely objectively/subjectively conscious.

 

[Valjean]

Different subjective realities and one objective Reality. A reality perceived in dimensions 1-2-3 is not going to look like a reality from 4-5-6 (not that we could perceive that anyway).

We can picture a square in our minds, add a dimension and we can picture a cube, but add another and you've gone beyond what our minds can picture.
You can see a 2-D dog and a 3-D dog, but you can't see the whole, multi-dimensional, dog, the Real dog.

 

[Mageth]

Different subjective realities and one objective Reality. A reality perceived in dimensions 1-2-3 is not going to look like a reality from 4-5-6 (not that we could perceive that anyway).

We can picture a square in our minds, add a dimension and we can picture a cube, but add another and you've gone beyond what our minds can picture.

Yeah, I've read Abbott's Flatland. It's fun to think about.

You can see a 2-D dog and a 3-D dog, but you can't see the whole, multi-dimensional, dog, the Real dog.

That's assuming "the whole, multi-dimensional, dog" is a meaningful statement and that this "whole, multi-dimensional, dog" is really the "Real" dog. I'm not convinced. I think the dog I see running around in my back yard is the Real dog. Why can't that "3-D dog" (4-D if you count time as a dimension) I see in my yard be the real dog? And what would or could higher dimensions that we can't perceive add to the concept of a dog that we do perceive, in any case?

I think this goes back to the notion of completeness that I mentioned before, and the difference between being incomplete and being inaccurate. What I see in my yard is the real dog, even if it's not the complete dog if one accepts the notion of all these higher, unperceived dimensions as part of the dog.

Another way to look at is is that the dog I look at in the 3D world is a real dog as it appears in the 3D world, just like a picture of the dog is a real dog as it appears in 2D, and assuming time as a fourth dimension a video of a dog is what a real dog looks like in 4D. If one could look at a dog in a higher dimension, it would look like a real dog as it appears in that higher dimension.

 

[Mageth]

Agree with that (my emphasis). It is absolutely accurate within DBT's "narrow band". But it ignores, as do we all in everyday life, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and various not so dark radiations that exist and can be accurately measured. Some of these eg radioactive substances, if in sufficient concentration in your dog's body or his vicinity, may show up on the photo, whereas you remain otherwise quite ignorant of them. And the photo ignores your dog's fleas, of which you may soon be acutely objectively/subjectively conscious.

Not being able to see the fleas in the photo is a limitation of resolution. It's possible to capture an image of a dog on which fleas can be distinguished (or, in the fantasy world of crime TV, by enhancing the hell out of a low-res image. ). Or of occlusion/angle/position; e.g., I can't see or capture an image of the "dark side" of the Moon from my yard. But that doesn't necessarily mean that a captured image of my dog or of the Moon is inaccurate; it means the image is incomplete. What the image shows may be quite accurate, and of course may even show more detail than can be seen with the naked eye given the right camera/lens/settings.

And if a sensor/instrument can be made that can capture representations of e.g. dark matter that are substantially accurate, then I can view those representations and form an image of dark matter in my mind that is substantially accurate, as it would conform to the captured representations. E.g., we have cameras/sensors that can capture EM radiation outside the (human) visible bandwidth, and we can view those images to form an accurate image of the world as seen in e.g. IR or UV.

We're not limited to our raw senses when constructing a mental image or model of reality. Well, other than that we must rely on those senses when viewing what our instruments have captured.

 

[Mageth]

I just noticed that in an above post I stated "My objection was to your comment that what our mind forms as a representation of reality bears "little resemblance" to reality ("what's really out there")" in response to Juma's post, when that comment was seynori's and not Juma's. Apologies.

 

[ontological_realist]

Perception is not abstract. Mental representation is based on actual information that is gathered by the senses: wavelength, pressure waves, airborne molecules, etc. Information that's neither abstract or arbitrary. Which makes the brains mental represention, if proven reliable, a valid perspective of the external World, albeit limited to a narrow band.

Then how do you see Hallucinations?

 

[ontological_realist]

I just noticed that in an above post I stated "My objection was to your comment that what our mind forms as a representation of reality bears "little resemblance" to reality ("what's really out there")" in response to Juma's post, when that comment was seynori's and not Juma's. Apologies.

How about hallucinations? How much resemblance do they bear to reality ("what is really out there")?

 

[DBT]

''..narrow band" view of the world, causing their actions and reactions towards it, is very different for an ant, a bee, a rhino, an antelope, a dolphin, or a fish-eagle etc.

The neural architecture that is generating an organism's perception of the world, including the passing of time, also shapes its response to the events that are being perceived. Though quite different perceptions and perspectives, but if related to the information content of the external world (thereby adaptive), nevertheless all equally valid...relativity at work.

 

[Mageth]

I just noticed that in an above post I stated "My objection was to your comment that what our mind forms as a representation of reality bears "little resemblance" to reality ("what's really out there")" in response to Juma's post, when that comment was seynori's and not Juma's. Apologies.

How about hallucinations? How much resemblance do they bear to reality ("what is really out there")?

What about hallucinations? They're called "hallucinations" for a reason. The fact that our minds can hallucinate does not indicate that our minds can't otherwise or normally form an accurate representation of reality.