Einstein and Time (Humans)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 03, 2016, 16:37 (3125 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Another essay which points out that time is a series of 'nows' and death is the last now for that person:-https://aeon.co/opinions/there-is-no-death-only-a-series-of-eternal-nows?utm_source=Aeo...-QUOTE: "And if death and time are illusions, so too is the continuity in the connection of nows. Where, then, do we find ourselves?" -Quote: "Einstein knew this. In 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote: ‘Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.'"-I think it was Romansh some time ago who drew a nice distinction between illusion and delusion. The former = not what it seems; the latter = plain wrong. In both cases, though, you can only make the judgement if you actually know the reality. Shame, then, on Einstein for claiming that physicists “know” that the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion. The most they can possibly claim is that they believe it's an illusion. Personally, I do not believe that death and time are illusions, and the fact that time is a sequence of nows does not invalidate the sequence of cause and effect, which I see as depending on a continuity of before-now-after, or past-present-future. Back to our epistemology thread: we cannot know the objective truth; the nearest we can get is an intersubjective consensus on what is real. If time as past-present-future is real to me and some of my buddies and not to Einstein and some of his buddies, he has his belief and I have mine. That's as far as we can go.