..........bumped.....in memory of.........Thanks Faustus........

Jun 26, 2010 -- 7:14PM, Don't_Be_Captious wrote:

This is mainly intended for Blu, though some others like Faustus, jcarlinbn etc. could almost certainly contribute intelligently.

The other recent thread about the illusion of time got me to thinking about the fact that photons & other light-speed travelling things (bosons) don't experience passage of time (or at least don't experience much of it).

Going back to discussions involving the Block Universe & free will, e.g. the phenomenon of consciousness being able to experience a certain kind of phenomenological "now" but only artificially "experiencing" the past & the future as mental abstractions e.g. memory & prediction/anticipation...

...I wonder if the main reason any creature in the universe which might evolve consciousness & intelligence, could not experience the universe as One Huge Block Universe -- cannot, in other words, experience all of time at once, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch, or at least from one's own birth to one's own death, but instead must forever (as long as alive) experience only a type of "now" which extends about 5 seconds, 2.5 seconds into the past, 2.5 seconds into the future, and at some remove by many milliseconds from ontological ("real") "Now" --

-- I wonder if the main reason for this is that such creatures that evolve so, are themselves extremely complex permutations of matter, e.g. fermions, particles with mass, and thus are forever & incorrigibly forbidden by Special Relativity to experience the extreme time dilation which bosons (light-speed-travelling, massless particles like photons) endure.

If anything in the universe could experience all of time, the entire Block Universe, as a truly phenomenological "Now," it would be massless things that travel near light speed.  Except such particles cannot evolve into enormous accretions like animals with consciousness, and thus probably can't actually experience such a "Now," or any other "now," or anything at all -- at least, they can't experience anything, at all, subjectively, e.g.phenomenologically.

So, once the Big Bang happened, and everything began to differentiate (bosons breaking apart from fermions & so on), at that point, it would have become impossible, per Special Relativity, for anything to evolve with consciousness that could possibly experience, subjectively what photons "experience," objectively, yet completely without comprehension -- an Eternal Now, the wet dream of a Block Universe, obviating all this pesky "consciousness" & Presentist stuff.