Psience Quest

Yesterday, M was watching a video in which somebody spoke about eternity as a quality rather than a length of time.  At first I thought they were trying too hard to be clever but then I remembered thoughts that I have had concerning time and whether or not it is really linear.  Many physicists think not.

https://www.space.com/29859-the-illusion-of-time.html

Quote:"We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Max Tegmark, "or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens [‘block universe’] — and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there's nothing that's changing; it's all just there — past, present, future.

"So life is like a movie, and space-time is like the DVD," he added; "there's nothing about the DVD itself that is changing in any way, even though there's all this drama unfolding in the movie. We have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn't yet exist, and that things are changing. But all I'm ever aware of is my brain state right now. The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories."

This might explain many things such as prophecy, ghosts or even the illusion of reincarnation.  It might explain those moments of timelessness we experience when we stop thinking analytically and just "be."  Maybe that is what eternity is really all about - not living forever, but living outside space-time and experiencing it as forever.

It seems I'm finding a lot of science on this theme so maybe this thread is in the wrong forum but I would like to discuss implications philosophically.  Here is a little QM for now:

Quote:Then in 1983, the theorists Don Page and William Wootters came up with a novel solution based on the quantum phenomenon of entanglement. This is the exotic property in which two quantum particles share the same existence, even though they are physically separated.
Entanglement is a deep and powerful link and Page and Wootters showed how it can be used to measure time. Their idea was that the way a pair of entangled particles evolve is a kind of clock that can be used to measure change.
But the results depend on how the observation is made. One way to do this is to compare the change in the entangled particles with an external clock that is entirely independent of the universe. This is equivalent to god-like observer outside the universe measuring the evolution of the particles using an external clock.
In this case, Page and Wootters showed that the particles would appear entirely unchanging—that time would not exist in this scenario.
But there is another way to do it that gives a different result. This is for an observer inside the universe to compare the evolution of the particles with the rest of the universe. In this case, the internal observer would see a change and this difference in the evolution of entangled particles compared with everything else is an important a measure of time.
This is an elegant and powerful idea. It suggests that time is an emergent phenomenon that comes about because of the nature of entanglement. And it exists only for observers inside the universe. Any god-like observer outside sees a static, unchanging universe, just as the Wheeler-DeWitt equations predict.

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blo...d3dc850933

(2022-01-18, 03:21 PM)Brian Wrote: [ -> ]This might explain many things such as prophecy, ghosts or even the illusion of reincarnation.  It might explain those moments of timelessness we experience when we stop thinking analytically and just "be."  Maybe that is what eternity is really all about - not living forever, but living outside space-time and experiencing it as forever.

Very interesting. Traditional metaphysics viewed eternity and the completely objective level of reality as sitting atop a vertical hierarchy. One thus reached enlightenment or non-being or heaven via a process of ascent, by moving out of subjective existence and into contact with the infinite.



Evolutionary thinking took the vertical hierarchy and collapsed it onto the horizontal plane. Our salvation or perfection or utopia now lies sometime out in the future. 

Apart from taking the existence of perfection out of the present and shifting it into a hypothetical point on a temporal arrow, such thinking has made it difficult for us to conceive of eternity as anything other than a horizontal plane in which one can move infinitely to the left (past) or right (future). Whereas the truth, like you suggest, may be closer to William Blake's infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.