quantum physics says reality only exsists in the past

while doing some research on quantum physics and astrophysics i was confronted with a very intruiging notion. It takes an amount of time for a photon to reflect off of an object and reach your eye and then another amount of time to go from your eye to a consious visualization of the sensory input. If we consider this notion to be "true" then does it stand to reason that we are actually seeing the "micro-past". If this is the case then you must wonder about a staggering implication. That being that there is in fact no physical objective reality in the present moment because the only thing that actually exsists in the "moment" is consiousness itself, and physical reality only exists micro seconds ago.

i dont know if this is really clear enough to understand where im coming from with this hypothesisll post back later if anyone has questions or thoughts on this idea.



[edit on 1-9-2008 by constantwonder]

It is clear, and sounds logical as well.
Just remember, time is a man made dimension (imo), because we require duration in order to observe action/reaction and process it.
This is my speculation, but logic requires not time, it is instant because the paths are routed according to the variables. We are the ones that need time in order to experience an abservation of it.

Sounds weird I know, hehe..

Say for instance you have a ball thrown at you. You reach out and catch the ball. The fact is though that it took a micro-second for that information to be passed through your eyes and to be processed by your brain and yet your body reacted in real-time. This indicates that the mind has some sort of 'forward-perception', an ability to see ahead into time in order to anticipate reactions and movements.

[edit on 1/9/2008 by Kryties]

reply to post by Kryties

No, intuitive ballastics will do it.

The OP is correct, but what does this have to do with quantum mechanics? It seems pretty Newtonian to me.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by Kryties

 

No, intuitive ballastics will do it.

Care to elaborate?

Im not being nasty I'm genuinely interested. Its a topic which Ive wanted to look more into for quite some time but never had the time to.

reply to post by constantwonder

Yeah, this is true.. even measuring something in real-time (down to a yactosecond) is still a past observation. So effectively, we are *always* seeing the past.

reply to post by Kryties

Care to elaborate?

Sure. It's not particularly esoteric or exciting, though.

Catching a thrown object (say a ball) is a learned skill. You learn to track the ball in flight, calculate its trajectory and place your hand or hands at some point along the trajectory before the ball gets there, or at least no later. The skill involves anticipation in any event; you put your hands where you calculate the ball will be in the future, not where your senses tell you the ball is now.

Sure, the ball isn't where your senses tell you it is now. It has moved further along that trajectory by the time the message reaches your brain. But that's irrelevant, because your brain has already computed the ball's future trajectory (using tracking data from your eyes, not precognition) and placed your hands in the appropriate position. The time lag ball-eye-brain-hand is automatically calculated for and taken account of in the process. How does your brain do that? Through trial and error. Practice makes perfect; until you learn to compensate for that time-lag, you'll keep dropping the ball.

It's ballastics, but it ain't rocket science.

reply to post by Astyanax


Ahh of course, I know what you are saying. I was thrown by the 'Intuitive Ballistics' though Ive never heard it called that.

Makes for some interesting thinking if you apply that logic to the people who can supposed catch an arrow shot from a bow or crossbow. I guess if you practice it enough you become intuitive, but unlike learning to catch a ball I really wouldn't be too comfortable on my first attempt trying to catch an arrow!

what does it have to do with quanum physics..... it has to do with quantum physics because its dealing with the nature of light and consiousness (a "packet" of light being a quantu) what i would really like to get to the bottom of is what exsists in the exact present moment of exsistance knowing observation takes time and particles are collapsed out of a wave function into a point particle simply by the act of observation then does anything actually exsist in the present other than consiousness and sheer probability?

on a side note on the observer line here is another interesting thought. (physics ahtes the idea of consiousness having any role, but im afraid they are being forced to account for it). Considering the notion that we actually observe a fraction of a second into the past and things exsist as a probability wave (exsists in all possible states simultaneously) until observed and we observe it fractions of a second ago then everything is actually constantly in a state of decoherance in the actual present. all we see is one possible configuration of an object as it was micro seconds ago. Would it be possible to ever actually observe (with something other than our human sences) the "present" in its state of decoherance and if so what would that be like ><

oi my brain hurts its all so strange and hard to rap your mind around

You thoughts are fixated upon light. There are other senses. Like touch.
All the senses lag behind the inputs. The instantiation of any inputs defines the present. There must be a present for us to lag behind so the present is self evident.

The universe must impinge upon the senses for there to be awareness.

You might argue that there is no future. This would be more rational.

The future does not yet exist, there is the present, there was the past. And we are always out of synch with the present. Always within the present, always reacting to past.

reply to post by constantwonder


What will really blow your mind is when you think about the fact that Time, in itself, is a man-made thing and therefore does not actually exist.

Fire an arrow at an apple. Film the arrow's journey with a high-speed camera. Select two sequential frames with the time between them being zero seconds.

Now, if time existed one would see the arrow not move between the two frames. Yet it does. So if no time actually passed in the space of these two frames, how did the arrow move?

haha thats an excellent point and it is kinda my belief that time is the 4th dimension of space/time.... Since we only live in 3 dimensions we arent aware of the 4th dimension of time and are merely seeing 3 dimension snap shots of our 4 dimensional selves.... In other words you already exist at deatch and still exsist at birth time is just the perception of the 3 dimensional snapshot of ones self here is an excellent little video that demonstrates this vary well and is only about 10 minutes and is well worth the watch

www.youtube.com...

Originally posted by constantwonder
while doing some research on quantum physics and astrophysics i was confronted with a very intruiging notion. It takes an amount of time for a photon to reflect off of an object and reach your eye and then another amount of time to go from your eye to a consious visualization of the sensory input. If we consider this notion to be "true" then does it stand to reason that we are actually seeing the "micro-past"........

[edit on 1-9-2008 by constantwonder]

This is very true, not only do we live a micro second behind, we also only see and sence what our brains tells us , not what our eyes see or ears here.

i saw a really good video on the topic the other day, i forget the youtube link but i will have a look, although ignore the last few minutes.

(its a really good video till about 2 minutes before the end it says everything is allah and turns into religious propegands... everything before that big is brilliant)


::edit - found it .. i think i watched it on google as it was one video, i found it on youtube in parts, part one seems to be teh good one, i wouldnent watch after that or you will get the religious mumbo jumbo.)

www.youtube.com...

[edit on 2-9-2008 by boaby_phet]

reply to post by constantwonder


Hey there constantwonder, I posted something along this line of thought in a similar thread of yours. I believe you are correct, I believe our consciousness is folded into space time. The brain is a biological quantum computer than can work in backwards time.
Stuart Hammeroff also shares this opinion, I recommend you check out Quantum Consciousness and any of his other research you can find, you may recognise him from "What the Bleep".

reply to post by constantwonder

what does it have to do with quanum physics..... it has to do with quantum physics because its dealing with the nature of light and consiousness (a "packet" of light being a quantum)

Well, the speed of light is the same whether you're talking about a quantum of light, aka a photon, or a lightwave propagating outward from the source. So there's really no specific appeal to quantum theory here.

what i would really like to get to the bottom of is what exists in the exact present moment of exsistance knowing observation takes time and particles are collapsed out of a wave function into a point particle simply by the act of observation

No problem. Just wait till the light reaches your eyes and you'll know exactly. No need to be impatient; light travels fast. Unless you're observing something at astronomical distances, you won't have to wait long.

then does anything actually exsist in the present other than consiousness and sheer probability?

Not only because the speed of light is finite but also because electrical impulses travel at finite (and much slower) speeds from our sensory organs to our brains, we can never know what is happening in the actual present. In fact, the more exactly you try to locate the present moment, the more elusive it becomes. There is really no such thing as 'the present'; it's just a cognitive and linguistic convenience.

Consciousness does not exist in the present, but in the past, as you imply in the OP.

And I seriously doubt that the world only exists because we're around to look at it. It's there all the time, whether we're watching or not.

physics hates the idea of consiousness having any role, but im afraid they are being forced to account for it.

I'm reading The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin. He makes the point that quantum mechanics, in spite of its great experimental success, is probably not a complete theory precisely because of this implied dependence on an observer to make any phenomen 'real'. He points out that the universe has existed for a lot longer than human beings have, indeed for longer than any kind of life could possibly have, so who then was the observer of all those ancient events? Who was watching the Big Bang?

Smolin feels it's likely that when a unified theory of physics finally emerges, it will account for all phenomena independent of the presence of any observer. I find his arguments persuasive.

That isn't to say that quantum theory is wrong; only that it is probably restricted in scope just as Newtonian mechanics is.

But of course, nobody really knows, one way or the other.


[edit on 2-9-2008 by Astyanax]

Always reacting to the past. Interesting.

So by taking in sensory from touch smell sight sound taste you are adding a delay to the perception of the present. The present can never be observed only the past. Taking away all perceptive senses you are left with your own thoughts, you are as close to the present as possible (but still not there)....does this not describe meditation? The only thing left in the delay of percieving the present is your neurological activity in the brain, take away that and you are dead? So is the moment of death your only encounter with the present?

Very fascinating topic.

reply to post by SectionEight

Taking away all perceptive senses you are left with your own thoughts, you are as close to the present as possible (but still not there)....does this not describe meditation?

I'm afraid not. Consciousness, as pointed out earlier, does not exist in the present. It exists in the past.

The research of Libet and others shows that our supposedly conscious decisions occur before we are conscious of them.

Libet's experiments suggest unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, therefore, little room remains for the operations of free will. If the brain has already taken steps to initiate an action before we are aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated.

Wikipedia

The idea that thought and action are voluntary is simply an illusion generated in the brain.

Libet's hypothesis was that conscious awareness is subjectively referred backwards in time. We consciously perceive the stimulus as occuring at the same moment it registers unconsciously, even though it doesn't in fact enter our awareness until it has persisted for half a second. Subjectively we backdate it to match the evoked potential at the beginning rather than the end of the 500 millisecond span.

ConsciousEntities

It is increasingly clear that consciousness is a projection of some sort caused by (and possibly no more than a by-product of) organic function. The self is an illusion and free will does not exist except in the most rudimentary sense.

More here, and much more here.

As for meditation, it's just a way of monkeying with brain function, no different in its operations from drugs, electrocortical stimulation or a bash on the head. I'm not saying it isn't beneficial under certain circumstances; but then, so is aspirin.

That's what I said, perception is as close to the present as you are going to get but still not there. Meditation blocks out sensory input so the only route to the past relative to you is in the synapses in your brain. The skeletal nervous system path is ignored as are exterior stimuli like sound waves and light.

What happens at the moment of death relative to your own perception? Death occurs in the past so do you never experience it? If you are dead in the past you cannot be to percieve the moment.

reply to post by SectionEight

The object of meditation is not to think: rather, it is to be open to all perceptual information without allowing oneself to be distracted by thinking about it. That is the very opposite of being 'alone with your thoughts'.

Besides, your thoughts (ie your mental processes) are not in the present; by the time you are conscious of them, they are already past.

Mechanically speaking reality of the moment would seem to exist only in the micro past, however I didn't make my point very clear as to an alternative so I'll try again. Within the neurons are even smaller structures called microtubules that are constantly active however they are switched off under anesthesia, so it's presumed that these microtubules are the mechanism for consciousness. Now it's possible that quantum events can occur at this level within the nueron, if so with superposition and entanglement then all bets are off.
Our seat of consciousness may actually sit in the micro future to compensate for the relatively sluggish brain processes, effectively placing us in the present.
Just a theory from greater minds than mine.

From the Quantum Consciousness site -

Brain activity correlating with perception apparently occurs too late (150 to 500 msecs after impingement on our sensory organs) to account for actions initiated or completed within 100 msec!

These include-
Preparation of spoken words responding to heard speech (Normal Conversation!)
Analysis of emotional content
Choice planning and execution of voluntary events
Hitting a baseball pitched at 90mph
etc...

[edit on 3-9-2008 by squiz]