Time & Mind: Was Einstein Wrong About Time?

What a monochromatic world it would be without such resources as the Essentia Foundation and its quorum of brilliant and informed thinkers. Thank you all.🧡

Thank you for hosting this conference. Though I am just a curious layman, I find that these inquiries and discussions add value to all of us even if I am just barely able to understand the ideas presented. It leaves me in awe and stretches my mind

Time as a Superposition in Higher Dimensions: This notion suggests that our perception of time as a linear progression may be an oversimplification of a more complex reality. Instead of time unfolding linearly as we experience it, it could exist in a superposition state within higher-dimensional spaces. In this view, time would not flow strictly from past to future but could encompass multiple potential timelines or configurations simultaneously. Elaboration: Consider time as a dimension similar to the three spatial dimensions we perceive, but with additional dimensions beyond our comprehension. In this framework, time could exist in a superposition of states, analogous to how quantum particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed. From our limited perspective, we perceive time as progressing linearly, but in higher-dimensional reality, time may exhibit a more intricate structure, encompassing multiple possibilities and configurations.

The inconsistency and uniqueness of Smolin’s slides is truly a work of art 😂

In realms where physics intertwines with thought, Where time's elusive dance is deeply wrought, The scholars gather, minds ablaze, to ponder, The mysteries of time, its spell we're under. Einstein's legacy, a towering might, Yet shadows linger, questions taking flight, Was he mistaken, in his grasp of time's embrace? Or does the truth reside in a subtler space? Newton's clockwork universe, precise and grand, With time as a river, flowing at its hand, But relativity whispers, bending the stream, A dance of spacetime, in a cosmic dream. Quantum mysteries, where particles entwine, In a dance of uncertainty, where time may redefine, Do they hold the key to consciousness's sway, Or is there more to time than we dare say? The second law, a decree of entropy's reign, A arrow of time, flowing against the grain, Yet within our minds, does time find its home, A subjective journey, where moments roam? Idealism's gaze, casting shadows long, Philosophical ponderings, a timeless song, Neurophysics, psychology, the mind's terrain, In search of answers, through each winding lane. Essentia Foundation, a beacon bright, Guiding seekers through the depths of night, In the convergence of minds, a symphony plays, Time and consciousness, in an endless maze. So let us journey, with open minds unfurled, Exploring the mysteries of this time-bound world, For in the union of science and thought, we find, The essence of existence, in the tapestry of Time and Mind.

Maybe consciousness originates in a higher or lower dimension and so it may not be included in our theory of everything in our dimension. And maybe time is actually in a superposition in a higher dimension and we perceive it linear in ours.

All truth is relative and dynamical. Change is absolutely fundamental. Patterns of change ( in magnitude and angle) manifest in infinite dimensions as energy, matter, consciousness, and the passage of time. The world of everyday experience is , given the constraints, a three - dimensional sum over histories in the infinite.

The Escher hands imply that the experiencer creates the experience that is then experienced in a recursive loop out of which reality rises.

Bernardo, Thank you. You have my sincere respect and gratitude for the work you have done. You have made a tremendous impact on my understanding of important philosophical concepts concerning the nature of reality.

An interesting aside to the specious time idea is the great American baseball player who claimed back in the 40's, when he played the game, that time "slowed down for him to the point that he could see the rotation of the ball as it approached and could react to it in ways that others couldn't. Interestingly he claimed to be able to smell the impact of the ball against the bat the horsehide of the ball striking his bat. Many have claimed he was full of it, but there is little doubt he was most likely the greatest hitter of all time. And perhaps his explanation is an example of this phenomena.

The issue of 'separate identity' and the fundamental privacy of personal experience in the context of that which is inaccessible and internal is addressed in the work on 'quantum information' by Federico Faggin and G Mauro D'Ariano which also has deep implications for an understanding of time as a fundamental mediator of trans-action within the hidden relational realm of the quantum substratum. Which can be found in a paper titled 'Hard Problem and Free Will: an information-theoretical approach' co-authored by Faggin and D'Ariano which incorporates quantum information.

I’m sooooo happy these conversations are happening! I just wish they had been when I was in academia years ago and I had been a part of it! So grateful to the Essentia Foundation for putting this out there to keep us all thinking and wondering and delighting in the journey!

This is so good, many thanks. Keeping Don Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup in the wings, ready for the next one....hopefully...

The challenge of dealing with time is to recognize there is a fundamental distinction between a materialistic/nominalistic worldview with which one can associate the function of the left cerebral hemisphere and is a form of time which is synchronic and 'chronotic' and, effectively, spatialized, as Henri Bergson would argue, versus a form of time that is fundamentally relational, intersubjective, qualitative, diachronic and 'kairotic' and is associated with the function of the 'relationally-oriented' right cerebral hemisphere. The former 'chronotic' time is 'the time of the physicist' is quantitative and numerical involving the counting of oscillations of a physical system that is a stable oscillator--it exists but it is linear, and it is NOT continuous NOR is it real. The latter form of 'kairotic' time, associated with Bergson's 'La Durée', however, is relational, intersubjective, and it IS continuous, circular, AND it IS real.

The relationship between mind and time is simple. Time is a measurement of difference. That’s why time is set by an atomic clock and we have time zones for light but not other things. Time itself is just the measurement of the differences between each other. The mind is grown differences through experiences and such. The mind grows its folds in relation to the differences absorbed by our sensors. Those folds are the neurons and the differences grown into our body/difference. These folds influence the body and the body manipulated reality to find things within the connections of differences. So time and mind are similar because the differences and connections that build both of them.

Why do we corroborate each other’s experience? Under classical physics, the simplest explanation was that mentality is a map of physical territory. With QM, the Born Rule, Bell’s inequality, the invocation of internal symmetries in abstract Hilbert space, etc, this hypothesis of a physical world to explain our mutual corroboration is the no longer the simplest one; in fact it's become impossibly complicated (many worlds etc). Maybe QM suggests that we’ve been confusing the map and the territory. Maybe the realm of Mind/Qualia/Experience is the territory, and QM is the map, and then there’s no remaining impetus to invoke anything physical/objective at all. I suspect the mathematical models of physics are the best-yet attempt for predicting our mutual corroborations/constraints in a purely mental domain, and that's it. I wonder more people don’t entertain this “zero worlds” idea. This view is entirely scientific, if you reframe science as the most sophisticated and rigorous method for prediction of experience, rather than any description of a "natural world".

I enjoyed = The Setting of the talk felt very traditional and was welcoming and warming. The Guests where amazing and every one was epic and information presented in the time given was amazingly compacted by each guest very well, finally the topic did center on TIME but I was happy it felt very investigative and thus not to dismiss all areas of our reality, like philosophy, psychology, physics, and so many more subjects involved it was great!

I so much appreciate these presentations and discussion. It further confirms what I’ve come to suspect about the fundamental nature of existence. One point of confusion though, is the concept of an evolving block universe. In the Einsteinian view, isn’t "block time" also part of the model? Evolution implies a process that unfolds over time, which wouldn’t square with an eternal, timeless “Now”. This might be resolved in the Idealist position that the Block is that inaccessible domain behind Bernardo’s frequent analogy of a dashboard, and it is simply our experience or “view” (Smollin?) that evolves. Perhaps this is also what Bernard Carr refers to as an additional dimension? At any rate, I look foreward to watching this again!

could an electromagnetic field expand space away, sending back photons (light) as it does? in pulling the past away, expansion of space makes room for future?

might branching in quantum time be based on conscious experience rather than choice?