Hi Paul, thank you for sharing the link with me. It’s a great article, and very nicely written, btw.
I want to respond to some of Julian Barbour’s ideas directly, as his thoughts bring out some issues that exist in understanding what consciousness is.
Is it true that Barbour believes both that time is unreal and yet we can have change? He must only be talking about clocks accounting for time, which, like the proverbial moon reflected on the surface of water, are never changed even though they show the passage of clock time.
This is the only way, that I can see, that he can say that time is unreal, and is only an artifact of something he calls change, which in the clock example, is the movement of the hands over the time markers. But clock hands move, and that takes time! One can’t call the latter (movement) an illusion and the former (change) a reality — since they are the same thing. And, of course, you cannot ground an illusion on another illusion — that’s not explanation, that’s a magic card trick.
In my own case, I realized that by removing the unfounded assertions that we make about what time is, such as that it is infinite, and it is objective, and it is also relative, and it is something that all things exist in, so it is real, then we can see time for what it truly is: that which generally is called consciousness. After all, the things that we are aware of are the contents of consciousness, not something apart from us, like time is said to be.
And this brought me to the realization that consciousness and time are synonyms for the same thing (I’m speaking simply here), and the reason why there is a “hard problem” of consciousness, i.e., that there is a question of why there is consciousness at all — a question that presumes that it is a biological phenomenon, just to further confuse ourselves — is because we look for it outside ourselves, while having carefully hidden it from ourselves behind a screen of unimpeachable belief in a theatre called Time & Eternity in which everything happens.
And what is even sillier is that failing to find consciousness in our organism because we have stolen everything it is and hidden those attributes “out there” as “time,” some even start saying that consciousness doesn’t exist — it must be just an illusion that has some kind of biological benefit! Absurd. An illusion is something that we are conscious of, or it isn’t an illusion.
The reliance on the zoetropic (cinematic) effect is really sloppy thinking because it still relies on the Time & Eternity theatre for things to happen in — i.e., flashing images one after the other creating the effect of motion, still assumes time in which to flash the cards, transitioning from one to another, as well as a conscious observer who will not only be conscious of the images, but whose particular psychology will link the changing images on the cards to create the “illusion” of motion — all of which requires time.
It doesn’t patch up the sloppiness of that thinking if we merely call the images “nows” rather than “cards” (a descriptive word that harks back to the old zoetrope machines at carnivals, where you would crank a handle to move a sequence of cards past your vision, creating motion, which is now automated as digital images flashed on a screen).
He is on to something, though, by introducing Plato’s ideas (forms) into the mix. Plato himself argued that reality must be a nondual whole AND that the appearances (on the cave wall in his metaphor) are the actual proof of this. I’ve never found anyone who seems to have written about understanding him on this point — other than Plotinus — and in fact, his argument was introduced to me at university as “an overly complex argument for how one can say something that is partially true and partially false.” I wrote about his explanation in “Platonic Nonduality And The Entanglement Of Ontogenetic Forms.”
I think the primary problem that physicists are trying to explain is why their mathematical formula don’t show any preference for sequencing the unfolding of phenomena — the so-called “arrow of time” problem — and so their solution is to claim that time isn’t real, and thus their problem is solved because they foisted it off on the psychologists, who have to now explain why our brains show a preference to order things in one direction, rather than the other.
But perhaps the problem of the “arrow of time” is in the structure of their maths, rather than in reality… but since it has been agreed that Math rules reality, we will have to wait for a sufficient number of funerals to occur — something Max Plank said — before some future mathematician has an intuition that the problem lies in our current understanding of reality, and thus the math that it is described with.
I haven’t yet said how all these “pointing out” arguments in the dialogs of the Proem of Tranquillity’s Secret come together. It’s actually very simple, which of course, makes understanding it very hard.
If my point about mind-training being beneficial for something beyond stress reduction and weight loss is true, then you can understand why I have to suggest that my “wrapping things up” has to come after the mind-training has its expected effect (or at least after the practices are explained first).
Thanks again for the link ☺️
