RE: Is the Past Real?
October 28, 2022 at 10:44 am
(This post was last modified: October 28, 2022 at 10:56 am by Neo-Scholastic.)
(October 27, 2022 at 12:27 pm)polymath257 Wrote:(October 26, 2022 at 9:11 pm)LinuxGal Wrote: You don't experience past events, you experience present events. In the case of the bomb, you experience a flash of radiation and a blast of air. These present events have a cause in the past, however.
I would disagree with that. The brain takes time to process the information from the senses. In fact, it can take fairly substantial fractions of a second to do so. So, the actual experience is always delayed from even the sensory event, let alone the event being sensed.
In the case of, say, a nuclear event at the site of an individual, it would be likely that no experience would be had at all since the vaporization of the body would happen much faster than the nerve signals and the brain processing. A nuke a kilometer away would be a different matter, depending on the size and speed of the fireball.
Yes, I do agree that parsing out what constitutes the present subjectively from within the universe has value. I am curious about time at the cosmic level. Does the universe, as a whole have multiple states? If space-time is entirely within the universe, then it would seem it could not have multiple states or change.
<insert profound quote here>