I'm not sure how I ever got by thinking that the world was a relatively simply place. It isn't. Not even the ergonomics of the chair I'm sitting in are simple. There's fascinating, and brain numbing, data, almost everywhere.
One minor thought, though, that has intrigued me lately, is this. At any given moment, all of the stuff we take as part of lived reality, like the way our buildings look, the way our faces look to one another, the historical contingencies that created all sorts of language, and our expectations about all of this, can be, if you will, frozen. At any given moment, none of them exist in that they only exist, and know how to exist, through time.
So while it is not revelatory to say that absent time, our reality looks odd, it is strange to play the mental game that freezes time and asks how things look absent all of our expectations about what is on the cusp of happening.
"At any given moment, all of the stuff we take as part of lived reality, can be, if you will, frozen. At any given moment, none of them exist in that they only exist, and know how to exist, through time."
ReplyDeleteThis is tricky (but not impossible) stuff to reason about. I take issue with some of your statements though. First, I don't think you can really "freeze" reality in time, even as a thought experiment. There is no global clock that shows correct time for the entire universe; events that are simultaneous in one frame of reference may not be in another (that's relativity); so whenever you're talking about "freezing" something in time you have to answer the question: freeze with respect to which observer? I claim that "playing the mental game that freezes time" (i.e. imagining that time stops) is an incoherent notion. When you imagine time stopping, you are imagining a motionless universe, frozen relative to a still-moving clock hidden outside: your own mind, counting the seconds of the freeze. So time is not really frozen. The actual freezing of time would have to involve the entire universe, including your own thought processes, "coming to a halt." But this is also incoherent--you couldn't possibly tell that time in the entire universe stopped because then all clocks in the universe would have stopped too so you couldn't measure time.
More thoughts on this soon, but you're right, I meant: IF I were God.
ReplyDeleteNot even God could do this, because it contradicts the laws of physics. There is no global "now".
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