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Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?
(www.scientificamerican.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Time is absolutely real. Physicists do not debate this with any merit. The book "The Secret" popularized the idea that physicists proved that time didn't exist but that book is cover-to-cover lies and mysticism.
The second law of thermodynamics has time as an integral component. If scientists didn't believe time existed or mattered, I doubt that'd be the case. There's lots and lots and lots of examples of this, that one is just the most poignant.
There's lots of things we don't understand about time, just like there's tons of things we don't understand about dark matter, gravity, and particle physics.
Ah, this old chestnut.
So what you're saying is nothing is real because it's all through our perceptions. So you do what? Ignore your senses? Ignore the reality and pretend it is what you want it to be? Curl up and die?
No. You exist through your senses and try to make sense of the world around you through them. All our senses (not yours, clearly) are telling us that time exists. Everything we experience and see is added to the catalogue of knowledge on how the universe works. And everything points to laws that indicate that time exists. We experience it and we see non-human matter experience it.
This is akin to saying gravity doesn't exist or the sun doesn't exist. Cool story, bro. Doesn't change a damn thing about how we live our lives. Can't float. Still need sunscreen. Time moves on.
All of our sense tell us that we exist in three dimensions, and yet the mathematics around black holes seems to suggest that all information can be encapsulated in only two dimensions. There was a theory I read about year ago, something about a "holographic universe" which put forth the idea that we technically are two dimensional, existing on the walls of the universe, but our senses interpret this as three-dimensional space.
The point being -- we already ready know it's a fact that we cannot always trust our senses, and that our senses can lie to us when struggling to make sense of the information. If we can't even be certain that we actually exist in three dimensions then you can't really discount the "possibility" that our conscience might be linked to something we're not aware of. Hell there are STILL people who claim gravity and a spherical Earth aren't real.
Time is absolutely real, but our perception of it is incredibly limited.