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Originally posted by masta12d
paint a portrait of what our world really looks like without all these filters?
Originally posted by straddlebug
reply to post by masta12d
What if time is really a static state - does not flow. There is not future, past, or present.
Originally posted by ObservingTheWorld
What if time is really a static state - does not flow. There is not future, past, or present.
This is exactly how I view time. Or at least the universe.
Originally posted by masta12d
reply to post by NorEaster
I couldn't resist the fire hydrant comment. Got a great chuckle. Thanks for that.
I was talking with a friend and although he too was resistant in wanting to engage in the "what ifs", i pressed him further.
I offered the idea of: what if we were of course born with these abilities? But instead of 2 eyes you had multiple receptors. He suggested a way to filter in and out more naturally so we settled on that with blinking as the trigger.
Besides, what's wrong with a little drink from a fire hydrant now and then?
Originally posted by Theflyingweldsman
Originally posted by ObservingTheWorld
What if time is really a static state - does not flow. There is not future, past, or present.
This is exactly how I view time. Or at least the universe.
You don't think time is moving?
You are not getting older, or tired, or hungry......?
?
Originally posted by straddlebug
reply to post by masta12d
What if time is really a static state - does not flow. There is not future, past, or present.
This is perhaps one of the more interesting lines of dialogue in Wagner's Parsifal. Occuring in Act 1 of the opera, it is spoken by Gurnemanz, a knight of the holy grail, as Parsifal himself observes that he hardly moves, and yet has already come so far.
Since I encountered the phrase a few years ago, I've been quite intrigued by the idea and all that might be held within that almost aphoristic statement. Perhaps it is the nature of mythology itself which is here being disclosed to us, a time-less realm of mythic archetypes existing in a sort of sacred space. The very idea of a space without time, of a time represented spatially - geometrically - recalls some of the highest human insights, and not merely those of mystics and shamans, who have spoken (in non-scientific terms) of such experiences for millenia.
"It is no longer possible to divide the four-dimensional continuum objectively in intersections that separately contains simultaneous events. The concept of 'now' loses its objective meaning for the spacially extended world. It is in this connection one has to see space and time as an objectively undividable four-dimensional continuum."
-- Albert Einstein: Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie
But where, indeed, does time become space? It seems nearly impossible for the human mind to conceive of a space separate from time - indeed, time insidiously winds its way into our existence whether or not we desire it to do so. The arrow of time would seem to establish an inherent entropy of the physical universe which would render it not unlike a timepiece, wound at the beginning of the universe and left to run itself out into eventual dysfunction, decadence, and chaos. Time, the death which lurks spectre-like around the barrier of our perception, bringing to ruin and corrupting the material universe with every passing moment, appears invincible.
There is only one theoretical object in the universe where the reign of time's seeming omnipotence is broken: at the distance from a singularity corresponding to the event horizon of a black hole. The postulated hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is described by some as the Holy Grail of astrophysics.
Fulvio Melia, an X-ray astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in reference to the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy - within the constellation Sagittarius - offered these rather revealing comments:
"(The event horizon) separates our Universe from another world.
Some say that when you cross the event horizon,
time becomes space and space becomes time."
... Shades of Parsifal!
The only real truth is what your brain perceives as fact, no? What is real?
Is a red crayon really red? Or is it every color but red?
Isn't everything we perceive really upside down and backwards and its our retinas that flip and rotate it to what we see? How would life look if we saw things just as they were? I'd imagine pretty damn confusing.
What if we could see at all wavelengths? But not the ability to switch, simply forced to view the world in infa-red, gamma, etc etc. would we be able to navigate the earth like this or would everything just be a wall of light that you couldn't see anything? Much like staring at the sun from 5 feet away.
What if you heard all sound waves at all levels? Why are we limited to such a small fraction of sound waves?
Our reality isn't reality at all. Kinda like playing a 16 bit video game but you can only move within 1 bit.
The truth is stranger then fiction it seems.