Are Space and Time an Illusion?

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12 May 2015 10:52 #191734 by
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YycAzdtUIko

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12 May 2015 11:58 #191736 by
Replied by on topic Are Space and Time an Illusion?
It takes a lot of mindbending to follow these topics.
A documentary in the same ballpark which is really worth watching is PBS Nova's "The Elegant Universe".

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12 May 2015 13:14 - 12 May 2015 13:18 #191742 by Gisteron
So...
The three facts he points out at the beginning are actually falsehoods...
Granting that they were, internal consistency is not a measure of accuracy. Even if everyone observed everything differently and internally consistently, it does not follow that they all are correct. To be precise, provided the set of observers is finite, and it is, there could be all of them correct, some of them, one of them or none of them and noone would know either way pending further investigation.
Even if they all were correct, the equality of future and past would not follow. At best there could be an equivalence relation with respect to the observation metrics. I can prove this one.
"Objectivity" is not a property of either a mathematical expression or a proposition in physics. Relativity does neither establish nor dispose of the notions of objective reality nor can anything else. If the gentleman meant intersubjectivity, his conclusion would be correct given the three premises in the beginning of the video being true. Sadly, they aren't.
Spacetime relations of points within said vector space have no bearing on causality or vice versa either in physics, or, for that matter, formal logic in general.
If "only things that correspond to spacetime relations" can be "objectively real", that in no way implies that all things that correspond, in fact, are. And all this is still pending a definition of objective reality. I can also map things bijectively such that all points in one set correspond to matching points in another without any of them being equal. This is getting increasingly gibberish at this point also...
There is motion through spacetime. We call it motion. Not quite the same as when you see space and time as independant, but still very much analogous. A that point I'd also like to point out that while spacetime is not strictly euclidian, the major difference is with the dot product whereby the time coordinate combination is preficed inversely to the spacial ones. Other than that, and everything implied by that difference, it is about as euclidian as vector spaces come.
"Noone really knows why we perceive reality the way we do"? Erm... There is this thing called energy efficiency and evolution. It's kind of sort of very well understood how come we perceive things the way we do. In our environment this happened to be what survived best, either because different, more beneficial methods of perception didn't come about or came at the cost of disadvantages severe enough for the carrying individuals to perish.

The presentation was nice though...
Oh, and he is right about zombies. They are kinda awesome.

Better to leave questions unanswered than answers unquestioned
Last edit: 12 May 2015 13:18 by Gisteron.

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