(April 6, 2017 at 10:14 am)Nanny Wrote: Anthrocentric. We may be the only species we know of that can perceive the universe, but it's clear that not every member of our species has this luxury (one is unlikely to be pondering the cosmos while dodging shelling in Syria, for example), and it's obvious that the universe exists whether we are around to perceive it or not. It existed before humans, it will exist after.
How are you defining "perceive" here? Pondering isn't typically what people mean by perceiving/observing, methinks.
And, sure, as an insider within this cosmos and assuming the flow of time, the universe did exist long before we human beings started to exist. But if we consider the B-theory of time rather than the A-theory of time, it's more complicated than that. From what I understand, given the B-theory of time (or eternalism), there is not really a temporal "before" or "after".
