Precisely why I decided not to take any of the conspiracy theories seriously until someone came up with figures that suggested these occurrences constituted a real statistical outlier cluster.
I'll expand my reasoning a bit:
Your mistake is conflating the block universe picture with absolute space and time. In relativity (as formalized in Minkowski spacetime), the "block" just means that all events - past, present, and future - are part of a single four-dimensional structure. It does not imply that there is a unique, observer-independent way to divide that structure into space and time, or to define a universal "now”".
One of the central results of Special Relativity (SR) is that simultaneity is relative. Observers in relative motion disagree about which distant events are happening "at the same time", and this disagreement is not a matter of perception or signal delay - it reflects the geometry of spacetime itself. If absolute time existed, there would be a single, globally agreed-upon notion of simultaneity. But SR shows that no such notion exists.
This is tightly connected to Lorentz invariance. The laws of physics take the same form in all inertial frames, and no experiment can single out a preferred one. An absolute space or time would effectively define such a preferred frame, breaking that symmetry. Since Lorentz invariance is extremely well confirmed experimentally, introducing absolute structure contradicts the core of the theory.
The block universe removes Newtonian absolutes. You still have a fixed spacetime "block", but there is no privileged slicing of it into space and time, and no universal present. Any attempt to reintroduce absolute space or time either conflicts with SR or becomes physically unobservable and therefore superfluous.
There are ways to introduce a preferred frame (such as Lorentz ether theories), but:
- They are empirically indistinguishable from SR
- The preferred frame becomes unobservable by construction
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Thanks for taking the time, Asbo.
-Will
-Will
exactly
No problem, I know plenty of people out there have claimed to be able to overturn the framework I mention, but with little success. In fact the greatest problem it faces is its inability to mesh with quantum mechanics. My solution is to overturn everything and think about what we perceive as reality in a different way. That is far from an original thought on my part as I've mentioned. I'm not even sure my prediction of inconsistency between histories of perception that I derived aided by AI is valid.* It seems it might be testable by simulating the discrete analogue of a path integral over observer-states, but I'll leave someone else to work out whether that's even worth doing and actually do it if it is. It's not something about which I feel any passion.
* The probability of paths differing by ΔN bits of information varies as exp(-ΔN). Normalising so that the sum of all probabilities is 100% implies that the probability of zero difference between two observations of an event is only 63%.
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How about levitation?
Not real. The clue's in the name.
It would be hard to explain how the exchange of real photons would give rise to an attractive force between positively and negatively charged particles via the electromagnetic field. They'd need to be able to convey negative momentum. That's something for which we need virtual photons and the mathematics of QED (or QFT).
Personally, I doubt even "real" electrons are real if everything we perceive is an illusion - in which case they're are different kind of observed virtuality. That's not the conventional wisdom, naturally. The old moderator used to get very flakey if we started making up our own hypotheses - mine are borrowings from the fringe.
I've heard about this several places, even one of my sons talked a little about this a while back. I never bothered to study this or read anything about it. I can google it of course but i can ask here if there is a short answer..... What does it mean if we are, or are inside an illusion? is nothing real? How and why are we here/there...?
You don't really expect a short answer do you? OK, 42, but I expect that's insufficient.
There are different versions of the idea ranging from simple perception filters that our brain applies to an actual, external physical reality and which evolved by natural selection almost to deceive us - not controversial - up to base reality being one of all possible conscious states. There is nothing new about the latter viewpoint - one of the ancient Greeks - Parmenides of Elea - had a similar notion, and, of course, there was Plato's allegory of the cave.
A more extremal version, which lies closer to my current viewpoint, is described here:
Consciousness as the foundation: New theory addresses nature of reality
Consciousness is fundamental; only thereafter do time, space and matter arise. This is the starting point for a new theoretical model of the nature of reality, presented by Maria Strømme, Professor of Materials Science at Uppsala University, in AIP Advances. The article has been selected as the...
and, in more detail, here:
Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy
Somewhere in between that view and the conventional one lies Integrated Information Theory.
Integrated information theory - Wikipedia
Meanwhile, in the conventional viewpoint, some are looking for a theory that underlies quantum mechanics:
Decoherence to quantum theory from a causally indefinite post-quantum theory
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There are three basic approaches, as far as I understand.
There is the Brain in a Vat concept, we exist only as a being of perception, but the universe is being fed to us as an illusion. Traditionally, the illusion is described as coming from an "evil wizard". Our brains can't tell. This is the foundation for the movie The Matix.
Then there is the dreaming. We exist, but all that we perceive, we've made up. It's the sleeping Red King from Alice's Through the Looking Glass.
The third one is the Universe is material, real, phenomenal, but we can't actually know it. Only our senses tell us about it, (Parmenidean), so it might as well be as fictional as the first one, the Brain in the Vat.
These ideas are all based on the epistemology of experience. Can we truly know? Since we can't truly experience directly.
These philosophies are referred to as variations of Idealism. I tend towards Reductive Idealism, that only consciousness exists.
-Will
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I find all this rather nihilistic. Why even?
Take the blue pill.
-Will
Nihilism is only a perspective. Meaning can be found or it can be applied, regardless of the existence of a universal motive or not.
We are here.
We feel it. Cogito ergo sum. Our personal experiences are as real as we feel them to be. Whether one wants to believe everything is made up by one consciousness or not, there is motivation to be. "Lila", for joy, is as good s reason as any; probably the only reason.
-Will
wow... that was a lot. I read everything and i absolutely don't get it.... i mean i didn't get a clear philosophy out of this. Maybe 42 is the right answer for me. I do appreciate you taking the time trying to educate me but i'm probably the student at the back of the class staring out the window......You don't really expect a short answer do you? OK, 42, but I expect that's insufficient.
There are different versions of the idea ranging from simple perception filters that our brain applies to an actual, external physical reality and which evolved by natural selection almost to deceive us - not controversial - up to base reality being one of all possible conscious states. There is nothing new about the latter viewpoint - one of the ancient Greeks - Parmenides of Elea - had a similar notion, and, of course, there was Plato's allegory of the cave.
A more extremal version, which lies closer to my current viewpoint, is described here:
Consciousness as the foundation: New theory addresses nature of reality
Consciousness is fundamental; only thereafter do time, space and matter arise. This is the starting point for a new theoretical model of the nature of reality, presented by Maria Strømme, Professor of Materials Science at Uppsala University, in AIP Advances. The article has been selected as the...phys.org
and, in more detail, here:
Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy
Somewhere in between that view and the conventional one lies Integrated Information Theory.
Integrated information theory - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Meanwhile, in the conventional viewpoint, some are looking for a theory that underlies quantum mechanics:
Decoherence to quantum theory from a causally indefinite post-quantum theory
ah ok, a little clearer here... i dont know. it's like falling a sleep in the fourth spatial dimension and when i start dreaming there is when i wake up her in the 3d world except it's a dream and when i dream here... i wake up there....
wild stuff....
The wilder theories don't make intuitive sense and that's been true in physics since the early 1900s. We haven't evolved to perceive things as they actually are - only as they need to be perceived to optimise the chance of passing on our genes. I've tried asking AI if it's possible to control the perceptual path one's consciousness takes through the realm of all possible conscious states, but it didn't get the question. Perhaps I'm not qualified to be a Q.
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Sure you are.... maybe exactly like Q even..