/sci/ - Science & Math

If our consciousness is basically information moving at the speed of light over short distances in some sort of resonance or loop, would that explain the feeling of an "I" as a singular thing in space and time, while the world moves around us? We're basically little singularities?

Special and General Relativity have had a bunch of philosophical interpretations associated with them that are not actually entailed by the mathematics of the theory themselves or Minkoski space-time.

A big one is the idea of the block universe, the idea that all real events exist at all times and that past, present, and future are merely subjective terms.

It's of then presented as: "everyone believed in absolute Newtonian time, then we learned that an externalist block universe exists from Einstein.

But the connection is very weak, often based on flawed analysis of the Twin Paradox that ignores how proper time works in special relativity. The works of Robb and Alexandrov have become less well known over time and the block universe as fact thing has really grown out of control.

There is, in fact, totally consistent ways to have local becoming and a present that work with relativity. But moreover, the arguments for the block universe are, in general, based on bad analogies and misunderstandings of what time even is.

Newtonian absolute time was never absolutely popular. Gallielo recognized that time and motion were relative. Aristotle recognized that time was emergent from change, something Liebnitz followed him on.

Others are straight critics of the model as a whole, see Nima Arkani-Hamed.

>>15028899
This is standard orthodoxy and it's challenged all the time. The problem is that it's easier to poke holes in a paradigm than to replace it. Even if a good replacement for current conceptions if space-time exists today, historically, it takes decades for such a shift to occur.

Arguably, it's even harder to shift a paradigm today than it was in Einstein's time because you have a very large share of the population who have undergraduate degrees who reject challenges to orthodoxy based on an insufficient grasp of the problems in a field. Plus, everyone read Kuhn and decided to start trying to come up with novel solutions, and many just aren't workable.

For example, pic related is a good argument against the block universe. There are information theoretic arguments against the mainstream view of space-time. You also have those claiming it is discrete and others thinking of space-time as its own sort of field, not a container ("the void weighs").

After all, physics is a discipline that has, what, nine major interpretations? None with majority support.

Certainly there is something to be said for the idea that space and time are abstractions and talking about physical interactions modifying abstractions is a little cooky, but it certainly seems to work well enough (major problems not withstanding).

>>15029325
I am not sure if dialectical offers our best hope for a unified view of reality or just the mirage of being able to do so. Every attempt based on it gets bogged down in horrendous complexity that makes it hard to keep the ideas straight or communicate them well.

Maybe information as a concept can help to better unify these attempts, but I sort of doubt it. Attempts to formalize objective logic require abstract mathematics that is never going to be accessible to even most scientists, let alone most people. To the extent theories exist to help make sense of the world, these seem doomed to be failures.