TIME,
THE STUBBORNLY PERSISTENT ILLUSION
AFFLICTING
CONSCIOUS BEINGS
©
Copyright July 2022, Edward R Close
Introduction
These posts reflect the
results of my on-going efforts, for about 70 years now, to understand the true nature
of reality. These efforts were prompted by an experience I had at the age of
fifteen, an experience that set me on a path of science, education, and
self-study. After many years, when Dr. Vernon Neppe, MD, PhD, and I first met
in person in this life, in Amsterdam in 2010, we were both professionals who
had been successful in different fields of science for many years. We discovered
that we had reached similar conclusions about the nature of reality, despite
the differences in our cultural and educational backgrounds, so we joined forces to combine and advance our work,
and together we developed the Triadic Dimensional Vortical Paradigm (TDVP), a
model of reality based on our independent research and the work of several
notable scientists of the past, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck, who
were instrumental in the last major paradigm shift, a shift in the
understanding of the nature of matter, space, and time that prepared the way
for a more comprehensive shift to the science of the future which will include the
reality of consciousness and Spirit.
Together, we have made an
astounding number of discoveries, but by far the most
important finding of TDVP was the discovery of gimmel, the third form of
volumetric reality which proved to be the organizing non-physical component of
atomic structure without which there simply would be no physical universe.
We discovered
gimmel while applying the quantum calculus I had developed using normalized
data for the electron and quarks from the Large Hadron Collider to define natural
quantum equivalence units. When the quantum calculus I developed in 1986, called
the calculus of dimensional distinctions (CoDD) was used to analyze the structure
of the most stable known physical object in the universe, the proton, the
non-physical component of objective reality was discovered.
In this
series of posts, I am identifying the assumptions that need to be more
accurately defined in order to expand the logical system of scientific analysis
to include the non-physical aspects of phenomena experienced by conscious
beings, and, last but not least, to resolve the “Mind of God” paradox revealed
in the last post. This paradox arises from the proof that infinity is necessarily
incomplete. In the last post, I explained that the Mind of God paradox results
from certain erroneous assumptions about infinity and time. The assumptions associated
with the concept of infinity were explored using set theory, and in this post,
I will focus on the assumptions associated with the concept of time.
The Cultural Aversion to
Mathematical Logic, A Brief Lament
Before
getting into the details of the assumptions underlying our illusions about time,
as revealed by the logic of relativity, quantum physics, and the Triadic
Dimensional Vortical Paradigm (TDVP), please permit me the luxury of briefly calling
your attention to the recent historical trend toward a pandemic of public
disinterest in mathematical logic. I find this cultural aversion, which is
especially prevalent in the United States of America, regrettable, and
lamentable because it has the potential of completely destroying Western Civilization
by devaluing the critical thinking skills that were preserved from times of
higher mental and spiritual virtue in the distant past by a handful of
philosophers of natural science.
We live in
an era of explosive mass media sound bites that have short-circuited critical
thinking to the extent that the mere mention of the word ‘mathematics’ or ‘logic’
causes the average American to quickly turn away and look for an easily
accessible shiny object promising immediate gratification. During my lifetime,
(I started public school in St. Louis Missouri in 1940) I have seen the
attitude of American public education change from one of honoring intellectual achievement
to one of promoting dull mediocrity. As a result, mathematics has become confused
with the simple repetitive operations that computers can be programmed to do, and
the elegance of pure reason is in danger of being lost to the average person,
allowing self-serving individuals in our government and educational
institutions to promote a false intellectual elitism that does nothing but divide
the citizens of our county and promote class warfare.
OK. Now I
will get off my soapbox. But I hope that this brief rant will encourage readers
to pause and think about some basic concepts of mathematical logic as they
apply to consciousness and the conceptual models of reality that we are
discussing. Here are some thoughts along that line:
·
Scientific
paradigms are systems of logic designed to model reality, the ultimate system
of mathematical logic.
·
No model
of reality is a theory of everything unless it includes consciousness because
consciousness is a major part of reality.
·
The system
of mathematical logic underlying reality has the same mathematical structure as
the logic of consciousness.
·
Only a conscious
mind can create a logical model of the way consciousness experiences reality
because only consciousness can experience itself as part of reality. Therefore,
the reality that we experience is a product of a conscious mind.
Time is a
very subtle part of the consciousness we experience directly, so let’s have a look
at what Einstein actually said about time:
“We (physicists) know that the distinction
between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”
“When you think about it, time is an
arbitrary construct”
“Time and space are modes by which we think
and not conditions in
which we live”
“Time and space are not conditions of existence,
spacetime is a model
for thinking”
– Albert Einstein
Relativity, Quantum
Physics, and Assumptions about Space-time
Albert Einstein spoke
about time on many occasions, and his quotes seem to bounce back and forth in
one’s mind like the endless reflections of a rainbow around a bright light in a
house of mirrors. They reflect the illusions of both time and space because together,
as spacetime, they form the 4-D conceptual domain known as
Minkowski space. They also allow us to have a peek at Einstein’s state of mind
when the quotes were uttered or written. By the end of his life, Albert Einstein
had begun to recognize the foreshadowing of the next great paradigm shift away
from simple materialism, looming as the result of the acceptance of the
counter-intuitive discoveries of quantum physics and relativity, but he would
not abandon the convictions of a deterministic physicist. His clinging to a physicalist
mind set is revealed in statements like:
“The physicist seeks to reduce colors
& tones to vibrations, …thought and pain to nerve processes, in such a way
that the psychical element as such is eliminated from the causal nexus of
existence, and thus nowhere occurs [in the physicist’s model of reality] as an
independent link in the causal associations. It is no doubt this attitude,
which considers the comprehension of all relations by the exclusive use of only
‘space-like’ [and by extension, ‘time-like’] concepts as being possible in
principle, [to represent] what is at the present time, understood by the term
‘materialism’ since ‘matter’ has lost its role as a fundamental concept.”
A mind like Einstein’s,
much like science itself, evolves over time, and, I know that, like many other
thinkers and writers, I tend to pick the quotes, as much as possible, that
coincide with what I believe – and/or know. I also believe that the last
insight he had about this subject and took the trouble to write down and publish,
is likely to be the best one. In the 5th and final appendix to the 15th
and last edition of his classic book; Relativity the Special and the General
Theory, a Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand, on June 9th,
1952, less than three years before he passed on to the other side of the one-way
mirror of consciousness, he wrote:
“It is
characteristic of Newtonian physics that it has to ascribe independent and real
existence to space and time as well as to matter, for in Newton’s law of motion
the idea of acceleration appears. But in this theory, acceleration can only
denote ‘acceleration with respect to space.’ Newton’s space must thus be
thought of as ‘at rest’, or at least as ‘unaccelerated’, in order that one can
consider the acceleration, which appears in the law of motion, as being a
magnitude with any meaning. Much the same holds with time, which of course likewise
enters into the concept of acceleration.”
I recommend reading
Appendix V, the final addition to Einstein’s “clear explanation that anyone can
understand” in its entirety for yourself, if possible, because it gives you, in
Albert Einstein’s own words (translated from the original German, the native
language in which his thoughts were formed), about as clear a picture as you
will find of his thoughts about some of the most important concepts behind the
theory of relativity. In that appendix, titled “Relativity and the Problem
of Space”, Einstein articulates the reasoning that leads to a very
important view of space and time that I want to emphasize and elaborate in
the context of the analysis we initiated in the last post.
In this last footnote
to his explanation of relativity, he concludes that, unlike objects with measurable
amounts of mass and energy, space and time cannot “claim any independent existence
of their own”. This is a very important factor in determining how we can
proceed to complete our analysis in the effort to resolve the mind of God
paradox because it means that the assumptions underlying the notions of time
and space, key elements in the concepts of acceleration, relative motion, and sequential
events, cannot be represented as sets, or elements of sets of existing objects in
the same way the assumptions about infinity were in the last post. We must,
therefore, find a different way to analyze the assumptions that have created
the current wide-spread persistent illusion of time.
In addition to the quotes
above, a few more quotes may help to clarify the logic of the axiomatic
assumptions that need to be corrected to resolve the mind of God paradox and provide
the basis of the shift to a new, more comprehensive phenomenology that is
provided by the TDVP model. (Phenomenology is the study of consciousness and the
experience of reality.) Einstein made no claim to be the first to see a problem
with assuming that space, and by extension, time, possess the same level of objectivity
ascribed to matter and energy:
“Time and again
since remotest times, philosophers have resisted such a presumption. Descartes
argued somewhat along these lines: space is identical with extension, but
extension is connected with bodies; thus, there is no space without bodies and
hence no such thing as empty space. … The weakness of this argument lies in
what follows. It is certainly true that the concept of extension owes its
origin to our experiences… But from this it cannot be concluded that the
concept of extension may not be justified in cases which have not themselves
given rise to the formation of this concept. Such an enlargement of concepts can
be justified indirectly by empirical results. The assertion that extension is
confined to bodies is therefore of itself certainly unfounded. We shall see
later [in this appendix], however, that the general theory of relativity
confirms Descartes’ conception in a roundabout way. … The psychological
origin of the concept of space, or of the necessity for it, is far from being
so obvious as it may appear to be… The idea of space, however, is suggested by
certain primitive experiences.”
He goes on to provide
an example of the “primitive experience” in the awareness of physical objects placed
in boxes. Such an experiences gives rise to the concept of space as something fundamental
but does not prove that “empty space” would not still exist if neither objects,
nor boxes, nor any kind of containers existed. The reader may have already
realized that the boxes and objects example he describes is equivalent to a set
theory conceptualization, even though Einstein does not identify it as such. In
the set theory language of the last post, one would argue that, if there were
no objects, and no sets of objects, finite, or infinite, then a null, or empty
set would have no meaning. On the other hand, because there is no way to test this
empirically, the argument does not prove conclusively that there would be no
space or time without the existence of matter and energy. (This weakness also
applies to the argument about infinity in the last post.)
Next, he explains how
the principals of relativity, i.e., “no preferred reference frame and
constant light speed”, in the special theory of relativity - which deals
with uniform unaccelerated relative motion - eliminates the psychologically
intuitive concepts of universal spacetime and simultaneous events, consistent
with Lorentz’s work and the Michelson-Morley experiment. Then he discusses the details
showing how the general theory of relativity does, indeed confirm Descartes’
logical leap to the conclusion that there is no such thing as “empty space”,
and consequently no such thing as spacetime without material events. It can be
summed up this way:
Physical objects are
not in spacetime, but physical objects are spatially and temporally extended.
In this way, the concepts of ‘empty space’ and time without events lose their
meaning.
Next, I want to show how
the conclusions of Planck and Einstein about the quantized and relativistic nature
of matter-energy and space-time, combined with the potential resolution of the mind
of God paradox from the last post, require fundamental changes in our basic intuitive
assumptions about time.
Recall that Max Planck,
said “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a
force … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and
intelligent Mind.” And Einstein agreed with Planck.
He said it this way: “Space and time can claim no existence of their own.
… What we have called matter is
energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses.
Matter is spirit reduced to a point of visibility. There is no matter.”
However, input data in
the form of electro-chemical impulses that the physical sense organs deliver to
the brain through the neurological networks existing in our bodies for the
conscious mind to process and store as mental images, lead us to assume things about
processes that we can’t see because of the extremely small-scale size of
quantum phenomena. We think that objective reality is made up of matter and
energy interacting dynamically in space and time. The a priori
assumptions that support the concept of the existence of an external objective reality
are the assumptions that matter, energy, space, and time are actual existing
things that make up objective reality. Einstein and Planck are telling us that
this is not true.
Our assumptions seem to
be verified by the fact that we can measure matter as mass, energy as force,
space as volumetric dimensions, and time as duration of physical events, all of
which we perceive through the senses. But this handy verification is clearly circular
reasoning because our proof of the existence of physical objects depends upon
the existence of physical objects, and proof of the existence of time as an objective
reality, depends on the existence of mass-energy events that depend upon the
existence of time!
Reality and The Role of
Intuitive Assumptions
Our intuitive
assumptions about infinity and time play a powerful role in the shaping of our
beliefs about reality and even affect how we live our lives. Given that reality
is what really exists, it should be obvious that when assumptions behind our
beliefs are at odds with reality, many problems will arise because erroneous
beliefs lead to mis-guided, ineffective, and possibly even destructive self-detrimental
actions. In the last post and in this one, we have identified the a priori
assumptions underlying beliefs about infinity and time that are held by most people,
and we have seen how they are in conflict with the realities that are revealed
by empirical investigation and logical analysis. The task now is to put what we
have found out about infinity and time into the proper perspective related to
what actually exists as objective reality, into practical application.
The universe is
remarkably complex and stable, exhibiting numerous precise cyclical patterns
that recur without beginning or end for as far as we can see or detect by
logical extension, into the distant past and foreseeable future, despite the experimentally
documented entropic decay of complex atomic, molecular, and macro structures
with the passage of time. The universe appears to be expanding into an endless,
perhaps even an infinite extension, toward the most distant visible objects, the
enormous brightly burning stars called quasars. Because the contents of the
dimensions of reality are quantized, we have been able to push our
investigation, conceptually at least, down to the smallest quantum, and to trace
the remarkable complexity and stability we perceive all the way down to the
most stable physical object in the universe, the proton.
We found the proton to
be a combination of three rapidly spinning objects called quarks, only one of
which, the up quark, even begins to approach the stability of the proton. It is
only gimmel, which occurs in measurable quantum equivalence units of volume,
but with no mass or energy, that gives the proton additional mass and amazing
stability. The fact that the total angular momentum of the three quarks is
conserved and increased significantly in a mathematically predictable way in the
proton, raises the question of why elementary objects like electrons and quarks
are spinning relative to all observers at such high rates of rotation in the first
place; an important question that no current theory other than TDVP, attempts
to answer.
The answer turns out to
be relatively simple, requiring nothing more complex than Newton’s Third Law of
Motion: “For every force in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Elementary
objects at the quantum level are spinning because the force expanding the
universe evokes an equal and opposite reaction, which is the sum total of the inertia
created by the spinning of localized vortexes (called elementary particles)
in the fabric of reality. OK, I can hear someone saying: but now you have to
answer an even deeper question: Why is the universe expanding? A flippant
answer might be: “Because empty space sucks!” But we’ve just been explaining
that there’s no such thing as empty space! - I can imagine Niels Bohr jumping
up and down, dropping his pipe, and spilling his box of matches all over the
floor in excitement and anticipation of the progress we are about make!
This paradox cannot be
resolved quite as easily as the Mind of God paradox because it involves expanding
the axiomatic basis of the scientific model of reality to the point where we
can understand why the speed of light is the upper limit of relative motion, how
one can perceive the extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time,
and why time and space, like mass and energy, must also be quantized. I also
want to get into how consciousness expansion related to this new understanding
of time leads to an interesting practical application. But, since this post is
already somewhat long, I will stop here and continue with this train of thought
in the next post.
ERC – 7/16/2022
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