Time, change, and continuity through change, are all real. A life is not a constellation of static experiences in eternity, disconnected but imagining that they are connected; it is the history of the changes experienced by one awareness as it transforms. The phenomenological study of experienced time will tell you about its nature, not the current guesses of physicists and neuroscientists.
I cannot see how your last sentence holds. My subjective experience of time was, up to now, everything from the usual feeling of continuous time and total disarray during psychosis up to a feeling of complete timeless eternity during transcendental meditation. Instead if knowing how time feels like—I have had my share—I would like to understand how consciousness relates to time in the light of physics. Subjective experience can be deceiving in infinitely many ways, but there must be (at least I hope so) some objective underlying physical foundation for it. At least my inclination towards realism tells me that.
Do the disarray of psychosis or the timelessness of meditation lead you to think that the “usual feeling of continuous time” is illusory?
My own experience of altered states comes from psychedelics, and from dreaming and sleeping. The usual feeling of continuous time leads to a certain ontology of subjective time, and one’s relationship to it: continuity of time, reality of change, persistence of oneself through time, the phenomena of memory and anticipation. The altered states don’t lead me to doubt that ontology, because I can understand them as states in which awareness or understanding of temporal phenomena is absent, compared to the usual waking state.
I cautioned you against using scientific ontology as your touchstone of reality, because so often it leads to dismissal of things that are known from experience, but which aren’t present in current theory. For example, in your post you suppose that “spacetime is a static and eternal thing”. My problem here is with the idea that reality could be fundamentally “static”. It seems like you want to dismiss change or the flow of time as unreal, an illusion to be explained by facts in a static universe.
On the contrary, I say the way for humanity to progress in knowledge here, is to take the phenomena of experience as definitely real, and then work out how that can be consistent with the facts as we seem to know them in science. None of that is simple. What is definitely real in experience, what we have actually learned in science, it’s easy to make mistakes in both those areas; and then synthesizing them may require genius that we don’t have. Nonetheless, I believe that’s the path to truth, rather than worshipping a theoretical construct and sacrificing one’s own sense of reality to it.
Time, change, and continuity through change, are all real. A life is not a constellation of static experiences in eternity, disconnected but imagining that they are connected; it is the history of the changes experienced by one awareness as it transforms. The phenomenological study of experienced time will tell you about its nature, not the current guesses of physicists and neuroscientists.
I cannot see how your last sentence holds. My subjective experience of time was, up to now, everything from the usual feeling of continuous time and total disarray during psychosis up to a feeling of complete timeless eternity during transcendental meditation. Instead if knowing how time feels like—I have had my share—I would like to understand how consciousness relates to time in the light of physics. Subjective experience can be deceiving in infinitely many ways, but there must be (at least I hope so) some objective underlying physical foundation for it. At least my inclination towards realism tells me that.
Do the disarray of psychosis or the timelessness of meditation lead you to think that the “usual feeling of continuous time” is illusory?
My own experience of altered states comes from psychedelics, and from dreaming and sleeping. The usual feeling of continuous time leads to a certain ontology of subjective time, and one’s relationship to it: continuity of time, reality of change, persistence of oneself through time, the phenomena of memory and anticipation. The altered states don’t lead me to doubt that ontology, because I can understand them as states in which awareness or understanding of temporal phenomena is absent, compared to the usual waking state.
I cautioned you against using scientific ontology as your touchstone of reality, because so often it leads to dismissal of things that are known from experience, but which aren’t present in current theory. For example, in your post you suppose that “spacetime is a static and eternal thing”. My problem here is with the idea that reality could be fundamentally “static”. It seems like you want to dismiss change or the flow of time as unreal, an illusion to be explained by facts in a static universe.
On the contrary, I say the way for humanity to progress in knowledge here, is to take the phenomena of experience as definitely real, and then work out how that can be consistent with the facts as we seem to know them in science. None of that is simple. What is definitely real in experience, what we have actually learned in science, it’s easy to make mistakes in both those areas; and then synthesizing them may require genius that we don’t have. Nonetheless, I believe that’s the path to truth, rather than worshipping a theoretical construct and sacrificing one’s own sense of reality to it.