Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos  Something creates a flow in space-time. There is no reason that can't be a physical thing, perhaps the expansion of space, thermodynamics, or causality. |
I have to disagree. The problem is that all physical things already exist in all their possible states,
at all times (it is confusing to use the term "time" here). This is what relativity is all about. Let me repeat the Penrose quote:
‘. . . particles do not even move, being represented by “static” curves drawn in space–time.’
There is, in other words, a fundamental difference between matter and mind, and that is that whereas consciousness is dynamic, matter is static in the sense that all possible states are spread out evenly in space-time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos It's possible, of course, that the future does not actually exist yet. |
According to relativity theory, it does. It's just that we can't see it yet. Smythies puts it thus:
[T]he buildings of imperial Rome still stand — it is just that we cannot see them any more. The buildings of future cities already exist—but we cannot see them yet. (
http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/smythies.pdf)
And once again, Louis de Broglie, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century:
Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them . . . the aggregate of past, present and future phenomena are in some sense given a priori.