...I recently viewed a “Big Think” video on YouTube titled:
“Time: Do the past, present, and future exist all at once?” - (here’s the link: https://youtu.be/5vzymaIabWI).
In the video, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano, who is the author of the book:
“Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time”
...stated the following:
It is quite obvious that a so-called “block universe” in which it is proposed that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, is based on a purely materialistic view of reality.Dean Buonomano wrote: “...the standard view in physics is that...(and this comes in large part from relativity)...that we live in an ‘eternalist universe’ - in a ‘block universe’ in which the past, present, and future is equally real...”
And as is typical with hardcore materialism, it is a view that seems to completely ignore the possibility that mind and consciousness might actually reside in a context of reality that exists above and outside of the fabric of matter (i.e., above and outside of the informationally-based substance from which the “block” is formed).
Now with that being said, I suggest that the problem with thinking that the past and future of a human mind somehow exist within the fabric of a block universe, can be compared to thinking that the actual actors in the movie “Gone with the Wind,” somehow exist within the informationally-based etchings on the surface of a DVD of the movie.
In other words, the gist of eternalism and a block universe seems to imply that if you could somehow locate the correct field of information within the quantum underpinning of the universe and then somehow manage to interpolate yourself within that field,...
(kind of like jumping into a specific area of information on the DVD that represents an earlier scene in the story)
...you would then, in essence, be traveling back in time and thus be able to walk around in 1930s Hollywood and literally be able to interact with the actual living minds and consciousnesses of the long since dead humans - Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.
Now. assuming that I am interpreting the theory properly, does anyone here actually believe such nonsense is possible?
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(Btw, this DVD analogy is also a good way of visualizing the mind/body issue and the hard problem of consciousness.)
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