eisteins physics of illusion

[jackles]

Do Einstiens physics prove we are part of an illusion.

[Impenitent]

do you understand the gravity of that question?

-Imp

[jackles]

Ha . But seriously gravity is as everthing esle an aspect or form of nonlocality. Its as if locality is falling back into omni locality and it wants to get there and will get there but its got to jump through a few hoops on the way first.

[raw_thought]

Einstein said that space and time are an illusion in that we separate them. There is only space-time. Time is a dimension like height, depth and width. It is the fourth dimension.

[raw_thought]

"“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Einstein
For Einstein ( and his theory of relativity) time does not move it is a http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_ ... s_flow.asp
Past and future are like east and west, they are relative to your position. Suppose I am in Los Angeles, CA. Detroit MI will be east of me. However, if I am in New York, Detroit will be west of me. Similarly, 1492 is in the past according to me. However, for a person in 1264 it will be in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

[Obvious Leo]

Einstein said that space and time are an illusion in that we separate them. There is only space-time. Time is a dimension like height, depth and width. It is the fourth dimension.

That's why our current models of physics make no sense. Representing time as a Cartesian dimension is a metaphysical fallacy because Cartesian dimensions are bi-directional. Despite what Einstein might have to say on the matter the arrow of time points resolutely from the past towards the future, never the other way around.

[hammock]

Do Einstiens physics prove we are part of an illusion.

Time as the ordered framework shouldn't be what is suspect in generic eternalism; only the supposed notion of the framework itself flowing. Even the flow is perhaps less an illusion when shifted to being the inherent nature of consciousness, or falling out of its limitations. There is no brain state corresponding to cognition of your entire life or worldline as a whole. That's why experience would seem like a chopped-up film-strip sequence of pictures / events, of one instance of awareness of yourself / the world, connected from one sensory snapshot (moment) to the next.

This immediate "right now" can have no other location than being sandwiched between a particular slice pragmatically designated as a past moment and another particular slice pragmatically designated as a future moment. Barring a period of unconsciousness or being in a coma, there's no leap over a mega-long series of intervals either backward or forward, or a unifying apprehension that can embrace them all. As William James once suggested, any feeling of transiting from one segment of your dimensionally extended body to the next could be construed as the very relationship itself between those segments (i.e, relationship rather than literal movement from one figurative slot to the next). Direction-wise, language might be asymmetrically meaningful futureward and unmeaningful gibberish oppositely, though that's not to suggest cognition rests solely with it.

IOW, any extended structure which the skull organ would have as some 4D or higher dimensional object is still divided into these slices of neural organization / patterns exhibited in a single duration which a brain-scan arbitrarily captures. With cognitions dependent upon / restricted to being instantiated by those divisions. Actually even that captured duration of a scan is a specious representative of "now", a kind of macroscopically-upward summary of particle configurations corresponding to planck-time units, the shortest possible temporal units of a block-universe, spacetime continuum, etc (whatever entity chosen to physically instantiate eternalism being the case). Likewise, a completed "thought" would have to cover or supervene over a multitude of such.

[surreptitious57]

the arrow of time points resolutely from the past towards the future never the other way round

Yes the psychological and thermodynamic and cosmological arrows of time all go in one direction

[Obvious Leo]

the arrow of time points resolutely from the past towards the future never the other way round

Yes the psychological and thermodynamic and cosmological arrows of time all go in one direction

You forgot the evolutionary arrow of time, which is perhaps the most significant arrow of them all. The thermodynamic arrow applies only to sub-systems of the cosmos which are informationally isolated from the whole. Entropy therefore increases in such subsystems as it tends towards thermodynamic equilibrium. But this is not what's happening with the universe as whole. When we examine the universe as a whole we see that entropy is decreasing as the universe evolves subsystems within itself of increasingly greater informational complexity, the most significant example of which is US, gathered around having a chat about it.

[Nemba pemba]

There is still another sense of 'arrow of time' that has recently been discovered. In particle decay, we now know that the laws of phyc are not invariant under time riversal! There is indead some objective notion of past and future known by the universe in very fundamental stage!

Some even say that the discovery of time symmetry violation in electroweek interactions means that electrodynamics themselves contributes some 'arrow of time'. Such a cosmos is not how Einstein understood. It seems to favour the idea of Whalter Ritz who disagreed with Einstein over the issue.

[Obvious Leo]

It seems obvious that the answer to the titular question is YES. Spacetime physics is modelling an illusory world and the reason for this is transparently obvious. When Minkowski represented time as a Cartesian dimension he committed a gross metaphysical error. Cartesian dimensions are bi-directional whereas time is patently not. The equations of physics might be time invariant but reality most certainly isn't.

[Obvious Leo]

Of course if you were to mention the word "metaphysics" in a room full of physicists they'd treat you like the bloke who farted in the elevator and all move over to the far side of the room.

[jackles]

an illusion has to have an omni present observer the same as a dream does have a dreamer.

[Impenitent]

an illusion has to have an omni present observer the same as a dream does.

thus spake rene

-Imp

[hammock]

an illusion has to have an omni present observer the same as a dream does have a dreamer.

I'm not sure how simultaneously "everywhere" the observer-function of a dream could be, though, unless you're merely referring to the overall dream process (both conscious and unconscious parts) being housed in the skull of the dreamer. In terms of the appearances themselves or its superficial facade, such empirical character of a dream-world is usually instantiated by and limited to the extrospective experiences / POV of an embodied consciousness. Which is to say, the avatar of the sleeping "transcendent" human; the latter's normal, waking identity having no super-level awareness of what is not being immediately perceived of that dream-cosmos either (it's temporarily shut-down and replaced by the avatar's fleeting identity).

A dream isn't even a phenomenal representation (indirect realism) of either part of the brain or a world that exists within the brain in full, independent of the avatar's finite perceptions of particular scenes of it. Instead it's a reality concocted on the fly from stored concepts and memories (including a a loose, regulating template for the very idea of an external environment that the other "integrated-on-the-fly" events conform to).

In that respect the brain/dream situation vaguely resembles the Greeks' dichotomy of a sensible world and an intellectual world. The former produced by the transcendent forms of the latter (undetectable to the embodied versions of conscious agents, other than the supposed capture of "metempirical objects" by reason in the form of linguistic placeholders, which was really just speculative activity). Forms / general ideas whose synthesis somehow engendered that realm of particulars which people resided in. However, it was a shared world of interpersonal manifestations which fell out of the phenomenal / noumenal dichotomy; whereas in a dream the circumstance is genuinely solipsistic. The appearances of other humans in a dream each lack correspondence to their own transcendent version of themselves (a sleeper or its brain).