Leaving Space, Time, and Spacetime Behind
Are Space and Time an Illusion? Considered in this video:
- 1. Give up your intuitions of how space and time work.
- 2. Facts about observers (particles are considered observers):
- a. observers disagree on how much time passes between events.
- b. observers disagree on how much space there is between things at any given moment.
- c. observers don’t fully agree on the chronological order of events.
- d. observations are consistent so that no observer can be ‘wrong’.
- 3. Spacetime is emergent from a deeper objective reality of causality.
- a. all observers agree on spacetime interval
- b. Spacetime intervals tell us about which causes influence which effects.
- c. Causality is more objectively real than spacetime.
- d. Spacetime is a tenseless, Non-Euclidean 4D mathematical Minkowski space.
- e. Our intuitions of space and time are arbitrary and abstract.
- f. We are real, however, if we think of our entire lives as a fixed geometric object in spacetime rather than a moving window on the line segment of our life:
- a. all observers agree on spacetime interval

He begins to sum up at 6:03
“Imagine we’re all reading a flip book made of graph paper. We agree on the events of the story, but we don’t agree where they happen on the page, on how many pages there are between events, or even on the order of some of those events, and yet we’re all reading the same book…only there’s no graph on the paper, there are no pages, and there is no book. All of that is just an imposition our brains make in order to perceive whatever it is. So why do we perceive reality in such a vividly spatial and temporal way? Good question, No one really knows.”
At this point is where I jump up and raise my hand. I think that I might know the answer to that question:
The mistake being made in our sophisticated rewrite of naive intuition about space and time is that the constancy of the spacetime interval is due to an objective ‘same book’ (or bookless book or whatever we are supposed all be reading.) To go to the next step into multisense realism, we must not only give up our intuitions about space and time being different, but we must give up our counter-intuitions about spacetime being literal.
If we consider instead that there is no final Minkowski block time universe out there, no ‘same book’, or even same language out there, but rather a shared capacity to read/write, in here, then both the naive intuition and sophisticated counter-intuition makes sense as perspectives within a larger context. Not just in human experience, or even within particles or probability laws, but deeper than that.
In this new schema all is read/written beyond spacetime but still ‘within’. Within us as well as ‘within’ every kind of non-human experience. This pervasive context ‘within all awareness’ would be an absolute context which is pervasive and devoid of any formal sense of distance or time. An anti-void. This absolute frame of reference can be understood as sense itself (something like “ference” rather than reference): Direct participation of perceptual qualities that need not be realistic, but also extend to phenomena which we are familiar with as fiction, imagination, myth, etc.
This is not to say that human imagination could necessarily describe the entire continuum of sense, but like the visible spectrum is to electromagnetism, it defines a range which is a thin slice of the whole, but much more than merely one color. The one ‘color’, call it white, would correspond to the single combined sense of timeless, spaceless realism that is studied under math and physics, but is nevertheless bereft of aesthetic qualities such as emotion, flavor, or (other) colors.
All that has ever been experienced can be seen, in this absolute frame of reference to be ‘right here and right now’, but for our local inhibitory conditions of human limitation. From our human perspective there is a cost in making awareness so immense that it embraces all other partitions; it becomes unreal or fictional, delusional, supernatural, absurd, or accidental*. The ‘heavens’ are not only causally closed at one level of awareness, but on another, they open up to non-linear, surreal mythscapes with no temporal rooting but deep symbolic meaning.
Jung spoke of the collective unconscious, Australian aborigines refer to a primordial Dreamtime, and many a psychedelic explorer have reported such aesthetically saturated realms. Anthropologists find that it is very common for cultures to assume that children are born into this world from a dreamier, more divine kind of world. These shamanistic-psychotic surrealities need not be considered ‘real’, however neither can their surreality and flirtation with prophetic intuitions be dismissed as mere accident. Even as a kind of placebo effect, the transcendental levels of experience must be accounted for in any would-be-complete view of the universe.
There is a lot to understand about our own spectrum of consciousness before we can even begin to approach the totality of awareness, which may be an unbounded, or self-binding rather than a fixed continuum. Non-human states of awareness might be both ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’, faster and slower than we can conceive of. This conception of the totality of experience as beyond causality turns causality into a kind of ‘nozzle’ of spacetime. Causality focuses the ocean of creativity; interiorizing some and exteriorizing others into relative degrees (the ancestor of our ‘five senses’ in which, for example, feeling seems ‘closer to us’ than seeing).
The pieces of this puzzle of human consciousness can, in my estimation, reveal a kind of ‘red shift’ and ‘blue shift’ which can be thought of in human terms as the stereotypically** autistic and psychotic extremes of human consciousness.
To return to the video, the multisense realism view would add:
- 4. Nonlocal spacetime and “space ⊥ time” as (space and time in their naive, perpendicular local appearance) both emerge from a deeper common sense, which is trans-local.
- a. this common sense can be thought of as the capacity for sense itself, or rather, for the particular kind of worldly sense of causality and agreement, which we might call realism.
- b. realism is a common, but not exclusively common sense but is the reflection of an even more fundamental sense, which is novel and unprecedented rather than probabilistic or determined by laws.
- c. the common sense of realism divides experience mechanistically and unintentionally
- d. the uncommon sense beyond realism multiplies intentionally, seeking and building significance.
- e. what we call causality is itself caused. Our distanced observations of realism is a kind of low-res substitute or icon that carries some semblance of the totality, but in an aesthetically neutralized, minimalistic form.
- f. by using the built in, self-organizing clues of nature, we can begin to see how the holographic universe must be extended to include our own ‘visible spectrum’.
- 5. The agreement of the Spacetime Interval is not evidence of a rigid body of 4D absolute reality, but rather evidence of the potential for agreement itself, i.e. the revelation of underlying local sensory unity with distant sensory conditions.
- a. this is what the constancy of light speed and gravity are ‘really about’: not photons or forces, but ordinary sensory experience in self-diffraction.
- b. light is not a particle or a wave, it is a local sensation on the cusp of spacetime emergence. Light is local sensation, and sensation is a boundary condition within sense.
- c. this means that sensation is more of a temporary subtraction from the eternal than an isolated piece of information.
- d. the extremes of human consciousness should be seen as a richer, more significant version of a guiding theme in all of sense: that of psychotic-unpredictable-figurative entropy and autistic-static-literal information.
- e. the phenomenon of seeing can be used metaphorically to begin to understand these extremes, as well as ordinary experiences of common sense, by working with the idea of language as a gravitational lensing in which the light of sense is bent by local accumulations of significance (mass).
- 6. Paradoxically, what all observers agree on is their potential for agreement and fact of their own disagreement.
- a. We can reclaim our naive intuitions about space and time being different, as this perpendicular aesthetic is an accurate reflection of our own subjective tunnel through eternity.
- b. We can claim the Minkowski counter-intuition as a brilliant, and useful creation myth which is derived from common insensitivity, rather than common sense.
This is way too much to take in all at once (even for me), and I have no doubt that it sounds crazy to most people (that too is part of the Lorentz-like contractions and dilatations of sense-making). This is only the very tip of the iceberg…just something to get down in writing…for now.
*Whether the out-of-range portions of the spectrum of sense appear to be insane, error, or divine depends upon the frame of reference from which they are experienced.
**not talking about real people who demonstrate autistic or psychotic symptoms, but the themes exposed by the stereotyping of those symptoms, some of which are being researched under Imprinted Brain Theory.
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Emergent properties can only exist within conscious experience.
…
Neither matter nor information can ‘seem to be’ anything. They are what they are.
It makes more sense that existence itself is an irreducibly sensory-motive phenomenon – an aesthetic presentation with scale-dependent anesthetic appearances rather than a mass-energetic structure or information processing function. Instead of consciousness (c) arising as an unexplained addition to an unconscious, non-experienced universe (u) of matter and information (mi), material and informative appearances arise as from the spatiotemporal nesting (dt) of conscious experiences that make up the universe.
Materialism: c = u(mdt) + c
Computationalism: c = u(idt) + c
Multisense Realism: u(midt) = c(c)/~!c.
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An extremely interesting article
The Science Geek
http://www.thesciencegeek.org
Thank you!