Time and Consciousness are the same thing

Actually what Einstein meant is that there is no "present".

Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

A very Tralfamadorian outlook.

edit on 9/2/2012 by Phage because: (no reason given)

Hmm... I'm thinking Einstein was saying there was *only* the present.

Is that what you intended to say here?

Originally posted by neoholographic
Consciousness is converted to Time below C (speed of light). This separation manifest itself through E=MC2.

What this means is that everything is just one now. Einstein said the distinction between past, present and future is a persistent illusion. This means from the point of view of light, everything is just one now. When things are in motion below C, then they're chopped up moments of this one now.

So Time is Consciousness experiencing these chopped up pieces of now. Time occurs because of the illusion of separation from the now via quantum fluctuations.

Each moment is an independent piece of now. We just connect these moments as past, present and future because we experience these chopped up pieces of now one after the other.

So Conscious Energy is all that exists and it becomes expressed as time, space and matter via quantum fluctuations.

With respect, what you say here does not make sense. Consciousness is undefined in physics, and in fact in any science of which I am aware. It's an intangible. Nowhere is there any evidence that consciousness - whatever it may be - is equivalent to time.

You speak of us experiencing things "one after another." "After" implies time. What you are apparently trying to do is to describe a possibly valid scenario (the illusory nature of time) using ordinary language that is inherently embedded in time.

You throw around terms like "quantum fluctuation" as though you understood them, which I know is not the case, because not even quantum physicists understand them. As Richard Feynman said, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." As I'm sure you know, Feynman was a theoretical physicist.

You might be onto something with the thought that time is an illusion. Aside from findings in physics, many mystics and philosophers throughout the ages have made similar claims. There may be something to that. But trying to cram this idea into Relativity or Quantum Theory is futile.

As for C, well... so far, physicists know of only two situations concerning C. What travels at C always travels at C. What doesn't travel at C never travels at C. Any non-C speed is relative. Different observers will measure non-C speeds differently, depending on their frame of reference. Observers will all agree on the speed of light, though.

The mass-energy equation has nothing to do with consciousness. It has to do with the equivalence between energy and mass. Energy is measured in joules; mass in kilograms; C^2 in meter^2/second^2. Nowhere is there any room for consciousness. Nowhere is consciousness implicit in the equation. The two simply have no connection.

reply to post by chr0naut

but merely that our particular perceptual 'window' on the timeline is an illusion.

My son asked me the other day why others think of time on a line and not a circle.....

I told him that's a good question and have wondered that myself.

Can it not be a circle?

It would have to be if history continuously repeats itself.

The mass-energy equation has nothing to do with consciousness. It has to do with the equivalence between energy and mass. Energy is measured in joules; mass in kilograms; C^2 in meter^2/second^2. Nowhere is there any room for consciousness. Nowhere is consciousness implicit in the equation. The two simply have no connection.

reply to post by baruch60610


Their roots connect them though, or so I think.

Originally posted by bluemooone2
reply to post by Phage

 

Phage , I think that I agree with you here, but I have to at least ask one thing.
Has there ever been any scientific evidence for what was once called the Aether , and is it possible that the idea has merit and is just something that we have not discovered yet?

www.levashov.info...

It goes into depth on the false altars of science and Einstein's access to other people's work in the patent office, but it also names someone who should be considered one of America's most famous physcists, Dayton C. Miller (1866-1941).

He began his experiments in 1902 and finished them in 1926. For these experiments he created an interferometer with a general trajectory for the beam of light of 64 meters. This was the most accurate interferometer in the world at that time and at least three times more sensitive than the interferometer used in the Michelson-Morley’s experiments.

Interferometer data were taken at different times of the day and at different times of the year. Miller performed more than 200,000 observations and made more than 12,000 turns of the interferometer. He periodically brought the interferometer to the top of Wilson’s mountain (6,000 feet above sea level), where, as he had supposed, the speed of ether wind was greater.

And now let us look at what the facts tell us.

On the one hand, we have the Michelson-Morley’s experiments, which altogether were performed for 6 hours, during 4 days, with 36 turns of the interferometer.

And on the other hand, we have experimental data recorded by the interferometer over a period of 24 years, with the device being turned 12,000 times! At the same time, Miller’s interferometer was 3 times more sensitive! These are the facts.

But perhaps Einstein and Co. were unaware of these results, or they didn’t read scientific journals and remained deluded? They perfectly well knew everything. Dayton Miller wrote letters to Einstein. In one of them he reported on his work of 22 years that confirmed the presence of an ether drift. Einstein replied very skeptically and demanded proofs, which were given to him, whereupon there was no answer forthcoming.

We can understand why there was no answer after they had received Miller’s experimental data. However, the most curious thing is that the positive results about the ether drift were registered even in the earlier Michelson-Morley’s experiments, but were "simply" ignored. After Miller’s death in 1941, his work was "simply" forgotten; nobody has ever published it in scientific journals—as if this scientist never existed. But he was one of the greatest American physicists.

So I would have to say, YES THERE WAS. AND IT WAS IGNORED.

Science took a road supporting theories, that for the main part, have been disproved. There became a "practical" slave science, but not the kind that shoots for the stars and starts to solve mysteries.

The oil industry and religious heirarchy joined ranks in creating a false paradigm and a finite universe, out of infinity.

Profit and Greed has prevented the energy and abundance and progression of all people equally. Which is why they did this, and the Christians got there, God created the universe at the moment of the Big Bang, when no such event occurred. And studying red shift proves that.

www.orgonelab.org...

Some quotes:

"The effect [of ether-drift] has persisted throughout. After considering all the possible sources of error, there always remained a positive effect." — Dayton Miller (1928, p.399)

and

"I believe that I have really found the relationship between gravitation and electricity, assuming that the Miller experiments are based on a fundamental error. Otherwise, the whole relativity theory collapses like a house of cards." — Albert Einstein, in a letter to Robert Millikan, June 1921 (in Clark 1971, p.328)

and

"You imagine that I look back on my life's work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track." — Albert Einstein, on his 70th birthday, in a letter to Maurice Solovine, 28 March 1949 (in B. Hoffman Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel 1972, p.328)

We've really been had!!! Miller successfully proved his theory, and Relativity should have collapsed like a house of cards, strangely it didn't. A whole lot of money was involved in maintaining the House of Lies!

So much pain and suffering, environmental damage, radiation everywhere, BP and Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Billions starving and genocide as the way Murder Incorporated operates.

And for what, a tiny group has ultimate power and ultimate wealth.

And they butchered scientific process as well.

Originally posted by MamaJ

The mass-energy equation has nothing to do with consciousness. It has to do with the equivalence between energy and mass. Energy is measured in joules; mass in kilograms; C^2 in meter^2/second^2. Nowhere is there any room for consciousness. Nowhere is consciousness implicit in the equation. The two simply have no connection.

reply to post by baruch60610

 

Their roots connect them though, or so I think.

Not at all, in my opinion. Or I should say, no more than any other two entities - cats and nuclear fusion, for example. In this Universe, I believe all is connected. However, there is no particular connection between consciousness and the mass-energy equivalence equation.

Of course (playing devil's advocate against myself) - the equation (apparently) required someone's consciousness in order to be developed or recognized. But that's pretty thin...

Time and consciousness are NOT the same thing at all! Let me give you a perfect example of why this statement is all shot full of holes.

Lets say that you are walking down the street one day, and a bloody great coconut falls out of the sky, and bashes you squarely on the head. You go down, out for the count. Lets say you end up in a coma for what... two years? You have been utterly unconscious, the whole blasted time, and yet the date is still two years later than you think it ought to be, and you have still very many library fines to pay.

Ergo time and consciousness cannot be the same thing, because time can pass without anyone ever being conscious of it.

People are quoting Einstein out of context.

Let me set up the quote. Einstein's friend Michele Besso had died. Einstein sent a letter to his family and it said this.

"Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion"

The context of the quote is death. So why did he say this to his friends family? He meant that there will not be any flow or passage of time between Besso's death and his death. This passage of time was just an illusion.

This has to be the case because of the speed of light. From the point of view of light, everything is just one now. Below the speed of light, this one now becomes many nows.

Just think about what he said. We depend on the passage of time for everything. Whether it's planting a crop or rushing to get to work on time. Yet Einstein says this passage of time that we build our life around is just an illusion.

So what is time absent the distinction between past, present and future? What is death if there's no passage of time?

Absent the illusion of the separation of time, what we call time is a singular consciousness. This singular now becomes many chopped up moments of now which we call time.

Again, this has to be the case and Einstein recognized this.

Things like entropy and our brains give us the illusion of a distinction between past, present and future.

Time absent the past, present and future is consciousness. Consciousness experiencing the illusion of the past, present and future is time.

I knew someone would bring up the Richard Feynman quote that nobody understands quantum mechanics. That's makes no sense because Feynman said this in 1965. This is 2012 and we have a better understanding of quantum mechanics.

So you have to look at why and when Einstein made this statement. It wasn't some abstract comment. It was directed towards Besso's family at his death.

Originally posted by neoholographic
People are quoting Einstein out of context.

Let me set up the quote. Einstein's friend Michele Besso had died. Einstein sent a letter to his family and it said this.

"Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion"

The context of the quote is death. So why did he say this to his friends family? He meant that there will not be any flow or passage of time between Besso's death and his death. This passage of time was just an illusion.

He didn't say the passage of time was an illusion. According to relativity the passage of time does occur within a given frame of reference. It's when you try to compare the time in one reference frame to another reference frame that "the distinction between past, present and future" becomes complicated. You are twisting his words. He is referring to simultaneity and this puts the quote in the context of his relativity theory:

Present

Special Relativity's "present"

It follows from Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity that there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity. When care is taken to operationalise "the present", it follows that the events that can be labeled as "simultaneous" with a given event, can not be in direct cause-effect relationship. Such collections of events are perceived differently by different observers. Instead, when focusing on "now" as the events perceived directly, not as a recollection or a speculation, for a given observer "now" takes the form of the observer's past light cone. The light cone of a given event is objectively defined as the collection of events in causal relationship to that event, but each event has a different associated light cone. One has to conclude that in relativistic models of physics there is no place for "the present" as an absolute element of reality. Einstein phrased this as: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion".

Originally posted by baruch60610
I think there is at least one very simple answer to that. If time is an illusion caused by consciousness, then there *was* no "first appearance" of consciousness. No time, no five billion years ago, no problem.

I strongly disagree with the OP's claims, but the objection you offered isn't enough to disprove what he said.

Did I claim to have proven or disproven anything? I merely asked some questions to clarify the hypothesis.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Nope it doesn't.

First this is someone's interpretation of what Einstein said and the quote is thrown on at the bottom of the statement out of context from Wikipedia. It says'"Einstein phrased this as: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion".

Einstein didn't make this comment in any abstract way. Einstein was specifically talking about his friend's death. Let's look at the quote directly from Einstein again.

"Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion"

People love to take this quote out of context because they don't like what Einstein was saying.

He said, now that Besso has departed this strange world ahead of me, THIS MEANS NOTHING!

This isn't something abstract, this is crystal clear and specific.

Besso dying ahead of him means nothing. This is because the distinction between the past, present and future is an illusion. This has to be the case because of the speed of light.

So you can't tack on this quote at the end of your opinion because it's not in context with what Einstein was saying. This was specific to his friends death not to anyone's opinion of Relativity.

Einstein said in a book Relativity in 1952:

Since there exist in this four dimensional structure [space-time] no longer any sections which represent "now" objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.

Again, he said four dimensional existence and not the evolution of three dimensional existence. So in this four dimensional reality, there isn't any three dimensional existence that objectively represents "now." This is because everything that's occurs in a three dimensional existence happens "now" in a four dimensional reality.

Exactly what I have been saying.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by baruch60610
I think there is at least one very simple answer to that. If time is an illusion caused by consciousness, then there *was* no "first appearance" of consciousness. No time, no five billion years ago, no problem.

I strongly disagree with the OP's claims, but the objection you offered isn't enough to disprove what he said.

Did I claim to have proven or disproven anything? I merely asked some questions to clarify the hypothesis.

You omitted the quote I was responding to. It was:

So, did time exist before there was consciousness (for example, before the Earth was born 5 billion years ago)?

When do you think consciousness first appeared on Earth? Was there time before that?

I interpreted your questions as a rhetorical device to challenge the OP's post. Rhetorical questions are a common way of making an implicit statement. In fact, unless I am sadly mistaken, your question in this post is a rhetorical question. You asked, "Did I claim to have proven or disproven anything?" I interpret this to be an implicit statement: "I did not claim to have proven or disproven anything."

OK, my understanding of your original questions was incorrect. It was an honest mistake. I apologize if my error caused you to become upset. That was not my intent.

Originally posted by neoholographic

I knew someone would bring up the Richard Feynman quote that nobody understands quantum mechanics. That's makes no sense because Feynman said this in 1965. This is 2012 and we have a better understanding of quantum mechanics.

Of course someone brought up the quote. It is as valid today as it was when Feynman said it.

The problem with understanding Quantum Mechanics isn't going to vanish because we've had a few more years to understand it. Certainly we've gotten a much better handle on it mathematically. Feynman's comment was based on the utterly alien nature of quantum behavior as compared to ordinary experience, and not on the lack of mathematical tools to understand it.

But let's grant your point. Let's agree that physicists now understand Quantum Mechanics much better than during Feynman's time. Even so, the quote was tangential to the point I was trying to make, which was that efforts to grasp Quantum Theory without mathematics are hopelessly doomed. We (meaning non-physicists) are no closer to grasping Quantum Mechanics now, than we were when Feynman made his statement.

In fact, we are at best only slightly ahead of where we were when Socrates was busy drinking hemlock. The Greek philosophers raised many of the questions that quantum physicists are facing. Quantum Mechanics has served to rub their noses in the fact that the Greeks' questions have never been answered. We're still struggling with them.

Originally posted by MamaJ
reply to post by chr0naut

 

but merely that our particular perceptual 'window' on the timeline is an illusion.

My son asked me the other day why others think of time on a line and not a circle.....

I told him that's a good question and have wondered that myself.

Can it not be a circle?

It would have to be if history continuously repeats itself.

edit on 3-9-2012 by MamaJ because: (no reason given)

MamaJ i think your son's question is very perceptive. Questions like this, that break out of the "accepted" view of the universe and view it differently are likely to be the catalyst for true scientific progress.

Although historical events seemingly repeat, the time against which they are measured seems linear, but this linearity is also more a general principle because we know that space-time can be distorted. When this distortion is along the dimension of time, we call it 'time dilation' (which has been verified through experiment and observation).

However, in 1949 the mathematician Kurt Gödel also found a particular solution for General Relativistic (GR) equations where time was curved in such a way that the curve was closed in a loop, which would imply that any'thing' on that particular 'time-curve' would repeat forever, always continuing back to its starting point. Since then, we have found other solutions that also allow for these 'closed time-like curves' (CTC's). These solutions are, so far, unverifiable experimentally so they may not actually exist in the real world.

The reason we speak of a timeline is probably mostly due to the concept of time being the fourth spatial dimension. To explain this, Einstein noted that the upper limit for movement was the speed of light, at approximately 299,792,458 meters/second. By inference then the limiting distance for anything to move in one second is 299,792,458 meters. So we can say that one second is equal to 299,792,458 meters! This means that we can measure all four dimensions in Minkowski space-time in the same units and would imply that the time dimension is just as flat and linear as the other spatial dimensions. The apparent discrepancies implied by time dilation are more due to the resizing of the ruler rather than an issue with the time dimension itself.

reply to post by Sly1one

You could take almost anything and say that its the same thing as consciousness...you have to be conscious to perceive it and know that it even exits...

Maybe thats because everything is consciousness...

I like to say.

there is no "time".
well. sure, theres "time" but we are traveling through time and space.
man's perception of time is built off of the rotation of the earth with the sun.

now, Imagine that you're in solitary confinement for 12 hours.
okay, now Imagine that you're out with your friends having fun for 12 hours.
which will feel longer?
"time" is just your perception.

sure, that excuse won't work when you're late for work, but really, we had to create out own "perception" of time with the sun dial.

just my 2 cents.

Embracing non-linear time is, imo, a first step. In an agreed upon reality, which consists of observing change, exclusively, the options for consciousness are extremely limited.

Time travel, initially, seems fantastical. A second look, based on ancient prophecies (and how could these guys have known this?), might entertain it. A third look, based on repeating celestial cycles, puts it in the dumpster again. A fourth look, based on an evolutionary consciousness, might revive it although consider that an evolved consciousness could be a transcendent consiousness placing it outside of motion and giving it the option to view motion as apparent motion or even as all apparent motion from the first change to the last and all changes in between.

The triviality of studying motion/change at all then becomes apparent. Although in that useless moment, the creation, as art, is manifest. And the practicality of simulated time as a medium for the evolution or even birth of consciousness.

Originally posted by Phage

Einstein said the distinction between past, present and future is a persistent illusion. This means from the point of view of light, everything is just one now.

Actually what Einstein meant is that there is no "present".

Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

A very Tralfamadorian outlook.

edit on 9/2/2012 by Phage because: (no reason given)

So you know what Einstein actually meant? Unbelievable.

reply to post by Astyanax

Gosh.

I thought my post might be a little hard for some to understand, but I didn't expect it to be – apart from one little star by some kind person – utterly ignored. Does no-one care to address the possibilities and questions I raised? Does all discussion of physics on ATS have to be confined to E = mc^2 and the double-slit experiment (and pseudoscientific romance notions like 'ether exists!')?

Feeling a little under-appreciated here...